I did it for Pirate Warriors 4, might as well do it for Age Of Calamity, since it’s also structured in two part as the Season/Expansion Pass for Breath of The Wild was… and since Nintendo itself didn’t really promote it in anyway, revealed this thing was gonna exist and when to expect the content of the pass to arrive, the price, just a couple of images and text. ….Kinda odd.
As promised in the announcement bullet points, this first part of the Expansion Pass won’t add stories or story content, but new types of weapons, new playable characters, and intriguingly new enemies. Alongside the pass immediate bonus of a new costume and weapon (NOT a new weapon type) for Link, which it’s just them giving you something for buying the whole expansion.
The new types of weapons being the nunchuck-flail thing for Link, and Zelda riding the Master Cycle bike, and the new playable character being an advanced-special version of those Ancient Guardian machines you see a lot in the game.
The flail is even better than expected, not only because it comes in multiples versions, but because even the basic form is already good, with excellent range and hook-shot like acrobatics, and then it lets you copy the weapon of a medium tier enemy/officer and use it until it breaks.
The Master Cycle for Zelda is also quite good, comes in more versions, and the aerial combat is particularly absurd & fun, don’t have much to say, just that it astonishes me how those Kamen Rider games musou-likes never managed to make “bike combat” fun, but here’s proof it can be done.
Alongside new advanced types of enemies (bombing grublin with red barrels supplies, harder and stronger Wizzors, giant Chuchus, etc.) there’s also a new difficulty option, Apocalypse, which is nice.
I wasn’t sure what “new challenges for the court lab” exactly was gonna mean, since the main game didn’t have such a facility, but that’s exactly what this first part of the expansion adds.
The Royal Research lab is a branching ensemble of requests and cumulative objectives to fulfill, which in turn unlock new challenge battles (some EX versions of story battles) on the world map, expand the inventory limit, some post-game functions like removing hidden weapon seals, let you acquire or buy some items, unlock other requests, etc.
And like in the main game, you have to go through many of these to obtain the new weapons types, gather materials and finally unlock the new playable character, one of those Ancient Guardian with the laser weapons, which implies facing the harder battles featuring new and harder varieties of existing enemies (stone taluses with highly increased weak-point resistance, dealing more damage and with beefed up HP, for example), and even outside of the signposted “EX Alert” battle featuring the boss type ones, even the new medium enemy variants help in providing more challenge.
Just wish these “Vicious” (as they call them) variants went even further or we got more new types of strong enemies, instead of an advanced Wizzos and powered up Stone Taluses, or incredibly tough Lynels. Some are new like the Giant Chuchu and have new attack moves, but i wish these “vicious” versions of older enemies got some new moves to surprise people that have mastered and 100 % completed the base game (like me).
Not hugely disappointing, since there’s some challenging missions to be had even with maxed out character, but still, more could have been done, especially since these missions with “vicious” variants keep appearing and cycle back and forth, so in order to gain enough materials and unlock everything you’ll have to grind by doing these more than once, which is also an issue i had with the base game in regards to unlock the last playable character, and leaves a similar problem of not having much left to do after that. Until the second part of the Expansion Pass brings more content.
Just wish they added a specific place/facility to grind exp and materials, like one of those “survival castles” seen in Samurai Warriors 2 or 4, or there were more requests/objectives and missions.
And mind you, playing as one of the laser equipped machines is a good prospect, the new playable character is fun, but i expected at least 2 new characters, i remember it being advertised as “characters” (because it was), you know? Guess we’ll have to wait for the second part of the Expansion Pass to see more playable characters.
Even so, it’s mostly good content and i was honestly craving to have more of Age Of Calamity, at all, so it totally scratched that itch, and it’s not a bad deal for 10 bucks (hypothetically speaking, since – like for the original BOTW – you can’t buy the 2 parts of the Expansion Pass separately, you’ll have to invest in the Pass as a whole or not at all), providing 10-15 hours of content, roughly.
Not bad a deal, actually.
For sure a better deal than the Character Pass for Pirate Warriors 4 was.
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