4/5 ★ – Sushiimi's review of Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Calamity.

Being my first venture into the Musou genre, I enjoyed this game quite a bit. When I first started the game, I was initially offput by the framerate during fights but later didn't even end up noticing it except in a few select areas or fights much like Breath of the Wild. Having not played this genre of game before, I really enjoyed the gameplay and mechanics. There were a few characters whose movesets were pretty lackluster and/or felt quite burdensome to use (talking about you, Ritos!) but aside from the occassional character-Iocked mission, you could avoid using them almost entirely if so desired. Those characters aside, though, many of the other characters were stellar and addictingly dynamic with combos that were both satisfying and just the right amount of challenging. The progression and pacing in the game was the shining star in this game for me. Playing the game on hard, the difficultly just under the highest tier, the enemy difficulty scaled perfectly as well as all the challenge missions they appeared in. Making it a point to complete all unlocked missions after each main story quest, I rarely spent much of my time grinding missions to get materials, money, or weapons. The soundtrack was another great piece of the game with many familiar themes and motifs from the Zelda franchise as well as some cute music cues during fighting phases, stuns, or other battle events. Sound design was also great taking mostly sound effects from Breath of the Wild with some other welcome variations. The story itself, although supposedly not canon to the main Breath of the Wild storyline, was well-rounded and a reasonable length. Overall, it took me about 42 hours to complete essentially all quests but those unlocked in the last subchapters (the hefty addition of content unlocked after completing the main questline also left unfunded) leaving probably another 20-30 hours of content left if l ever get the itch to play it a bit more which is a very healthy amount of content ourall. Definitely open to another game in the genre (probably after a 6-12 month gap since I would absolutely get bored from repetitiveness playing this genre of game regularly) after dipping my toes in even though I think the charm of Breath of the Wild is a big reason the game pulled me in initially and might be something I'd miss a fair bit if I ventured outside the franchise.