Hyrule Warriors Legends

Written by Sean Colleli on 4/11/2016 for 3DS  

Back in 2014 I thought the original Hyrule Warriors was one of the standout titles of that year. It was a sorely needed shot in the arm for the flagging Wii U, and despite fan skepticism, fusing the Zelda universe with the arcade action of the Musuo, Dynasty Warriors franchise was a novel crossover that just worked…if you didn’t think about it too hard. At the time fans were still reeling from Nintendo’s confident reveal of an actual, multi-timeline Zelda continuity—a Zelda fan Holy Grail for decades—and they weren’t quite sure how to include Hyrule Warriors.

The best way, it turned out, was to take a giant step back and just enjoy the game as a huge non-canon, Zelda Avengers-style crossover-team-up mega event. It also turns out that it’s the best way to approach Hyrule Warriors Legends, the ambitious, enhanced 3DS port of the game. Despite the massive gulf in power between the Wii U and the 3DS, Nintendo has attempted to bring an already crazy game to a crazier portable format, with varying degrees of success. If you want to find out how the basic game plays and what I thought of it, please check out my original review. Surprisingly Hyrule Warriors Legends plays almost exactly like the Wii U version, so to avoid repeating myself I’m going to focus on what’s different in this new portable iteration.

Hyrule Warriors Legends is an even more daring feat than the Wii U original, considering it attempts to port down the vast, important majority of that game while adding new content of its own. I say majority because the challenge mode is missing, as well as any hint of multiplayer; due to the 3DS hardware limitations, co-op has been completely removed. This is pretty disappointing considering there’s even more emphasis on social gaming with the 3DS, but the constrained power of the portable necessitates some paring back.

What we gain is a sizable chunk of new content, most of which is unique to the 3DS version for now, but will eventually be patched into the Wii U game as a mixture of free and paid DLC. The most notable addition is of course the elephant in the room: Linkle. Unfortunately this refreshing new addition to the cast of Hyrule Warriors has been the center of an overblown controversy about the supposed lack of diversity in videogames and gaming culture. As far as Hyrule Warriors Legends is concerned this is much ado about nothing, and Linkle is an intriguing new character in her own right.

  

The Zelda development team had been toying with the idea of a female counterpart to Link for a while now—sort of a little sister who looks up to him and aspires to be a hero too. The way she’s ultimately implemented is a little different. Linkle is a young cucco farmer who has dreamed of being the descendant of the great hero, destined to fulfill her destiny as he did in ages past. It doesn’t help that Linkle’s grandma gave her a magic golden compass and a green tunic inspired by Link’s classic getup. This recalls Link’s grandmother in Wind Waker, and raises amusing questions about an entire culture that dresses their kids in green tunics and tells them that any one of them could be the hero of legend.

When Linkle hears that Hyrule castle has been attacked, she gears up with her dual crossbows and heads off to meet her destiny. Her misadventures are slotted cleverly into the existing Hyrule Warriors storyline, which is impressive considering it already spans multiple timelines and dimensions. Linkle gets sidetracked by numerous problems—she runs afoul of the Skull Kid and even helps Midna regain her true form—but in the course of these trials Linkle becomes the hero she always believed she was. She even plays an integral part in the ending; while Link and Zelda are occupied with returning the Master Sword, Linkle finally gets to Hyrule castle in time to help Impa wage a desperate last stand against the remaining monster army, and even turns the tide.

The online complaints that Linkle somehow isn’t good or progressive enough—she isn’t a complete female replacement for Link or she isn’t distinctive enough—are really missing the point. Nintendo isn’t trying to placate a tiny group of so-called fans who are frankly never happy, they’re adding yet another fascinating female character to a cast of warriors that is already bursting with strong female leads. Indeed, she ultimately shows up a number of highly trailed warriors with just her pluck and uncanny aim. Linkle joins Impa, Zelda, Midna and even weirdos like the bug princess Agitha in proving that no matter who you are or where you came from, anyone can be a hero, even a simple cucco farmer with nothing more than a lot of heart.

  

As far as how she plays, Linkle is anything but a simple re-skin of Link. Her primary weapons are her dual crossbows, which is quite a departure from the rest of the cast who all use melee weapons as their primary or some kind of magic or esoteric musical instrument. Linkle uses ranged attacks almost exclusively, which takes a second to get used to but is truly something to behold. Linkle is absolutely ferocious on the battlefield; I got a real John Woo feel from the way she wields those crossbows, almost like how Bayonetta uses the four pistols strapped to her limbs. I’d love to see Linkle show up in future Zelda titles as she brings something really unique to the franchise as, essentially, a sharpshooter character.

This of course brings us to the gameplay in Hyrule Warriors Legends. If you’re playing on the New 3DS—and sadly you should, as any of the older models have a hard time with framerate and completely disable the 3D effect—then you have a functionally identical control layout to the Wii U version. This means the basic layout is preserved, with face buttons for attacks and combos, c-stick for rotating the camera, and circle pad for basic movement. Strangely through, lock-on functions have been mapped to the D-pad, which is a tad awkward.

The touch screen adds a lot more functionality, with several new features that I hope get integrated into the Wii U version via the GamePad. You can now tap between characters to swap mid-battle, and tapping character portraits even lets you issue commands to other warriors. This way you can direct them to a specific location or even have them attack high profile targets. The touch screen also lets you warp between certain locations, which in theory would be a huge improvement over the Wii U version but in practice is only a marginal advantage. Warping only becomes available if you have the ocarina item, and when owl statues appear on the battlefield. This makes sense from a Zelda lore perspective, but it would’ve been much more intuitive if any liberated keep or outpost automatically became a warp point.

  

The problem with all these features is that they are, unfortunately, constrained to the 3DS hardware. And even the New 3DS just isn’t up to the task of making Hyrule Warriors a fun and seamless experience. Don’t get me wrong, the collected development teams of Nintendo and Koei Tecmo have done some amazing work shrinking such a huge game down to a portable format, and running smoothly with most of its features intact. The game plays much as it does on the Wii U, but the 3DS’s limited graphical abilities really hobble the experience.

I’m not one to harp on graphics when it’s not important, but unfortunately here it’s pretty important. On Wii U, Hyrule Warriors was a delicate balance of managed chaos under the best of conditions. As a real time action-strategy game it takes a lot of situational awareness and second-to-second decision making. Cramming all of that detail down into a 3DS screen—with the accompanying low resolution—makes managing that chaos all the harder. The view of the battlefield is a whole lot smaller, which unfortunately just makes playing difficult. What you get is a game that hypothetically plays exactly the same, but in practice is a whole lot less intuitive.

This has less to do with the raw visuals—the poly counts, the textures, the draw distance—and more with menus, screen size and resolution. To be fair the developers have done an impressive job with the basic graphics here; Hyrule Warriors Legends has the same colorful, high-contrast appearance as Smash Bros 3DS, complete with the thick comic-style outlines for the characters. The framerate is also consistently solid throughout. It’s just that the menus are, in a word, ugly. It doesn’t look like any of them have been redrawn, just down-rezzed to the 3DS’s blurry native resolution. I can ignore this for basic menus, but it makes the battlefield map a real eyesore. This is a problem, as you’ll be spending a lot of time squinting at this fuzzy map to plan strategies and just figure out where you are in relation to the other warriors.

  

It’s a real shame too, because with the proper optimization and a more powerful platform, Hyrule Warriors Legends could be an incredible portable game. Throw in a few more mid-level checkpoints to enable shorter play sessions and re-work the co-op for local wireless play, and this could be a great party game. As it stands, Hyrule Warriors Legends works okay, but if you’re used to the Wii U version it’s going to be a real challenge to play it on the 3DS.

Legends has a few new features that might warrant a purchase. In place of the co-op is a new feature that lets you train fairies for Adventure mode, and once you finish the main quest you unlock a new story that incorporates the Wind Waker and its characters, like Toon Link, Tetra and the King of Hyrule. Again it’s all cool stuff, but the 3DS format makes it difficult to enjoy and nearly all of it is getting added to the Wii U version as DLC.

I hate to say it, but Nintendo should have held off on this one. The writing is on the wall: the Wii U and 3DS are in their twilight days (no pun intended), and the NX is on the way. I have no doubt that Nintendo has a powerful new home console and a next generation handheld just over the horizon, and Hyrule Warriors Legends really should have been saved for that next gen tech.

For now, Hyrule Warriors Legends is an ambitious swan song for the 3DS. It does some incredible things from a technical standpoint but ultimately is brought down by some hard limitations. If you really want to play Hyrule Warriors on the go, by all means get Legends. Just expect it to be harder to enjoy than the Wii U version that you already know and love.