Why Hyrule Warriors is simply nothing compared to World War I
Hyrule Warriors (2014)
Hyrule Warriors (2014)
The other day I was reading about World War I casualties in the final days of the conflict, and all I can say is, bloody hellfire. It was the old Hundred Days Offensive, that frightful last rush of the war where the British front said: “Bugger to it all, chaps. Let’s bloody well finish the Gerrys!” to which their French allies gave a hearty “on hohn hohn” laugh and squealed: “Formidable!”
The Germans caught wind of their plan, however, and for three months they all ran at each other and drove tanks at each other until Germany finally cried for mercy. The net result? Over two million marked casualties. Many combatants were captured, but the majority were killed, and all in the length of a summer’s holiday from school.
With numbers like that, you can’t even imagine the face of a typical British fighting man, or a typical French or German or Austro-Hungarian fighting man for that matter. Too young to be on a battlefield, but too old not to fight for his country. That nutter Stalin was right, a million deaths really is just a statistic.
Since then, there’s been all kinds of films and books and even museums and military demonstrations that have played a part in glorifying the hell that is war. I’d love to say that I would denounce these war-loving works in a forthright and disapproving manner, possibly with a sternly written letter to my local representative and to the national newspaper.
But I’m as bad as them, because I love a bit of war. And when I saw that a bizarre crossover Zelda game called Hyrule Warriors was making its bow on the Switch, I became interested as all hell.
Actually, the game had already made an appearance on the Wii U, though I never bothered getting it - too many DLC packs to buy, and anyway, how can I run an efficient military campaign with that aircraft carrier of a controller? I’d rather something a bit more streamlined.
More ridiculously, Hyrule Warriors also came to the 3DS, and you didn’t even need the New Super 3DSi Lite Pro XL to play it. I can’t even imagine how the game runs on an original 3DS, since the handheld console can barely do a 3D Pokémon battle, but there you go.
The big advantage of the Switch version is that it contains all of the DLC from the off, which means you don’t have to bother with the Wii U or 3DS versions - I advise you to take your bayonet and go right for the Switch jugular.
If ever there was a useful demonstration for how the Switch combines the console power (quote-unquote) of the Wii U and the portability of the 3DS, it’s Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition. In a way, it’s what those obscure old Battalion Wars games ought to have been.
The game is a spin-off of the Dynasty Warriors series where, to my understanding, a load of impossibly-coiffured feminine swordsmen and buxom schoolgirls are brought together in some ridiculous plot, and it becomes a war game - you play as a designated Hero, running around the open 3D environments and capturing Keeps and Outposts in order to stave off attacks from the enemy.
You do this by slicing through hundreds of opponents at a time, using combo moves, special attacks and finishers. You certainly rack up the body count in this game; you can cut through about 2,000 enemies in a 10 minute battle. That's just from one man, woman or Goron.
How about your comrades, your Zoras-in-arms. Want to know how many kills they’ll get to help the cause? Well, you’ll never be able to find out between all the complaining they do and rescuing they need. Yes, it’s one of those games - you’re the only one who can do the mission because all of your allies are pilchards.
This being a Zelda game, there’s fanservice through the roof, and this is certianly through when we take into account the amount of playable characters: almost 30 in total. You’ll be playing through the main campaign as Link, but then suddenly Zelda, Sheik, Impa, Tingle, the boat from The Wind Waker and God knows who else will join the fray.
Usually, these “helpers” will find themselves in immediate danger from the onrushing enemy and they will need your urgent assistance. As in, ‘get here in 5 seconds flat or I’m toast and you will have wasted 20 minutes of your life’ type of urgent. Not only that, your bases and keeps fall like leaves from a tree as well, and if you lose your Allied Base (your main HQ), your mission is failed immediately.
Talk about a one man effort - this is why it pays to be a lone wolf. At least that way there’s little chance of dying from friendly fire, as happened to so many WWI soldiers. Anyway, no sooner will you have started a tough mission than you’ve got the so-called Knights of Hyrule squawking in pain as they’re easily overwhelmed by the easiest enemies in the game.
I know there are hundreds of little Stalchildren running about and they all look very scary, but come on lad. You think you’re doing well in battle, then you get a brief message that your Allied Base is being turned over by 400 enemy creeps, a message that’s easy to miss when you’re off slicing through their cousins without a care in the world.
Then wooosh! The Base falls and you immediately lose. You also lose if one of your partners flee after having taken too much damage. Doesn’t matter if they were contributing absolutely nothing to the war effort; they must stick around and at least bear witness to your triumph, or it’s a massive internal incident for you. Court-martial, public humiliation, maybe even death by Light Arrow firing squad, that’s what you’ll get.
I don’t get it. Someone useless on the battlefield finally sees sense, sees that they’re in way over their heads here, and decides to escape the conflict and leave the real fighters to it. Certainly that’s what I’d do, if I ever got sent to the trenches. But in Hyrule Warriors, such desertion by your ally means you bear the consequences. Now what the hell?
Well, never mind all that. The game is repetitive in the extreme, but it’s great fun to turn on your Switch and burst through a 10-minute mission or two in the colossal Adventure Mode, an enormous range of individual missions with several different parameters.
Some missions make you use different characters, or they contain different gimmicks or different bosses. It’s a mode that calls all of the great Zelda games of yore to mind with maps and music from Skyward Sword, Wind Waker and more, with rulesets and dozens of Zelda characters to choose from.
Actually I can’t quite believe how powerful the game’s addictive lure is. By the time you’ve done about 30 missions, out of God knows how many, you will have fought pretty much all of the enemies and bosses, unlocked all of the characters, seen all of the locales, listened to all of the music.
You know full well that you’re now just doing the same thing over and over again, running through practically the same scenario each time, except on this mission you’re playing as Toon Link instead of Zelda.
But you love playing these endless missions, so much so that you’re almost going through the motions, doing it all automatically. Eventually, you do realise that you’re slaving yourself away to the game, and you remove it from the console with defiance. But that exciting allure of maybe unlocking a new hair accessory for your Fairy companion, or a better tier weapon for Skull Kid, that might bring you right back for another dozen hours.
You can even get Marin from Link’s Awakening on your team for God’s sake, which allows you to beat up hundreds of foes with her bell, tag-teaming with the Wind Fish Itself. That’s almost worth the price of entry alone. Or how does a female version of Link, called Linkle, grab you? And I’m not joking you on that, either.
Also, I am loving the electric guitar remixes of some of the old Zelda tunes, even if they can get pretty repetitive. Also, many of the character voice samples are quite bizarre and can be a little grating, especially given the repetitive nature of the game. But I’m just nit-picking here, and Link’s Master Sword slashing through Bokoblin fools sounds nothing less than mesmerising.
Ultimately Hyrule Warriors is as addictive as crack, properly hazardous to your health and productivity. The gameplay loop and the slow progression is a wonderful attraction. And I should know, I’ve played this game for over a hundred days by now.
Well, I don’t mean a hundred days cumulatively, even though some nutter out there will have done just that. But I’ve given it a hell of a lot of hours, been slaughtering enemy skellingtons by the thousand, and guess what? I’ve still only killed about 150,000 monsters.
That’s not even one tenth of the death count of the last days of World War 1. And when I think about how many millions of times I’ve mashed the game's attack buttons and gleefully chopped down the enemy squads, that World War I death count becomes frighteningly incomprehensible.
21 June 2024