Having now finished Age of Imprisonment's story... This is the worst of the Nintendo Warriors games.
Hyrule Warriors was a celebration of the entire Zelda series, making battlefields out of iconic locations like the Water Temple and the Sealed Grounds and letting us wreck shit as out-there picks like Midna, Fi, and even Princess Agitha. It's by far my favorite Zelda game, and up there among my favorite games period.
Fire Emblem Warriors earned a lot of grumbling for a boring roster and high number of clones, but I love how it evolved the mechanics, making certain moves force out enemy weakpoint gauges and reducing the time spent just waiting for the enemy to do the thing you can react to.
Age of Calamity narrowed its scope down to just referencing one game, but its gameplay was still rewarding to master and I appreciated it being an alternate story where the Champions not only got to live, but also hung out with their successors that we know and love.
Three Hopes effectively nullified most of FEW's complaints by narrowing its scope to one game and having movesets be class-based instead of character-based, though its non-committal endings left much to be desired.
And now we have Age of Imprisonment, which proudly advertised itself as having a story that every TotK player will already know the ending to, and the game delivers on that promise to a fault.
A sub-series that used to offer a roster of deep cuts is now padding itself out with two generics of every race.
We could have seen Purah and Mineru talk shop.
We could have heard Agraston give Yunobo fatherly advice about his business.
We could have seen Riju go through the severe culture shock of meeting a Gerudo people who still revere Ganondorf as their king, to the point of needing to be persuaded to turn against him, giving Riju a chance to prove herself as a young leader.
And in exchange for giving up those possibilities, what do we gain? A Construct who acts as a stand-in for Link, down to never having dialogue and having a sassy little companion to talk for it.
Calamo and his bud have a nice little personal story going on, don't get me wrong, and we might not have gotten them if the game had been willing to pull in characters from the present, but I would gladly make that trade because fun crossovers and What-Ifs are like half the appeal of Warriors games.
At least the gameplay saves it... Is what I would be saying, if not for the fact that Zonai devices are completely broken. You don't need to bother learning how the characters movesets' work, because you can just plop down a fan and a flame or frost emitter for a free tornado, or a hydrant and a frost or shock emitter. This forces out any enemy's weakpoint gauge and, unless they're electric or gloom-powered, stuns them, letting you button mash their gauge down. Yes, the zonai devices run on batteries, but you start every battle with three instant refills, and even if you use all those up you can find more by breaking boxes.
When one mechanic is powerful enough to render most of the others irrelevant, that's not great game design.
For the record, I still enjoy Age of Imprisonment, but between the above-mentioned problems and what currently passes for full price for Switch 2 games, I would recommend any of the other Nintendo Warriors games over it.
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