The Champion's Ballad is about as good of DLC as we could have gotten for Breath of the Wild: More shrines, another dungeon, a big boss fight. All of those are fun, but not particularly memorable, but the bike you get as a reward for completing them is indisputably rad.

The initial challenge you're presented with involves a weapon called the One-Hit Obliterator, and this might be my favorite part of the whole game. BotW shines brightest when your life feels like it's hanging by a thread. (Eventide Island is another great example) This intro to the second DLC pack requires you to rout groups of enemies in certain areas without being struck a single time, resulting in a new shrine being unearthed. This is some of the most tense, strategic gameplay in Breath of the Wild, and I desperately wish there was more of it.

After unlocking these shrines on the Great Plateau, there are more new Shrines to unlock across Hyrule, each batch corresponding with one of the four deceased Champions, and the quests to gain entry to them are solid. All of this culminates in a new dungeon being unlocked. This isn't technically a Divine Beast, but it may as well be. It maintains the same repeated aesthetics from the four you've already completed by this point, and feels like it could be an extension of any of them. While it's cool to have more to do, this emphasized one of BotW's greatest failings: Dungeons without unique identities. It does, however, end with the best boss fight in the game.

Like the first DLC pack, the new clothing items are essentially useless in the late game (they can't be upgraded), so if you're thinking of getting this DLC, I'd recommend doing it right from the start so you can actually take advantage of these new unlocks. The new Horse armor is the best of the bunch, but if you beat the aforementioned new dungeon, you won't need a horse ever again.

Finished my 2nd full playthrough of BOTW with this DLC.

The Ballad is an incredibly welcome and challenging piece of additional content. It leans on your familiarity with the overworld to discern secret locations, and then it tests you with the one-hit weapon challenge, cool new shrine concepts, and one hell of a final boss. Having to fight all the blights again was a bit weak, but the rest of the trials all pay off in a wonderful little bit of extra story content, and the absolutely badass addition of the Master Cycle Zero. Worth every penny.

As for my 2nd overall playthrough: It was just as immersive and thrilling as it was back in 2017. I challenged myself to beat the game with the HUD turned off and without activating any towers (which I was able to maintain until the Ballad, which REQUIRES some map knowledge). Approaching the game in this way gave me an appreciation for how thoughtfully designed each region is, how much personality is on display in each environment. This is an iconic open world for a reason: It's such a unique organism filled with so much to discover, and barring that, so much for you to play around with to your heart's content. It's the ultimate adventure simulator.

Swimming overall is probably the worst traversal mechanic, and it sucks that not even the Zora suit can speed it up. That aged pretty hard for me on this run, especially during the Water Blight fight. Ganon's final form is underwhelming in one manner, but I also kind of appreciate that his first form is meant to be your definitive skill test, and then his second form can be seen as a "victory lap" to cap off a long journey.

Other than that I'm just an unapologetic lover of this game. The Ocarina-Skyward era still holds a place in my heart, and I think Majora is probably overall the best Zelda game. However, I'm fine with this being the present day state of Zelda. The amount of innovation it has brought to the open world genre is an absolute good, and the freedom and possibility it gives the player is still astounding. Bring on the Tears!

The Champion’s Ballad starts strong. You are tasked with activating and completing four shrines in the Great Plateau with access to only one weapon which can take out any enemy in one hit, but this weapon has reduced your health so you can also be taken out by any enemy in one hit. This makes for some really intense enemy encounters which force you to plan carefully and not be reckless while also making for some interesting and unique shrines. Once these shrines have been completed you are given your inventory and health back and are tasked with finding and completing three shrines associated with each of the four divine beasts. Completing these enable you to battle the beasts again with a fun twist. Finding and accessing the shrines themselves can be a bit laborious with the cryptic clues and lack of easy access to the maps which show their approximate location. However, the shrines themselves are as good as ever. It was also nice to have another crack at the bosses you face in the base game but with an extra challenge (that I won’t spoil) though it did feel a bit like déjà vu at points. Completing all of the above unlocks a fifth divine beast. Going through and completing this divine beast was pure joy, being BOTW at its best. What’s more the DLC does a great job of providing more substance to the storytelling, with frequent and more fleshed out cutscenes giving us a better insight into the Champion’s and protagonists. It’s by no means a storytelling masterclass but it is definitely a step up from the base game.

The Champion’s Ballad has a really strong opening and ending, but is slightly dragged down by a weaker middle section. Regardless, the DLC is well worth your time, being a fantastic addition to an exceptional game.

Ranked DLC Recommendations

Imagine Mario Odyssey releasing a few more DLC worlds, except they required beating 4 Kaizo Mario levels first before you could access them. It’s a hilarious hypothetical, but less funny IRL.

The opening of this DLC is wildly off-putting and misjudged, a one-hit death redux of the Great Plateau as a bafflingly ill-conceived roadblock highlighting the most frustrating (but easily ignored) annoyances of the brilliant main game. It abandons imaginative and flexible challenges that don’t ruthlessly punish combat and platforming experimentation for a tedious trial-and-error slog. Thankfully, I pushed through to the great new Beast Emblem shrines.

The 12 emblem shrines are all fantastic escalations of the original shrine puzzle mechanics, often at much grander scale. The open-world riddle solving that unlocks each one is also a treat, and there’s a nice diversity of what unlock actions are required, including another stealth mission, flying course, and shield-boarding course, among others. Figuring out where on the map each of those occur is also a fun time, locating where each excerpted map snippet lies on the broader overworld map. I also loved the final divine beast it all leads to, and the story insights into the champions were all very characterful and charming.

The redux blight bosses are sort of a drag, including the muddy wash visual filter applied to each one, but they at least have the interesting premise of giving you a specific restricted item “build” to complete each fight instead of just beating them with the overpowered stockpile of weapons I had on hand.

Joguei pela primeira vez agora enquanto terminava meu save do Switch pro TotK e... é... mei ruim né... muito mais do mesmo, inflado e esticado. Pegam a parte mais saturada do jogo e só repetem, com mais duração e complexidade. Bonus negative points pra primeira etapa da DLC. Nunca tinha morrido pra uma abelha antes.

Pra ser justo, a última dungeon eu achei mais interessante que as outras do jogo base, o resto é só repeteco que nesse ponto do jogo eu imagino que todo mundo já tá de saco cheio.

As novas cutscenes são bem legais e valem muito a pena, já a motoca, bem, ela é muito legal e tal. Mas que porra eu vou fazer com isso depois que eu já terminei o jogo inteiro? O mesmo vale pros upgrades dos poderes, principalmente o do Revali...

No mínimo essa DLC tinha que ter sido introduzida bem cedo pros jogadores que iniciaram um novo save com ela. Porque é tudo inútil no ponto em que você libera.