Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment

Just to get it out of the way right up front: I've never played a Hyrule Warriors game before Age of Imprisonment here. Sure, I've been aware of them lurking around in the periphery of the Nintendo ecosystem (our own Joseph Moorer is a big fan), but I just never had a chance to get around to them. I spent a lot of time playing Dynasty Warriors games back in the PS2 era, but my own gaming tastes seemed to shift away from them at a certain point. Though I’ve read reviews of the more modern iterations of the franchise, and it seems like things have evolved somewhat, the Hyrule Warriors games have always seemed to take the backseat to some other thing that I really wanted to play.

But I have spent an absolutely ludicrous amount of time with both The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. I've dropped dozens and dozens of hours into each of those titles, buying them myself so I can take my time playing without any obligation to blast through the games to write a review. When Tears of the Kingdom dropped in 2023, I disappeared into that game for weeks, dropping all my reviews, taking over the family television, and dragging everyone along with me on my crafting adventure through Hyrule. So when Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment rolled around promising to let me spend more time in that world, I was pretty much sold.

I knew what to expect here: this is not a "Zelda" game. Rather, this is a game that wraps the warm, beautiful animation style of Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild around the frantic, button-mashing chaos of the Warriors formula. It's a spin-off. And you know what? It works way better than it has any right to. For a crossover game that drops almost 100 percent of the mechanics of one of the original titles, Age of Imprisonment is still surprisingly fun. Sure, the particle effects are more impressive, and the camera is way more dynamic, but the Warriors games haven’t evolved all that much since I was banging away on them years ago. Those decades away from the franchise actually made the button-mashing feel somewhat fresh again. 

Story wise, Age of Imprisonment drops you into the Imprisoning War, the conflict that takes place thousands of years before the events of Tears of the Kingdom. If you played TotK, you probably remember the basic setup. In that game, Zelda gets sent back in time after the opening sequence and spends the rest of the game trapped in Hyrule's ancient past while Link tries to clean up the Ganondorf situation in the present. Throughout Tears of the Kingdom, we got glimpses of what Zelda was up to through memory sequences, but Age of Imprisonment works to fill in the blanks.

You play as Princess Zelda, along with a constantly rotating cast of characters, each with their own move set and vibe. The story feels like business as usual. Regardless of the era, Ganondorf is up to no good, the kingdom is in peril, and our heroes must rise to the occasion. What impressed me here though is the fact that developer Koei Tecmo treats the Tears of the Kingdom canon with respect. This is a game that has characters mowing down thousands and thousands of enemies, but it still finds time to tell a story that slots nicely into the existing lore. What happens in Age of Imprisonment isn’t world-shattering, but it fits and it kinda matters to the overall story.

But let's keep it real. Nobody picks up a Warriors game for the story. You're here to take a buzzsaw to thousands of baddies while your character pulls off increasingly ridiculous special attacks. And on that front, Age of Imprisonment delivers.

The combat is Dynasty Warriors through and through. You wade into contained battlefields swarming with hundreds of enemies and just start hacking away until they are all gone. Light attacks, heavy attacks, combo finishers—the button mashing I remember from my early days with the franchise is still here, and it all feels pretty good. Most actions are completed with simple combinations of the X and Y buttons, and you don’t have to be a fighting game specialist to pull these moves off. The UI on the screen clearly shows you what you have to tap next in sequence, and special moves are telegraphed and communicated, giving slowpokes like me plenty of time to execute.

The game slowly unlocks playable characters, each of whom has their own unique move set, and the variety on display is impressive. Watching the Goron characters tuck and roll across the battlefield like bowling balls of destruction is a hoot. Seeing Zora Queen Qia unleash her water-based attacks and dodge by literally swimming through the air like Michael Phelps felt fluid (get it?) and improbably smooth. Mineru was probably my favorite, though. She rides around on a one-wheeled motorcycle summoning an increasingly absurd barrage of constructs to crush her enemies. The animation here is superb, with the objects flashing in and out of existence with the speed of your button presses.

In addition to the stuff Mineru conjures, the  game integrates other Zonai devices from Tears of the Kingdom into the combat. You can use things like the Frost Emitter to freeze enemies solid, or the horse-faced fire emitter thing to light enemies up with flames. These devices tie into a surprisingly deep elemental combat system where chaining the right effects can melt through enemy defenses in seconds. There's a Weak-Point Gauge, basically a stagger bar, that you chip away at by exploiting elemental weaknesses, and once it breaks you can crush enemies with a Weak-Point Smash.

Boss battles add in a rock-paper-scissors counter system where you have to read the enemy's stance and respond with the correct ability. Is that Lynel charging at you? Hit them with a forward counter. Is the boss jumping into the air? Bust him with an aerial interrupt. It's not particularly complex, and the game absolutely tells you what to do in most instances (or at least trains you until it becomes second nature) but pulling off a perfectly timed counter and watching a massive boss crumple still feels pretty good. Again, I’m not a fighting game guy, but I could feel the influence from those games at work here.

I'm not going to pretend that Age of Imprisonment revolutionizes, or even improves, any game mechanics. This is a Warriors game, and that means repetition is baked in deeper than chocolate chips in my wife’s muffins. You're going to be defeating waves of enemies and fighting bosses over and over and over again. The side missions all blur together after a while, and I must admit that I zoned out on the story at certain points just because I felt a little dazed from the non-stop grind. There's not a lot of variety in objectives, and the map layouts, while pretty, don't offer much in the way of unique mechanics or surprises.

But here's where I have to give credit where it's due: I didn't mind the repetition all that much. I’m a fan of JRPGs, so I’m okay with turning off my brain for hours, repeating the same tasks while I’m on the grind. What I appreciated about Age of Imprisonment more than anything else is that the game makes you feel like you're back in the world of Tears of the Kingdom. The art direction is spot on. The music is that same sweeping, gorgeous soundtrack. The sound effects, like the little doop-doop-doop when you open a chest, are all pulled straight from TotK. This game absolutely nails the aesthetic, and as someone who has wanted to get back to that game for at least a year, playing this felt a bit like coming home.

Playing on Switch 2, the game looks and runs really well when docked to my 4K TV. I don’t have any fancy gauges, but it appears to be running at 60 FPS even when the screen is absolutely packed with enemies and explosions. The level of visual fidelity here is genuinely impressive—I must admit that I hooked up my Switch 2 to my home projector for one session, just to see how the game looked when it was enormous. Answer: really good.

Handheld mode is a different story. The game still runs well, but I found it to be less impressive when it was shrunk down to a smaller size. I'm not a handheld guy in general though, to be fair. My decrepit hands and old man eyes just can't handle it the way they used to. This is pure personal preference—so take it with a grain of salt—but I feel like if you want to see Age of Imprisonment at its best, play it on the big screen. Or the big-big screen.

The campaign took me 25 to 30 hours to complete, but I was barreling through as fast as I could (doing exactly what I don’t like to do with Zelda games). I barely scratched the surface of the side content. I still haven't messed around with the post-game Vicious Battles that require characters at level 70+. I have tons of map nodes left to unlock, but I don’t know if I’ll be getting back to the game any time soon. Once I wrapped the story, I was pretty much satisfied.

Age of Imprisonment is the kind of game that's perfect in measured doses. If I took it much further, the repetition would start to pluck on my nerves, especially since I played so much so fast. But playing a mission or two at a time? It's exactly the kind of mindless, cathartic fun I need sometimes to clear my head. I can see myself breaking this out during the slow period that occurs in the game industry around the holidays and just vegging out with it. 

Hyrule Warriors Age of Imprisonment isn’t a game that's going to change your life or redefine what Warriors games can be. It’s fun. Not a classic, but really well made for what it is. If you loved Tears of the Kingdom and you're looking for an excuse to spend more time in that world, Age of Imprisonment is absolutely worth your time. It respects the source material, delivers endless waves of mindless, satisfying combat, and runs great on Switch 2. Works for me.