🕑 Added 2015-02-11 04:26:24 +0000 UTC
Just to set the stage, since this is a thin coat of Zelda on top of a Dynasty Warriors game: I don't understand the appeal of Dynasty Warriors, I think the characters are dumb, the setting is boring, and the gameplay is tedious. Let that flavor the rest of everything I say depending on how much you agree/disagree with all that. And the game is very clear that if you don't like Dynasty Warriors, this game is not for you. The very first thing you see when starting the game for the very first time is: "Please select your preferred control style." and your options are "Warriors" and "Zelda" and you get no other information. I had no idea what either of those entail and that screen is not even remotely useful.
So much of the game is tedious and pointless. The bosses are fun and some of the objectives have good bits of tension rushing around doing stuff, but the rest of the game is just mashing the attack button. Your allies are totally useless. They will stand there and let keeps be taken, walk into enemies, walk into the boss's strongest moves, and generally be the worst cannon fodder ever. And the game has a habit of completely undermining your progress. You can spend a chunk of time capturing outposts, beating enemy commanders, and clearing up the board and then the game will just snap its fingers, hand all of the outposts back to the enemies, and respawn all the enemies. It feels like it would be far more fun if you got rid of 99% of the grunt enemies and just left the few remaining ones, the enemy commanders, and the bosses and had you go through the stages that way. This would clear out the tedious and fairly pointless tasks of wading through infinitely respawning minions that serve no purpose greater than giving you something to walk around and slow you down as you run towards an objective.
Losing bases/progress is ultimately what killed the game for me. I'm totally happy to do every objective and conquer every base myself, but if I take an area over, my allies should be able to defend it. That one simple game change and I would kind of be into this whole thing. I was digging how dumb but dumb in kind of an enjoyable way they melded the Zelda items with the button mashing combat and how the story is just "Look, there's time travel and alternate dimensions and that's why we can make anybody from the franchise appear", but the tedium of capturing then losing bases prevented me from having a good time.
I read an interview where the producers were talking about the initial pitch being more like a Zelda game with Dynasty Warriors trappings added on to it. I think that would have been a far more interesting game than the DW game but with Zelda characters we got instead. An action-heavy Zelda spin-off could be really keen, but it needs the dungeons and puzzle elements too. Instead, HW is like 99% Dynasty Warriors with a smidge of Zelda. A cosmetic veneer of Zelda characters isn't enough to make a game with fundamentally bad design and tedious gameplay enjoyable.
