 This is what I'm going to call my Honest thoughts my my review as it were of Hyrule Warriors age of calamity. I Am warning you right now That this is not one of those spoiler-free reviews. This isn't even one of those reviews That's gonna really probably tell you if you should buy the game or not. I mean, I'll get into that in a moment But there's going to be a lot of talk about the entire story of Hyrule Warriors age of calamity from start to finish If that's not for you. No, don't watch this video now I'm sure you might have already clicked and you're upset by the title. Hey, I don't care Just gonna be honest. I'm someone who seeks out these conversations. I seek out these These sorts of titles I seek out these thumbnails myself as a viewer I have always said when making content that I should make content that I myself Would want to see would want to view and I want to see Spoilers I am someone who actively seeks out spoilers So I actually want videos that has spoilers in the title and spoilers in the thumbnail to make me click to make Me see what's going on. I like that. I've always liked that as a consumer I've liked that dating back to when I was a kid even before the internet was that big of a deal In fact, there were magazines that will put spoilers sometimes in the titles of the articles or in the covers And that would make me buy those magazines so I could find out more because I can't get enough of spoilers That's just how I am. So I make content the way that I want content to be made So that's not for you. I kindly ask you to direct reviewing pleasure to other channels That will not be doing coverage in this way of video games player essence spawn wave I think even rgt85 and many others out there will give you that kind of coverage beat them up will as well Like there's plenty of channels out there that will give you your spoiler free coverage And maybe not even talk about this stuff, but I'm not one of them So I'm making the content that I would want to see and view Including titles and thumbnails Although the title of thumbnail for this one shouldn't be that bad. It is a review after all Here's the thing if you just want to know if Age of Calamity is worth your money as a Zelda fan. Let's say that you are a big Zelda fan And you've played Breath of the Wild. Is age of Calamity worth the 60 bucks? Yes emphatically yes, it is the greatest gameplay wise Warriors game of all time. There is not a single Dynasty Warriors One-piece Warriors Hyrule Warriors Fire Emblem Warriors, there is not a single Warriors game that is better than this game There are games that run better. Yes, there are severe frame rate drops in this game severe Single digits sometimes almost one frame or less because there will be times in certain battle situations That it'll be like you are watching a stop motion video I'm not going to sit here and sugarcoat it that happens granted It happens in almost all warrior games And if you've ever played a mooso game, you should be expecting it But I do want to throw out there yet There are other mooso games that performance wise are better Hyrule Warriors defender of addition performs better than this game Hyrule Warriors Legends on the 3ds on the new Nintendo 3ds in particular performs better when it comes to frame rate But frame rate is not everything we have talked about in the past that great frame rate and great resolution make games better fact Great resolution and great frame rate do not make good games. You can have a 4k 120 FPS game released right now on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X or PC But just it being 4k and 120 FPS doesn't actually make it a good game So having crappy frame rate does not also make something a bad game So yes, there's a lot of frame rate issues, but that doesn't make this a bad game It is still the best Warriors game to date from the variety of enemies to the variety to how they How they space out the use of some of the bigger enemies like hynoxes and linals And and the new enemies that get introduced into the fray There is a lot to like about the enemy variety in this game But what really stands out if you just want to talk about some non-spoiler territory stuff is the well the Characters, okay the characters and how they how they have combat in the game. The thing is there is Every let me put it this way I've played a ton of Musou games from Dynasty Warriors all the way through Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity and the thing is a lot of times there's a lot of repetitiveness with the characters Characters don't feel different enough There are differences, but they never really feel different enough There's a lot of sameness in how the characters play and yes You're still just whacking through hordes and hordes of enemies But there is a ton of variety whether it's from Zelda and Link or or even Impa Which again these are all characters you can play in the demo or if you're going all the way up to Hetsu or Teba or Riju. I mean these characters are extremely varied all four of the champions Well, I guess fives and links also a champion control completely differently Yes, the basic controls are the same is still mostly y and x y and x occasional z ours thrown in as well So it's like a three-button combination of attacks, but there's a lot of variety in those attacks There's also the fact that while every character has the ability to use Your Sheikah Slate abilities like in Breath of the Wild all of them work Functionally a little bit different. So everyone has the ability to freeze Magnesis Freeze enemies in place or you know use things like the bombs But all of these abilities save like the freezing enemies in place thing Work fundamentally differently with each character. So there's a lot of little nuances You need to learn with how these work and Understandably they're most powerful with Princess Zelda She is the most powerful of these abilities because her base attacks aren't necessarily as powerful as some other Characters because she's not supposed to be amazing at combat But she does hold her own just fine by the way if you're wondering about that Zelda is you can literally play her as like your lead Character for much of the game if you would like so yeah, there's that you get to choose which characters you want to use in most missions There's only very specific story based missions where you have to use certain characters like link There's sometimes when link is not optional So the thing is I fundamentally love this link himself has a varied move set Depending on the typo weapon you're using whether it's a one-hander whether it's a two-hander whether it's a spear These all provide different use cases and different weapon types They even change your zr ability like with a one-hander you use a bow But you don't have a bow with your zr ability with a two-handed weapon So there's just a lot of different Variety of of gameplay I guess in this game in comparison to every other Musou game I've ever played including the last Hyrule Warriors Which had a case of feeling a bit same Z with some of the characters. That's not the case this time around They did a fantastic job adding variety to the combat and variety to the characters and how you approach combat in this game And yeah for that reason alone. It's the greatest Warriors game ever, but now we got to get into the story So here's the thing Nintendo wrote the story for this game Nintendo said this is the only game where we will be Experiencing what happened a hundred years before in Breath of the Wild and The big thing about this story Because this is why a lot of people are picking up this game is the story right because it's supposed to be a canon story It's supposed to be a prequel of sorts, right? It's the only game. It's ever gonna release that happens during the actual great calamity well the story is Let's just say it retcons all of Breath of the Wild entirely It's like Breath of the Wild didn't even happen so It's interesting because at the very beginning of the game and you saw this in the demo You know, you have that scene where that that were that uh that little mini guardian comes to life And then travels through time and the moment you see the travel through time aspect You're like oh boy last time we had time travel That was Ocarina of time and when we had that happen there were split timelines like what's going on here's time travel so You see that they have traveled back through time and end up partnering up with with Zelda and Link and Impa and I The thing is the story unfolds for a for a huge chunk of the game I would say about half of the game the story unfolds Exactly like Breath of the Wild describes it right, you know You go to each territory and you discover a person there That's going to become the the champion and and running one of the Divine Beast It's gonna help you to stop calamity Ganon You're on this journey with Zelda with extra cutscenes that we didn't get in the original game showing her personal struggles with her Inability to access the full power of the Triforce so she can do her part to stop calamity Ganon We see Link's rise to becoming a champion Whereas in Breath of the Wild he was mostly a champion in all of those memories We now get to fill in the gaps of all the things that happened to him becoming a champion We get to see more about the King of Hyrule in King Rhone like dude. He is Kind of hardened man. He's kind of cruel in some ways But he's hardened by certain events and certain things he's trying to prevent and trying to get Zelda to do right We get to see a little bit about Zelda's mother We never get to hear about the mother of Zelda but in this game we do and well We don't actually see her the game has one particular scene where it teases like you're just about to see Zelda's mother But then it pulls away We find out that Zelda's love for technology in her curiosity around it came from her mother And there is the fact that that little egg guardian. Hey, she built that you find that out late in the game She made that as a child and she forgot because Her dad the king took it away thinking it was ruining her focus on trying to find a way to unlock her powers So she when when when the thing travels back in time to meet with Lincoln's Oh the doesn't really remember making it because she did it when she was a little girl So it's it's crazy Seeing that come full circle But for a majority of the first half of the game everything unfolds as you expected to right There's nothing too shocking. Okay. You got all four champions You're gonna go face off against Calamity Ganon. Oh, no, Calamity Ganon does his things He makes his blights the the the champions are all stuck and trapped inside there They're now Calamity Ganon controlled You know divine beast and Link and Zelda are facing off Against Calamity Ganon or at least running from Hyrule Castle in a way as the king supposedly is killed Zelda try you know the king saves them and then you know supposedly the king is killed the king doesn't isn't actually killed but We'll find that out in a bit, but they're running away and here you are thinking here's the scene. It's coming It's coming right here. We go. This is exactly the breath of the wild here come all of the guardians There links not gonna be you know links gonna do what he can to fight off a One or two of them But he's gonna get massively injured and then Zelda is gonna step up to protect link and here we go Enter the events of breath of the wild and any sort of extra endings because again We knew that there were some interesting endings to this game Beforehand, maybe they come later. Maybe they come a few hundred percent the content Maybe it's an alternate ending right the whole ending that retcons the series Maybe it's an alternate ending and we start off with the ending of breath up So like I was like oh cool We're gonna get the ending that leads to breath of the wild and then when you do extra beyond that ending That's when you kind of retcon things and create a second timeline nope Right when you think it's going to happen it doesn't sell the cries the the Guardian shoots something up into the sky the baby guardian that that Zelda created shoots something up into the sky that basically brings back the new leaders the Nutteba, Riju, etc brings back the new leaders of those Those tribes from breath of the wild our current day breath of the wild back in time to help Save Ravalli, Urbosa and all that and ultimately they actually fail at it But what they do is they buy enough time For a link to show up and save the day and then link defeats the blights in present day Hyrule as it exists before breath of the wild So essentially everything gets reckoned Zelda still hasn't discovered her powers yet She goes on when they're on the run and they're at like a call of fortress Zelda is all like yeah Follow me we're going to dominate and like I have unlocked my powers now and it's just it's crazy, right? And it leads into a final confrontation now this entire time the story is going on You know something's up because there's like this seer right there's this magic man who thinks he can control calamity Ganon to an extent Turns out in the end. He can't control calamity Ganon. What a shocker couldn't see that one coming That was one of the biggest things that like you just knew was coming the whole time And even the Yiga clan ends up joining your forces because the Yiga clan was originally helping this seer But then decides yeah, no, this isn't good. We can't let calamity Ganon come back So everyone unites at the end. You have you have the you have all four champions link impa Zelda Robbie Pura you have you have the Teba and Rizu and the rest of the game from breath of the wild there as well They all team up to ultimately defeat not only this seer, but calamity Ganon itself Calamity Ganon is much more fierce in this game than he ever was in breath of the wild You could definitely tell breath of the wild calamity Ganon If this is to be considered cannon, which obviously breath of the lads of cannon game We get to see basically the full might of calamity Ganon in this game And I'm going to tell you guys right now the final confrontation in Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity regardless of your difficulty mode from easy all the way up to the hardest difficulty is Way Harder than the final confrontation's I'm going to use shuns because is that last part with beast Ganon really a confrontation? It's so easy with Ganon or calamity Ganon In breath of the wild makes it look like a joke The battle against this calamity Ganon is much more intense. This calamity Ganon is much powerful like So much more powerful than he ever was in breath of the wild this is like the full might of calamity Ganon and You face off against it and a combination of obviously link and Zelda and the rest get it done So you end up sealing away the darkness in the end Hyrule has peace restored it It ends up not super destroyed even though Hyrule Castle as is destroyed the whole world isn't super destroyed and Everything's going good. And then if you 100% the game basically it's not really 100% There's this a long quest line after the end of the normal of the normal game That you can do to unlock the ability to play as the little guardian as its own It's okay, and I can't remember the name of the guy. I think it's sort of the tea It's just a really random names all the throws out there from what I can tell when she was a kid You get there's this long quest you can go to unlock the guardian and Unlocking the guardians so not necessarily 100% in the game, but it's it's pretty close to 100% in the game Unlocks the guardian and that unlocks the quote-unquote secret ending Which is basically just a continuation of the of the ending already given to you after you be calamity Ganon Where everyone you know the tabba region the rest get get sent back in time or Where they go back to Breath of the Wild which never happened so it's weird This game In the secret ending there is there really isn't much additional information You just get to see some stuff that happens after calamity Ganon is defeated Nothing that I find to be too like I was hoping there might be a hint at like oh, this is an alternate ending, but Here's the thing Age of Calamity is not the backstory of Breath of the Wild That's what you find out this story written by Nintendo Because it was supposed to be the back story Breath of the Wild Because it was supposed to be the back story Breath of the Wild is not actually the back story of Breath of the Wild That's the crazy thing. It's not the backstory What So what does this mean? Well, there's really two things This game is not canon. That's chief thing number one. Maybe this game is not canon It's just a spin-off Nintendo even though they wrote the story Treated it as a spin-off and despite them teasing things that basically you said it was a prequel in canon It's not and so it doesn't matter the game's irrelevant. It's just like the other Hyrule Warriors game It's it's your own unique story that just takes place in this certain world of Zelda and it means nothing or And this is probably the more likely scenario the timeline has split again And some of the things that happened in this game will be referenced in Breath of the Wild 2 now Breath of the Wild 2 we know factually follows up Breath of the Wild so This is happening at a time when we're Breath of the Wild happened and maybe Zelda never cried on the little guardian There didn't bring the people back and then you know, whatever like that's clearly where the split occurs is when Zelda cries and the Tier hits that guardian Maybe That's you know where the split occurs that in my opinion, but here's the thing This is a really good story, I like this story. It's just I Don't like the Zelda getting complicated again, and maybe that's just me But I didn't like this timeline split at Ocarina of Time I hated it I hated that timeline split and I hated it even more when Nintendo just made up a completely old link died So that's a new timeline like I Didn't like the time when I don't like things getting overly complex, but here we go Nintendo's at it again Assuming that this game is still considered canon and we'll know he aged you a new will answer questions about it eventually And if it's part of the timeline or not when Breath of the Wild 2 coverage starts to happen People will clearly ask him what age of calamity and he will let us know if it's part of the timeline or not So we we should have to wait long. We should know within a year if this game is part of the timeline if it is Then they have created another split timeline situation And they have reintroduced time travel into the series So now we need to think about What this is going to mean for Zelda moving forward Clearly Breath of the Wild 2 is going to be following up the events of the original Breath of the Wild But does the ending of this game open up another branch that they could start making Zelda games in too If they don't want to keep following down the Breath of the Wild line See what was so refreshing to me about Breath of the Wild is it was so far in the future And so clearly a dragon break style game where it brought all the timelines together again And they were kind of rebooting the franchise immediately upon rebooting the franchise. They split the timeline again I I'm just not a fan of this approach. I I guess I'm I'm a more of a fan of linear Story in so much that it makes a lot more sense and we're not debating which timeline games go into Um But we're they just kind of ensure that's going to keep happening if this game is canon again Ajiya no more will confirm at some point if this game is part of the timeline or not, but yeah, I'm My feeling at the end of Age of Calamity is both relief because I finally beat it Um Looking back on me playing it. I really enjoyed what I played, you know, I spent 30 40 hours playing this game Loved it loved every minute. I played of it the story despite knowing You know what was going to happen because of the leaks before the game came out was still enthralling throughout I still found myself like literally not breathing during certain cut scenes when zelda was speaking specifically like There was moments watching the combat with the champions that I thought for a brief second We were about to see him die, but they didn't there was a lot of um animosity and excitement and My heart going a million miles an hour during the story and all the gameplay So I love this game This is probably my favorite video game in 2020 and that's seen a lot because there's so many great games but I also have a bias for zelda, so Here's the thing I'm still slightly Disappointed that there wasn't An ending they could have had this split ending happen and still show us the ending of breath of the ending that leads the breath of the wild Instead they either retconned it or Are we going to find out like my thing is in breath of the wild too in the sequel Are we going to find out that it's not that breath of the wild itself never happened? Are we going to find out that that's an alternate part of zelda history that was retconned with This and that they something some crazy time-traveling crap happens in breath of the wild too that changes it and makes breath of the wild not occur like There's so many possibilities here and maybe this was intentional Gotta remember aji anumu told us that this was the only game that was going to show us the events that happened before breath of the wild nintendo wrote the story I wonder if they are trying to set us up for breath of the wild too Doing something insane That makes it so breath of the wild itself never occurred I don't know I'm just throwing that out there like when these guys time travel back to the past To help the champions Does that actually occur in breath of the wild too where they end up time traveling back? And if it happens then why does it happen? Does something happen in breath of the wild too where they need to go back to the past and change what happened? I'm very very curious about this Is what happened in this game going to be explained in breath of the wild too that they needed to go change the past because of something else Again this game could be setting up a lot So if you're a zelda fan love breath of the wild absolutely play it if you've never played breath of the wild Should you play this game before you play breath of the wild? Sure. You can it is a prequel But i'm gonna tell you right now the backdrop of breath of the wild and the cutscenes aren't going to make sense to you Because this game is going to give you a completely different backstory that doesn't happen in breath of the wild As far as we're aware Anyways, you guys let me know what you think about all this down in the comments below. This is my review I honestly think that this is a really good game. This might be the best game on switch this year Animal crossing new horizons Is going to sell better It's going to be more popular. It's going to have more appeal Muso games and the kind of comment they do don't have the same sort of appeal Honestly, this is the best game on switch in 2020 So you should you should absolutely play it. It should be a must-own game if you're a switch owner If you're you know, someone playing, you know on other consoles right now This is a game that maybe you should consider if you decide to get a switch someday Uh, of course, you know Breath of the wild is a must-have game as well. So anyways, I'm defender of a chance from the tender prime Let me know what you think about breath of the wild And obviously age of calamity hyrule warriors down in the console Let's have an in-depth conversation about this story about every aspect of this game because hey This is not some spoiler free video folks This is my review of hyrule warriors age of calamity. I'll catch you guys in the next video