So I grabbed Hyrule Warriors last night and thought I'd share my thoughts on it, based on the first few hours of play.
This is my first musuo so I didn't know what to expect, and perhaps features that are a staple in the series are missing, or done differently making this a bad musuo. I don't know. Serious Dynasty Warriors fans should probably look elsewhere to see if this appeals.
Story
Basically Cia, the sorceress guarding the 4 fragments of evil, goes bad and unleashes said evil upon Hyrule; creating rifts in spacetime linking (see what I did there?) up 4 different eras of Hyrule.
It's hammy fan fiction. But there's plenty of little nods to longtime series fans, that makes that hamminess wonderful. It's not a Zelda game and the story so far is lacking any subtlety (ooh, I wonder why Sheik happens to have the Triforce of Wisdom...). But as a fan of Zelda, seeing familiar glowing eyes in a porcine shadow amps up the obvious reveal, despite it's b-movie feel, and going into a battle trying to guess which character will be added is nice as well.
And in any case, the story is simply a peg to hang the gameplay, characters and setting on which brings us to...
Gameplay
It's fun. I'm no fan of hack and slashes (or haven't been in the past, W101 and this are making me reconsider that stance); but sprinting through Skyloft, slaughtering thousands of moblins as you go, is fun. The combos don't really on memorising obtuse combinations of buttons to pull off, it's basically hit B a bunch of times and every so often hit Y for variation. But it looks and feels good.
The battlefield management is one part of the game that I was unsure about, but in general there's not too much backtracking and as I get deeper into the game I'm seeing that the real gameplay is in keeping an eye on the state of the battle, and it's not as worrying as I initially expected it to be.
The levelling and item management works, it's not too obstrusive and it's very user friendly. Although it's not exactly apparent just how much difference it makes. I'm guessing that later in the game my ass is going to get kicked by it though.
I do have a few bugbears though: I like rotating maps; this map doesn't rotate and it's going to take a while to get used to. And there should have been an option to get it on the gamepad too. Tutorials; they're basically non-existant. I'm only really able to tell what's going on because I watched a lot of the Treehouse stuff about the game. It is fairly intuitive, but guidance on the basics would've been nice.
Presentation
The cut scenes are nice (I'm glad Aonuma is looking to them for guidance on Zelda U), the music is great fun, and I'm liking the character designs. Impa especially; best character so far IMO.
But in game it doesn't look great. It's not an ugly game, but it certainly doesn't have the same mastery of the hardware that Nintendo usually exhibits and there is noticeable slowdown in parts, although not enough to hinder playability, we're not talking Ass Creed here. I've not tried the coop yet, but I hear the slowdowns worse, so we'll have to see.
Replayability
I've not really explored much of what else is on disk yet, but the adventure mode looks mighty weighty, the challenge mode could be good and the need to level up everyone, collect everything and build all the weapons makes me think that this will see a lot of play. Especially as it's looking to be a game where you can play a section out of sequence and still get it.
Verdict
I don't know if it's a good musuo, but it's a lot of fun so far. Presentation issues and niggles I have with the maps and lack of tutorials aside it's a good game. It's not AAA, but I doubt anyone was expecting it to be, and the industry (and Nintendo especially) needs more of these solid "B-movie" titles: they're fun, cheap, and probably fairly profitable.
If you're a Zelda fan looking for some mindless hack and slash fun with some fanservice thrown in, I recommend giving this a shot.
7.5/10
