Booting up Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment on Switch 2, docked to my OLED, I braced for the usual musou whiplash: a swirl of red dots, a big square map, and the urge to mash light attack until my thumb begs for mercy. Two minutes in, Zelda is already carving neon arcs with a gleaming Zonaite sword, light projectiles snapping to targets as the blade boomerangs back to her hand. The frame rate? Silky. Dozens-sometimes hundreds-of Bokoblins on screen and it stays calm. That immediate smoothness took me off guard in the best way, especially after my rocky time with Age of Calamity’s dips.
But the quiet worry crept in with the first cutscene. The camera lingered on faces I knew from Tears of the Kingdom. The tone was serious, canonical, and, honestly, familiar. I scribbled a note: “Feels like a retread-combat legit, story… we’ll see.” Thirty-five hours later, that line still rings true, but I also wasn’t ready for how much the new combat verbs would win me over.
Age of Imprisonment’s best trick is how it reframes the musou rhythm. Yes, you still clear outposts and delete platoons like dust bunnies. But after about two hours, I realized my right index finger had stopped living on the light attack button. Unique Skills—short cooldown moves that double as hard counters—train you to watch enemy tells and time your aggression. A Construct lunges? Dash Unique to intercept, shatter its poise, then pile on. A Lynel winds up its ground-shock wave? Pop a vertical Unique and crash down behind it, carving the weak-point gauge like you’re trimming a hedge.
The game encourages this attentiveness by letting allies bail you out if your Unique Skill is cooling. A little prompt pings near the target—your partner basically says, “I got it”—and they rocket into a cinematic assist. It’s not just flashy; it kept the tempo alive during the busiest moments, when you’re juggling two outposts, a screaming commander, and a boss with a health bar the size of the Hudson.
Then there are Sync Strikes, which are the series’ new “super duo” moves. Pair Zelda with Qia (the Zora queen) and you’ll seed the arena with floating water orbs; pop them with your arrows to balloon the damage cone. Team up Rauru and Zelda and you’re suddenly steering twin beams of light with both thumbsticks—left beam, right beam, your living room lit like a rave. They’re crowd-pleasing fireworks. The catch? They’re rarely tactically necessary. I used them because I wanted the spectacle, not because the mission demanded that kind of choreography. Still, every time I landed one, I grinned like an idiot.
Roster variety is where Age of Imprisonment earns its “played all night” badge. Zelda is the balanced lead—quick chains, controllable spacing, and that satisfying sword recall. Mineru is the sandbox queen. One mission had me riding a giant spiky two-wheel contraption like an unhinged lawnmower, plowing through Bokoblins, then hopping off to spin a paddle that punted energy orbs into a pack of Moblins like I was playing pinball.
Qia commands water with this dancer’s elegance—whirlpools to corral mobs, narrow jets to juggle elites. Her kit feels like a rhythm game if you lean into the flow: swirl, pop, slide, repeat. Agraston, the Goron chief, is a rolling boulder of a character—you become a wrecking ball, ignite the dirt under your enemies, and spill molten chaos in wide arcs. And then there’s Calamo, a Korok so cute he should be illegal, who throws fruit for elemental bursts. On paper it’s a joke; in practice, he’s a status ailment monster. Hurl a chill fruit to lock a Moblin pack in place, then chain a fire follow-up to melt the frozen elites. Watching a field of red dots evaporate because a walnut-sized tree gremlin weaponized groceries never stopped being funny.
Every character’s light/strong combo strings are distinct, but it’s the cadence that matters. The game wants you to alternate strings, weave in a Unique Skill to interrupt, then cash out with a weak-point smash. Once I embraced that loop—especially on tougher enemies like Hinoxes and Lynels—the musou “mindless” label faded. If Dynasty Warriors is popcorn, this is kettle corn with the seasoning pack you can actually taste.
Age of Imprisonment borrows Tears of the Kingdom’s tinkerer spirit without asking you to assemble DIY death mechs mid-fight. Every character can deploy Zonai devices—flame and frost emitters, time bombs, rockets, fans, hydrants—and the trick is how their battery economy forces choices. Do you shoulder-mount a flame emitter and draw a fire lane through a swarm? Or drop it as a turret and flank to herd enemies back into the scorch? Does a rocket get you across the map to save a beleaguered ally, or do you save it to punish a boss’s recovery animation?
Devices aren’t just damage—they’re problem solvers. Fans reflect projectiles, which trivialized a roomful of spit-happy Lizalfos once I started timing the gusts. Hydrants wash sludge off enemies, exposing them for follow-ups. And yes, some of the weaknesses carry over from Tears: I giggled the first time a Frox gagged open wide and I moon-tossed a time bomb down its throat. That entire fight went from “uh oh” to “surgical” in seconds. Battery limitations keep you honest; abuse a setup and you’ll be dry for a minute, which opens space for the counter-driven Unique Skills to shine.
Midway through, the game reveals a curveball: the Mysterious Construct, a new character who transforms into a small aircraft for on-rails Sky Island sorties. Think arcadey dogfights—dodge sheets of tracer fire, line up salvos, swoop through rings and debris trails. On my first run, I instinctively started barrel-rolling through gaps that didn’t actually require it, because the game sells the fantasy so well; it’s as close to a surprise Star Fox cameo as we’re going to get.
The problem is that it’s too rare. These missions act like refreshing palate cleansers, but the Sky Islands—and the Depths, for that matter—feel underused overall. When Flight Mode showed up, I perked up. Then it was gone again, and I was back to excellent ground combat on familiar real estate. I didn’t need a full air campaign, but a few more of these setpieces would’ve balanced the late-game repetition.
Nintendo threads this one into the official tapestry. This isn’t an alternate timeline like Age of Calamity; it’s a straight extension of the lore that Tears of the Kingdom already sketched. You’ll see the founding of Hyrule, Ganondorf’s ascension into full Demon King, and a direct bridge into events you already know. The highs are staged with real muscle—the multi-pronged final push feels like a small war, and the way the classic Zelda theme swells near the end actually caught in my throat.
But here’s the honesty: if you played Tears of the Kingdom, most revelations aren’t new. The writing leans heavily on alliances and battlefield briefings—natural for a musou framing, but it means the character stuff for Rauru and Mineru is mostly texture rather than transformation. I enjoyed the texture, especially Mineru’s weary wisdom contrasted with Zelda’s resolve. Still, I never once felt like I’d learned anything essential that I didn’t already suspect. As connective tissue, it’s solid. As a story you must play if you love Zelda? Not quite.
Musou games live and die by how often they remix the same objectives. Age of Imprisonment’s early missions do a competent job of spreading your attention—capture this, protect that, hunt the elite, race the clock. Mid-campaign, I was happily dividing my squad to squeeze efficiency out of the map: send Mineru to bulldoze an outpost with contraptions, tag Zelda to intercept a named elite, and have Qia sweep a flank clean with whirlpools. It felt like I was orchestrating a messy symphony.
Then the back third hits a rut. Objectives compress into “fight the next strong enemy” corridors on maps that funnel you predictably. Sync Strikes subtly encourage grouping up—two heroes together equals faster clearing—but most missions don’t reward that coordination beyond the satisfaction of a flashy delete button. I didn’t mind the repetition for a while because the moment-to-moment combat is that good. After a dozen hours, though, I wanted the game to throw curveballs beyond “harder Lynel, slightly faster timer.” That’s where the underutilized Depths and rare Flight Mode stung the most; you can feel the potential for more variety just out of reach.
This is the part that made me breathe a sigh of relief: performance is finally a strength. On Switch 2 (handheld and docked), I was looking at a near-steady 60fps for the majority of the campaign. Dozens of enemies collapsing under a Sync Strike, particle effects everywhere, and it held. I noticed brief dips during the busiest boss explosions, but nothing that disrupted my timing. Enemy pop-in is still a thing—you’ll see clusters appear as you charge—but the window where that matters is short, and it never cost me a clear.
Load times are snappy enough that restarting after a failed optional challenge didn’t feel like a chore. The HD rumble equivalents are restrained; when Mineru slams a contraption or Agraston rolls into a pack, the feedback lands with weight instead of a buzzy tingle. This is the first Zelda-flavored musou on Nintendo hardware where I didn’t have to caveat the fun with, “well, the frame rate…” and that alone is a huge step up from Age of Calamity.
I spent most of my time playing on Normal with occasional bumps to Hard for rematches. The device quick-select felt intuitive—shoulder button to pull up the wheel, flick to the gadget, back to slicing in a heartbeat. The UI keeps battlefield priorities clear: colored arrows point to elites, timers are readable, and ally icons pulse when they’re near a Sync Strike. By hour ten, I’d mapped my mental routes through “oh no” situations: when a Hinox rolls up on a weak point at a base, dash Unique to stagger, drop a hydrant to clean up mud, ignite frost-chunked elites with a flame emitter, then cash out with Zelda’s weak-point smash.
There are also those tiny moments that make the grind feel personal. One late mission drops you into the Lanayru Wetlands in a lightning storm. I misjudged Qia’s spacing and ate a bolt while standing in ankle-deep water—then remembered I had a fan. I popped it up, reflected a barrage of arrows and a stray electric spit, then turned the gust into a mobility tool to dash out. It wasn’t a scripted “gotcha,” just the systems overlapping in a way that rewarded curiosity.
If you love musou games and you like The Legend of Zelda, this is the strongest Hyrule Warriors entry to date. The combat’s “read and react” layer and the Zonai toolkit gave me more to chew on than any prior spin-off. If you’re a Zelda fan chasing essential lore, temper expectations—this fills in textures around events you’ve basically seen. And if you’ve bounced off musou repetition before, this won’t convert you on narrative chops alone. But if your main beef was performance and shallow feel, Age of Imprisonment makes a compelling case to try again.
Age of Imprisonment nails the part of musou I’ve always wanted to love: a power fantasy with timing and intention. When you’re weaving Unique counters, dropping the perfect device, syncing a partner finisher, and slicing a weak-point gauge in one smooth breath, it sings. It finally feels like a Zelda-flavored musou that respects your reflexes and your brain.
The reasons it doesn’t climb to all-timer status are more structural than mechanical. The campaign leans too hard on familiar beats to stand on its own narratively, the back half needs a stronger remix of mission goals, and the coolest side mode is the one you see the least. None of that erases the fact that I stayed up past midnight three days in a row just to clear “one more” stronghold. It just means the next step is obvious: keep the combat spine, ask more of the missions, and give the Sky and Depths their due.
Score: 8/10
Age of Imprisonment refines the Zelda musou blend with smart counters, a killer roster, and Zonai gadgets that encourage creativity—all running beautifully on Switch 2. The story is canon but largely familiar, and the late-game loop could use more variety. I came for answers; I stayed for combat that finally rewards timing and invention.
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