It took me a while to warm up to this one. At first, I thought it paled in comparison to the Hyrule Warriors before it. However, I've grown to appreciate it for what it is and enjoy it, even if I like the first slightly better.
It feels like for everything this game does better than Hyrule Warriors, it comes with a drawback:
Characters are more unique with their own gimmicks making them more fun to play, but there's also characters that range from less fun to downright horrendous to play.
The addition of perfect dodging adds a huge layer of fun to combat and mastery over it, but the game also removes pretty much all of the strategy of the battlefield.
Enemies are more varied, but they're all monsters you've already, fought hundreds of times in Breath of the Wild, adding to the feeling of repetition.
Smaller enemies will now sometimes group up to attack you, which is cool, but they also take much more time to kill, which is less satisfying when having to juggle them for ages.
Finally, combat just felt a bit snappier in Hyrule Warriors, and I'm not sure if that's due to an engine change or the framerate being lower (which I didn't have as much of a problem with as others but it also wasn't amazing).
Overall though, I would say this is a worthy successor to Hyrule Warriors despite my issues. It still offers hours of grinding and side stuff to do just like the first, and the roster of characters is impressive considering they all pull from only one Zelda game. I also didn't mind the story as much as others, while it still has that melodramatic tone that makes me not like BoTW's story, the time travel elements don't ruin it for me. I think the game does a decent job of showing how things would have played out if Terrako had not shown up, and seeing an alternate timeline of the characters banding together to stop the Calamity was fun to see.
One last thing: I made a quick tier list of characters in the game, ranked by how much fun they are to play:
https://ibb.co/mTNTdt3
I'll probably be going back to this game, I'll likely update it once I play some of the characters I haven't unlocked yet.
It feels like for everything this game does better than Hyrule Warriors, it comes with a drawback:
Characters are more unique with their own gimmicks making them more fun to play, but there's also characters that range from less fun to downright horrendous to play.
The addition of perfect dodging adds a huge layer of fun to combat and mastery over it, but the game also removes pretty much all of the strategy of the battlefield.
Enemies are more varied, but they're all monsters you've already, fought hundreds of times in Breath of the Wild, adding to the feeling of repetition.
Smaller enemies will now sometimes group up to attack you, which is cool, but they also take much more time to kill, which is less satisfying when having to juggle them for ages.
Finally, combat just felt a bit snappier in Hyrule Warriors, and I'm not sure if that's due to an engine change or the framerate being lower (which I didn't have as much of a problem with as others but it also wasn't amazing).
Overall though, I would say this is a worthy successor to Hyrule Warriors despite my issues. It still offers hours of grinding and side stuff to do just like the first, and the roster of characters is impressive considering they all pull from only one Zelda game. I also didn't mind the story as much as others, while it still has that melodramatic tone that makes me not like BoTW's story, the time travel elements don't ruin it for me. I think the game does a decent job of showing how things would have played out if Terrako had not shown up, and seeing an alternate timeline of the characters banding together to stop the Calamity was fun to see.
One last thing: I made a quick tier list of characters in the game, ranked by how much fun they are to play:
https://ibb.co/mTNTdt3
I'll probably be going back to this game, I'll likely update it once I play some of the characters I haven't unlocked yet.
Reviewed on May 22, 2022