Over the years Nintendo has made some very big moves regarding some of their beloved characters, and had crossed them over to other genres just to see how other developers handle their characters. Hyrule Warriors takes that exact same concept and pushes one of Nintendo’s most beloved franchise. Hyrule Warriors is a collaboration with Tecmo Koei creator of Dynasty Warriors series to bring you a more action orientated The Legend of Zelda. At first you would think this type of gameplay wouldn’t fit the Zelda universe but i was surprised Tecmo Koei handled this with care.
Story
Hyrule Warriors starts you off right into the story as it only lets you play legends mode(which is story mode) before you can do anything else. It begins with Princess Zelda dreaming about a war coming to the land of Hyrule. As she awakes; her guard Impa is concerned about this vision she had, they both seek out the legend who can save Hyrule. During the story you meet up with a variety of cast members from the majority of The Legend of Zelda titles. One of the new characters which you meet early on, in the story mode is named Lana and she is a very major character in the story of Hyrule Warriors. The story is driven by narrations and also small cutscenes but the majority is text based which is kinda weird because Nintendo and Tecmo Koei do have the budget for this. Even though text is how the other Zelda Titles tell the story, this was the one shot Nintendo and Tecmo Koei could have experimented with voices and it could have made way for future Zelda games. Besides not having voice overs Hyrule Warriors is very basic as the story is just there to get all your favorite characters together.
 Gameplay
We are so use to seeing Link and friends play a certain way between titles like The Legends of Zelda and Super Smash Bros, that seeing all these ultimate attacks roam free here might wow some with the flashy movesets. All the playable characters have different move-sets and weapons that are unique to them, as you progress in legends mode you have option to level up your characters and even add on more attacks to your combos. The weapons for instance can be upgraded with elemental properties to inflict more damage or give you the necessary advantages in the battlefield. To make this even more interesting the amount of weapons in Hyrule Warriors create some interesting looking attacks like Link picking up a piece of the ground and slamming it onto enemies.
Main attacks are done by pressing the Y button and heavy attacks are done by pressing the X button, pressing heavy while in a combo using the Y button creates a new combo chain. Some characters attack chains involve magic and not entirely weapon base attacks, you also get a dash button and block which barely get used as the typical enemies in this game are just cannon fodder. That’s one of the problem with Hyrule Warriors, enemies in this game get mowed down by your attacks by the dozen and you barely get hit besides the usual boss encounters. Many would know of this if they have played other Mosou games (Dynasty Warriors series) that the difficulty for this is almost non existent especially when you get to upgrade your weapons, it becomes very samey, very fast. The battlefields scatter all over Hyrule from the plains to even the Deku Tree and most of the missions are all similar to each other not much variety on that front, just killing enemies or escorting soldiers to the next available base.
As the battlefields are not very hard to navigate, your fighting more with the camera sometimes for it to straighten out. I had some problems with it during boss battles the most were the camera would zoom out wide and that created a problem trying to restock on hearts. Hyrule Warriors also has a co-op mode which you and someone else can play on two different screens, that’s right! one player uses the Wii U Gamepad as their screen. Meaning no split screen which is awesome, but theirs also a bad side to this as their seems to be a downgrade visually. Nintendo has mentioned that they will try to patch this to get everything up to single player standards.
Presentation
 What separates Hyrule Warriors from the Dynasty Warriors games is obviously the use of Nintendo’s most beloved franchise, you can really tell Tecmo Koei put their heart and soul into making this for the fans. Everything in the game gives you those nostalgic feeling from your childhood if you played Zelda when you were younger. The music is the one thing that drives this whole experience and Hyrule Warriors has just the right amount of new and old remixes to make this thing work. Visually down to the menus you feel like wow this looks and feels like a Zelda game directly from Nintendo but its made by Tecmo Koei!
Also they added a mode that makes this even more nostalgic and its pretty cool from your standard story mode were your just killing enemies. That mode is called Adventure mode and it mimics progress like your playing a 2D Zelda game and you get to move about this grid each with their own battles and requirements. Adventure mode rewards you with characters, more weapons, and materials for upgrading equipment. It also adds to the replay value once you finish the story mode.
Conclusion
If your a really big Zelda fan run to buy this game! It’s fan service galore and will satisfy you until we get Links latest adventure. Newcomers looking for something new on the Wii U i recommend it, if you can see through all the shortcomings as it is a very feature complete game. Even if your not a fan of the series but know a bit about Zelda you can still tell they did a very good job capturing the series in this new take of this classic legend.
Score:
+ Amazing Soundtrack
+Nostalgia Overload Adventure Mode
– Can get Repetitive like other Warriors games
-Technically Wii U can do better visually
Hyrule Warriors  is out now for the Wii U
I’m not sure it could do better visually. Surely a lot of the systems grunt had to go into the masses of characters on screen, so sacrifices had to be made elsewhere.