The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a masterpiece, but it left a lot of lingering questions about the most important event of its timeline: the Imprisoning War that sealed away the Demon King Ganondorf. You might assume that would provide a prequel like Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment with heaps of territory ripe for proper exploration as you follow Princess Zelda back in time to the era of Hyrule’s founding. Unfortunately for any Zelda fans hoping for satisfying answers, however, Age of Imprisonment only succeeds as the super fun, over-the-top, fanservice-filled power trip the Warriors series is known for rather than the fleshed-out glimpse into what Hyrule was like thousands of years ago. It consistently prioritizes gameplay over story, and it’s my least favorite tale in Zelda’s Breath of the Wild quartet by a pretty significant margin as a result – but the upside is that Age of Imprisonment is the best Hyrule Warriors has ever felt to play.
The Hyrule Warriors series takes the world of The Legend of Zelda and wraps it around Dynasty Warriors’ 1 vs. 1,000 action. Age of Imprisonment’s roughly 18-hour campaign is set on dozens of recognizable battlefields across the ancient version of Tears of the Kingdom’s Hyrule, complete with skirmishes in the gorgeous golden Sky Islands and the Gloom-infested Depths. Tearing through wave after wave of practically helpless grunts as you claim outposts and chip away at more challenging bosses is consistently entertaining, largely due to how Age of Imprisonment wonderfully understands iconic and novel elements from the source material and seamlessly weaves them into Warriors-style gameplay.
Tears of the Kingdom is one of the most mechanically ambitious games of all time, and it’s delightful to discover the clever ways Age of Imprisonment incorporates its craziest ideas into flashy, absurd, hilariously referential combat. Remember building janky vehicles and weapons with Zonai devices? Mineru utilizes her extensive knowledge of Zonai technology to summon spiky rolling deathtraps from thin air that plow through piles of enemies, while one of her special abilities sees her building a catapult to launch a Construct that will knock down an airborne enemy. And instead of dashing like most other characters on the roster, she rides around on a Zonai wheel.
The controls are simple – basically every action is executed by pressing Y a certain number of times before following up with X – but the effortlessness, snappiness, and fluidity of the animations make each attack a joy to watch, and you’re constantly earning new combos as you progress. Sure, you can button mash most of the time and probably be fine (at least on normal difficulty), but I was always excited when I gathered the proper materials to unlock an extra move for one of my favorite characters just to see what fun nod Age of Imprisonment would offer next, like when Zelda learned to use the time-rewinding Recall ability to launch a wave of light energy projectiles and boomerang them back for another round of damage, complete with the visual and sound effects you’d expect from that power.
I was always excited to unlock an extra move for one of my favorite characters.
These creative references extend well beyond individual character movesets, too, like how perfect dodges initiate a time-slowed Flurry Rush. Returning bosses feature their same flaws – for instance, shooting a Flux Construct’s weak point with an arrow once again causes the whole structure to crumble into a pile of cubes, while you’ll want to throw a bomb into a Frox’s mouth to stun it. You can do that with the Zonai Time Bombs, as every character has access to a small lineup of Zonai Devices that are great for exposing enemy weaknesses and shattering weak point gauges, opening them up for a very powerful critical smash. You have to manage limited battery power to make the best use of these Zonai devices, yet another interesting way Age of Imprisonment successfully recontextualizes Tears of the Kingdom’s mechanics to create a unique combat system that both beautifully complements its predecessor and stands on its own.
Age of Imprisonment is basically all combat and story – if you’re looking for Zelda’s iconic puzzle-solving and exploration, then the Warriors series probably isn’t for you to begin with – but it does such a great job of consistently dripfeeding you with new abilities and obstacles that I never got tired of battling, reviewing my rewards, upgrading my characters and weapons, and choosing my next mission. And there’s so much to dive into: I may have reached the credits, but after more than 20 hours, my total completion is still only around 35% as I’ve got tons of optional upgrades and side missions left to complete, including some challenging postgame battles.
Each chapter introduces something new, like sludge-covered enemies in Zora’s Domain that require water-based attacks or the Zonai Hydrant to expose them. I should mention this is the third consecutive trip to Hyrule that lays out its key items in a ridiculously long single-row menu after Tears of the Kingdom’s Fuse options and Echoes of Wisdom’s Echoes, so maybe Age of Imprisonment follows the Zelda style guide a little too closely at times. But at least you can map a handful of Zonai devices or special abilities to a quick menu, so it’s really not a big deal.
Those special abilities play into another strength, which is how Age of Imprisonment manages to keep things fresh by constantly encouraging character swapping during a battle. Certain unblockable attacks require a specific counter: aerial attacks knock down airborne enemies, while charge attacks stop rampaging foes in their tracks. If an allied character is standing near an enemy when it enters one of these states, you’re prompted to instantly swap to the advantageously-placed character to execute a counter automatically. Performing actions like this charges up each character’s individual Sync Strike gauge, which allows two warriors to team up for a powerful special attack that is often a specific, tailored move to fit the relationship between them. If Zelda and King Rauru team up, for example, they use their shared light power to fire simultaneous beams of energy forward. Each Sync Strike begins with the characters high-fiving or fist-bumping, which is a nice thematic carryover from Tears of the Kingdom’s focus on hands and connection.
The deep combat can shine thanks to great technical performance.
The deep, excellent combat can shine throughout thanks to Age of Imprisonment’s great technical performance. Breath of the Wild’s own Hyrule Warriors prequel – Age of Calamity – was a choppy slideshow at times, so I’m thrilled to report that Age of Imprisonment takes advantage of the new Switch 2 hardware and performs fantastically, generally staying at a smooth 60 fps, which is very impressive given that there are often hundreds of enemies on screen at once. I won’t say it never drops a frame, but I’m over the (blood) moon with how well it does run, making it one of the best showcases so far for Nintendo’s new console. The action drops to a slightly more inconsistent 30 fps in two-player splitscreen co-op, but it’s still a totally valid, fun way to play with a friend. The only annoyance in co-op is that when one player opens up the special abilities menu – which happens a lot – the action stops for the other player as well, but good communication with your partner will likely keep this from being too big an obstacle.
Strangely, that rock-solid performance doesn’t translate to the cutscenes, which frequently stutter and look much blurrier than the gameplay itself. It’s a disappointing caveat in Age of Imprisonment’s otherwise impressive presentation, and a microcosm of how I feel about it as a whole: wonderful combat with a big letdown whenever it’s time for the story.
So That Was the Imprisoning War
Age of Calamity deviated so much from “canon” events that it basically exists in an alternate universe, and I actually really enjoyed that choice – The Legend of Zelda is filled with alternate histories and time travel shenanigans, so why not experience another branch on the tangled tree we call the Zelda timeline? But, understandably, a huge portion of Zelda fans have been hoping that Age of Imprisonment would be a more accurate retelling of the events leading into Tears of the Kingdom, and Nintendo has basically promised as much leading up to launch. And while it’s true that Age of Imprisonment’s story doesn’t contradict anything that happens in its predecessor, that doesn’t automatically make it good.
Before I dig into what makes the story such a problem, a quick word about spoilers: I am not going to spoil any of the specific twists, turns, or big events of the campaign, but I am going to discuss the basics of who the central characters are and what it’s all about – and, more importantly, what it fails to focus on. If you want to go in with a completely clean slate, you might want to jump ahead to the verdict, but know that Age of Imprisonment puts a big enough emphasis on its story and cutscenes that these issues stand out in a way that really does feel worth discussing. (That’s a big reason why we declined to publish this review at the pre-launch embargo, as Nintendo asked reviewers not to discuss any story details at all.)
A portion of this story follows the threads we already know: Zelda meets the first king and queen of Hyrule, Rauru and Sonia, as they work together to defeat Ganondorf while she ponders how to return to her own time. But rather than center Age of Imprisonment’s story around Zelda’s journey, its primary focus is on a new character called the Mysterious Construct and its Korok companion, Calamo. Zelda isn’t really the main character, these two are. Zelda and Rauru’s army may get similar screentime as the Construct and Korok, but a lot of Zelda’s conversations are explicitly about the Construct. It’s a critical example of how gameplay was put first and foremost: the Mysterious Construct is, for all intents and purposes, a Link replacement for a story that can’t include him. It uses a Zonai device-infused version of Link’s moveset from Age of Calamity, and it’s admittedly one of the most fun characters to play as. Calamo and the Construct are even thrown into a handful of Star Fox-like on-rails shooter levels, which are a very fun, surprising change of pace from the rest of the action.
The pair also recruits several new characters to join their ranks, which become additional playable warriors in your army. Some of my favorites come from this set, like a Goron who tears rocks from the ground and fights like a sumo wrestler… but given that most of them are optional, they aren’t woven into the story literally at all. As a lifelong Zelda fan, it is genuinely fun to play as random Gorons and Zoras – especially when most warriors have some interesting wrinkle that makes them mechanically unique – but it’s strange how much of the roster is made up of characters we learn next to nothing about across the campaign.
The story is a huge missed opportunity that fails to meaningfully dive into Tears of the Kingdom’s lore.
It’s a very disappointing direction given the potential of this setting. Calamo is a classic 3D Zelda companion, along the lines of a Fi or Midna, who speaks for our silent hero as we learn more about his own personal journey to find a good place to put down roots and start a forest. The story told with these two characters isn’t bad, and it hits a few decent emotional notes, but it doesn’t outweigh the overwhelming sense that it’s a huge missed opportunity for what this prequel could have been: a rich exploration of the Sages, the Zonai, the Secret Stones, Ganondorf, and everything else that made the lore in Tears of the Kingdom so intriguing. But Age of Imprisonment isn’t really interested in diving into any of that, instead mostly hitting the same beats we’ve already seen, with any new content largely revolving around the Mysterious Construct and Calamo’s journey.
Ganondorf is barely even present outside of the events we already know, and his motivations and backstory aren’t fleshed out whatsoever. I only learned marginally more about the Zonai and the Secret Stones. We get names, faces, and surface-level motivations for the Sages that were nothing more than plot devices in Tears of the Kingdom, but we don’t spend nearly enough time with them to develop any sort of emotional attachment, and it feels like they’re only here out of obligation. They’re not even close to as memorable as the four Champions from Breath of the Wild, and the fact that they’re also pretty generic, heroic figures from the Gerudo, Goron, Rito, and Zora tribes yet again makes it even tougher for them to carve their own place in Zelda lore. As a result, Age of Imprisonment fails to add the “gotta see it” context that would have justified this prequel revisit in the first place.
Ranking the Switch and Switch 2 Era Zelda Games
Ahead of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, here’s every Zelda game released in the post-Breath of the Wild era, ranked.
On that note, this iteration of Hyrule is beginning to feel a bit tired. Between Breath of the Wild, its sequel, and the two Warriors prequels, this is essentially the fourth time I’ve been told a version of this same story with versions of these characters in a version of this Hyrule. The Legend of Zelda is no stranger to repeating characters and story elements across entries, but different overworlds, art styles, and other variations on those central themes make the mainline series feel like different tellings of a bedtime story that’s been passed through generations. This Wild Era of Zelda, however, no longer feels like the breath of fresh air it was once was. It’s hard not to feel an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, compounded by the fact that ancient Hyrule is almost indistinguishable from the present day. Apart from Hyrule Castle’s different design and location and a few more trees where there might now be signs of civilization, the only way to know we’re in an era so long ago that it is lost to time, as Zelda calls it, is because the story tells us we are.
What’s stranger is that Age of Imprisonment not only avoids any attempt to deepen the events of Tears of the Kingdom, it actively dances around key story moments as if it’s not trying to spoil the twists from that game, which feels awkward for this one. I can’t imagine there are many people who would play Age of Imprisonment first, and even if that was the case, there are some details omitted or only referenced offhand that are on the level of if Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith ended by only hinting that Anakin becomes Darth Vader out of fear of spoiling the original trilogy.
There is some good to the story – I particularly enjoyed seeing Mineru and Zelda bond early on over their shared interest in technology, which has been a consistent trait of this Zelda since her introduction in Breath of the Wild. There are also a few neat nods to some minor story events that we know happen later on. But if this is the sendoff to the Zelda we’ve spent more time with than any other in the history of the series, I can’t help but feel it’s a pretty weak goodbye.
