During a Nintendo Direct presentation back in 2014, fans were shocked to see a new version of Link in a Zelda spinoff no one saw coming, a musou game for the Wii U titled Hyrule Warriors. Such hack and slash 1 vs 100 games were previously mostly home to Koei Tecmo's Dynasty Warriors series, but collaborations have allowed a variety of spinoffs with properties such as Fire Emblem, Persona 5, and maybe most notably, The Legend of Zelda, which just released its second musou game last November, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity.
While the original Hyrule Warriors acted as a celebration of the Zelda series as a whole, it wasn't largely concerned with story elements. However, the announcement last September of a Breath of the Wild spinoff prequel in the form of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity brought fans of the most recent mainline Zelda title back to Hyrule to experience the events that took place 100 years before Breath of the Wild. And as the game has been out for over a month now, more details on its development have been revealed.
A recent interview with Koei Tecmo producer Yosuke Hayashi on Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity has been published in the Japanese Nintendo magazine, Nintendo Dream. User PushDustin on Twitter has translated the interview, revealing a slew of interesting tidbits about certain design decisions made throughout the game's development.
Much of the interview focused on fleshing out the gameplay of characters such as the game's 4 Champions, Daruk, Revali, Urbosa, and Mipha. Hayashi stated that the Koei team worked hard alongside the Zelda team to make the characters work, and wanted them to be easy to pick up and play while still staying true to their source material. Namely, each character originally used a paraglider, but this was changed to better suit each individual character, such as Revali, who now uses his wings to fly as opposed to a paraglider. For characters like Mipha and Daruk, their weapons and other characteristics were first used as a base to develop their move-sets, with their unique mechanics being added later into the game's development, such as Mipha's fountains and Daruk's magma attacks.
As for the game's earlier characters, the team wanted to give certain feelings to them, such as giving Impa a "tricky" feeling, making Zelda feel like a "magician," and having Link play like a more "orthodox" musou character. The interview also contains design details on other playable characters, some of which may be spoilers to players who haven't progressed to certain points in the game.
It seems that the experiment of a more story-heavy musou Zelda game paid off for Koei Tecmo and Nintendo, as Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity was very well received. And although fans may have to wait a bit longer before the release of the sequel to Breath of the Wild, hopefully Age of Calamity can hold them over for the time being.
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is available now on Nintendo Switch.