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   Christi Junior (christijunior@detroitriotcity.com)'s status on Thursday, 20-Nov-2025 07:29:38 JST Christi Junior
   Woohoo, I managed to finish Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment just in time for Kirby Air Riders! Some early thoughts:
   
   - As you'd expect it's a radical improvement over Age of Calamity both in terms of looks and performance, and with far fewer of those distracting pop-ins that marred AoC's presentation. Of course, given just how much stronger the Switch 2 is compared to the Switch 1 that was to be expected, but still, it feels kinda surreal to see a Hyrule Warriors game look this good AND run so smoothly even when the battlefield is completely covered with enemies and the screen is filled with all sorts of fancy attacks and visual effects.
   
   - In terms of its character roster it was on the whole inferior to Age of Calamity, due to having to rely so much on OCs to fill up the character slots. That said, a number of the playable characters were real standouts, like Mineru and her army of Constructs (it also helps that I really liked her even back in TotK), a reinvented Zelda with her awesome time manipulation gimmick, Calamo the Korok with all his elemental attacks (especially cool what with how they interact with the environments, in true open world Zelda fashion) and of course, the surprise star of the show, the Knight Construct! Also, even the “Filler” characters are usually quite fun to control, especially with various new mechanics introduced in the game.
   
   - I went into Age of Imprisonment expecting Zelda to be the main character again, but surprisingly, she’s arguably only the 4th most important character in the story! King Rauru was obviously the true protagonist, but the aforementioned Calamo and his Construct buddy also ended up outshining the princess. Given Zelda’s bigger-than-expected role in Age of Calamity, where she arguably upstaged Link himself, I think was for the best that she took something of a backseat here all things considered.
   
   - For the most part I felt the new story content was serviceable rather than truly exciting, and I actually felt that the cutscenes were a step down from AoC in terms of combat choreography (that game would definitely have given us an epic duel between the Knight Construct and the Forbidden Construct when the two met for the first time). Given Tears of the Kingdom’s disappointing story, I dunno just how big of a demand there even was for a game depicting the Imprisonment War, so its status as a fully canon story wasn’t necessarily that big of a selling point either.
   
   That said, the final few chapters definitely ramp up the sheer Cool Factor and Epicness in terms of both storytelling and cutscenes (just a small thing, but I really like that we actually get to see Rauru use his seemingly all-powerful Beam of Divine Light against Ganondorf, it always bothers me when a character fails to use his trump card against the real threat). The game also makes a number of smart choices with the story towards the end, managing to actually cook up a climax that felt fresh and even moving despite TotK already having showed us how Ganondorf was sealed away. The complete lack of TotK references to the Construct is also explained in a satisfactory manner.
   
   - The on-rail shooter sections were fucking awesome, and unlike the Divine Beast stages in AoC, they never wear out their welcome either.
   
   - In terms of content the game feels kinda light for a Warriors title – but that might actually be for the best, given what notorious time sinks these things usually are. I’ve spent 40 hours on AoI so far, and the postgame seems quite substantial, so for completionists it’s probably a 60+ hour game. It’s also easily the best-playing Nintendo Warriors game so far, though Three Hopes still remains my favorite Musou overall.
   
   - You definitely shouldn’t play this game on Normal, since even on Hard Mode it was pretty easy (at least for someone like me who did all the sidequests). Some people would probably only want to play the game on Very Hard, but personally the power fantasy aspect of this type of gameplay meant that Hard mode generally being easy, but having a couple of difficulty spikes felt fine to me – and I worried about the Very Hard setting potentially making some of the longer story missions a real slog.
   
   Very fun game overall, I’ll definitely be returning to it later on to tackle the postgame, especially since it’s been announced that AoI will eventually receive a handful of free updates.