thedarlingone (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thedarlingone) wrote2025-02-20 08:00 pm
thedarlingone) wrote2025-02-20 08:00 pm
(no subject)
for some reason whenever i live in this part of the country i get the worst pressure-change headaches whenever Some Weather rolls through. there is a gale warning on, so naturally i have spent today with a headache. i don't know if i'm too close to sea level or what.
other than napping, i have mostly spent the day playing hyrule warriors: age of calamity, a spinoff of breath of the wild, which is one of my favorite video games of all time and also incredibly difficult to explain from a standing start.
(describing video games is a whole unique skillset, because with books or audiovisual media there's usually an assumption that your reader might or at least should want to consume it themself if you sell it well. but most people are not going to play a specific video game, because they would have to have the correct hardware, the money for the software, the necessary skills and abilities, and a *lot* of time. a single completionist playthrough of the mass effect trilogy takes me about 260 hours. that's equivalent to binging almost 350 episodes of a 45-minute drama, or 13-15 seasons depending on season length. admittedly mass effect is long even for three AAA video games, but they are not a quick medium to experience a story in.)
anyway. i had a point. my point is that it's awkward talking about spoilers for video games because you very especially cannot do the "it's so good people, go watch it and come back, i'll wait" shtick. which is a shtick that annoys the fuck out of me anyway because i personally require spoilers to convince me to invest my energy in most media, but i understand that a lot of people do Not want spoilers. and the thing about age of calamity specifically is that it was marketed one way and then had a mid-game twist that completely alters the tone, and it really does hit best when you see it unspoiled but also with the background of having played through breath of the wild. also the subplot that made me specifically buy the game instead of just watching playthroughs is a *different* spoilery twist that changes the entire shape of the game story and refracts back into the characterization from breath of the wild.
so. i feel like trying to explain why i love these two games. possibly somewhat incoherently, because i still have a headache. but there Will be major spoilers for both games under the cut. if i can remember how to code a cut.
so. breath of the wild. the game that changed the industry. every franchise since 2017 that has pivoted to the open-world model has been inspired by the success of breath of the wild, from soulsbornes (elden ring's devs explicitly credit botw as an inspiration) to pokemon (legends arceus literally opens with the same iconic shot as botw). and not one has done it better.
where to start? the legend of zelda series began in 1987. in each game (or sometimes pair of games), different characters called link, zelda, and ganon or ganondorf play out a battle of good and evil, usually in a country called hyrule.
as the lore currently stands, these three characters are reincarnated intermittently for these recurring faceoffs. link is a swordsman fated to wield the "master sword", which glows with a holy light, also called the sword that seals the darkness or the blade of evil's bane. zelda is a princess descended from the great goddess hylia and able to use the goddess's holy power -- hyrule's monarchy does not otherwise appear to be matriarchal, as the ruler is always zelda's father the king, but this contradiction is never addressed. and ganon is the incarnation of evil, attempting to take over and/or destroy hyrule, whose reincarnations link and zelda are always fated to battle and must defeat but cannot destroy, only seal away for a time.
breath of the wild tells a story of two different links and zeldas in a total of three different eras. ten thousand years before the game's present day, hyrule was home to a highly technologically advanced race called the sheikah, who are mostly human-looking but all have white hair. (link and zelda's race, hylians, look mostly human but have long pointy ears. i've never quite figured out whether sheikah have pointy ears.) the sheikah of that time built a bunch of fancy machines to help defeat that era's ganon. everything went smoothly: four immense animal-shaped mechs called the divine beasts shot ganon with powerful lasers, an army of six-legged robots called guardians (shaped like upside-down pottery from japan's ancient jomon era) aided link and zelda in the battle, link struck the final blow against ganon with the master sword, and zelda used the sacred power of the goddess to seal ganon away for the next ten thousand years.
a hundred years before botw begins, it was known in hyrule that this version of ganon, known as calamity ganon, was about to awaken again. the king at the time, an imposing white-bearded gentleman with the equally imposing name/title of king rhoam bosphoramus hyrule, took steps to be prepared in accordance with prophecies left by the previous era's hylians. the era's incarnation of link, a teenaged son of a royal guardsman, was found, properly made acquainted with the master sword (which "chooses" its wielder), and appointed as zelda's bodyguard. the four divine beasts and the massive army of guardians were excavated from underground, and the remaining sheikah began researching how to make them work, since the user manuals had not survived. superpowered members of hyrule's other four sapient species were recruited to pilot the divine beasts and dubbed "champions" (along with link, but when i use "the champions" as a group noun, it usually means these four).
however, there was A Problem. the problem was zelda. she could not access the holy sealing power, like a proper princess of hyrule should. her mother had died when she was very young, before passing on her knowledge of how to use the power, and there were no written records to help. for years she had prayed and meditated daily, traveling to all of hyrule's sacred sites, with no results. when the ancient sheikah technology was discovered, she wanted to help the fight by studying it instead along with her best friend and personal maid, a sheikah girl named impa. however, king rhoam, worried that ganon would be unstoppable if zelda could not seal him away, forced her to focus more and more on her meditations and prayers. this Did Not Help At All.
(having link as her bodyguard also did not help at all. he's a well-behaved little inheritor of prophecy. the master sword accepts him immediately. so having him constantly tagging around feels like rubbing her face in her own failures.)
there was one sacred site in hyrule that zelda could not visit until she became an adult, on her seventeenth birthday. this was the spring of wisdom, where no one lacking wisdom was permitted to go. so she traveled there that day with link and spent her seventeenth birthday praying, more or less -- we see her at one of the other holy springs and it's more or less "yelling at the goddess for stonewalling her for ten years", but obviously nothing else had worked. this didn't either.
that evening, at the foot of the mountain where the spring of wisdom lay, as zelda explained to the four champions that shit was still fucked (not in those words), calamity ganon returned from deep under hyrule castle -- and he had spent the last ten thousand years devising a Plan.
sheikah technology uses orange lights to denote neutral or standby status, and blue lights to denote active or completed status. ganon possessed all the guardians, turning their lights magenta. the now-evil guardians swarmed through hyrule castle, killing the inhabitants, and headed out to attack the various headquarters of the hylian army as well.
the four champions (not counting link) dashed to the divine beasts in order to begin a counterattack, only to discover that each divine beast was now possessed by a large fragment of ganon's power. these "blight ganons" trapped the champions inside the divine beasts and killed them, then turned the divine beasts' running lights magenta as well.
link and zelda attempted to get to the castle to confront ganon, but had to turn back. they fell back to a wide field near a fortified chokepoint on the road, where a small remnant of the army was fighting a holding action. there, they were overwhelmed by guardians, and link was nearly killed. zelda, faced with losing the very last person she cared about, finally gained access to her sealing power and absolutely nuked every guardian on the field and many more across hyrule, leaving them as burned-out husks.
link, actively dying, was rushed to a location called the "shrine of resurrection" to be placed in healing stasis. zelda took the master sword, left impa with a message to pass on to link whenever he should wake up healed, deposited the master sword back where it came from (in a hidden forest under the care of a talking tree), and then went to the castle. without link or any of the other pieces of the puzzle, she couldn't defeat ganon, but she bound him and herself to the confines of the castle along with most of the remaining un-nuked guardians, leaving the country of hyrule to limp along in a postapocalyptic medieval state.
a hundred years later, the actual game begins when link wakes up, amnesiac, as the player character. the ghost of zelda's father guides him through the tutorial level, introducing him to hidden shrines that act as warp points and mini-dungeons. link gathers superpowers such as magnetism and ice-pillar creation from the four tutorial shrines, then gets a short version of what happened a hundred years ago from the king's ghost, along with a paraglider which lets him hang-glide from any high point, and instructions on where to go talk to impa for more information.
from there, the game pretty much consists of finding out by gradual degrees what happened, gathering weaponry, defeating enemies for resources and practice -- there are a lot of smallish goblin-type monsters that wander the land, as well as larger minibosses and an assortment of surviving guardians -- and eventually battling through the four divine beasts to free the champions' imprisoned spirits and acquire their superpowers before finally defeating calamity ganon.
(the game is a true open world after the tutorial ends. receiving the paraglider is the only "you are not allowed to go to Place before this point" marker. so speedrunners go straight from the tutorial to fight calamity ganon, who summons any undefeated blights for a boss rush before you can even reach him. the world record stands at 23 minutes and one second, from link waking up to the first frame of ganon's final form's dying cutscene. unless the streamer currently grinding on sub-23 achieved it today; i haven't checked.)
anyway! so! that is breath of the wild. in brief, ish. look, i haven't even touched on korok seeds or armor upgrades or weapon durability. it's a big game.
hell, i haven't even touched on the fucking world map. you know how video game worlds are, well, stylized? minecraft is the most obvious example, it being Entirely Squares, but most video games will have their landscapes sort of tiled and repetitive to some extent, to save on graphics space.
botw has some repeated buildings and trees, but nothing about the geology is tiled. it's so well individuated that i can glance over at a youtube stream and usually know exactly where the streamer is, so closely i could put my finger on the map, just from the landforms and scenery. the zone transitions are a bit minecraft biome -- there's the autumn area, the jungle area, the volcanic area -- but the map overall is a fucking work of art. the traditional japanese village is placed in a limestone karst region with those sugarloaf mountains they have in some parts of china, and they just make me so damn happy. especially since if there's a vertical surface that isn't 100% sheer, you can climb it like a little humanoid gecko. so i get to clamber up and down geology from all over the world, which is a delight in itself.
having thus created an impressively habitable world, nintendo's zelda team very reasonably wanted to put more games in it. the botw sequel, tears of the kingdom, uses almost entirely the same map, somewhat altered to reflect the events that cause there to be a sequel. but age of calamity, which as the name suggests is a prequel set during the hundred-years-ago era known as the great calamity, is a completely different genre and requires a certain amount more explanation before we even get into the story.
so breath of the wild has fairly standard "realistic" video game combat. most enemies are roughly your size, and you fight them one-on-one or in small groups. if you get surrounded by a dozen enemies, you are probably in for a bad time.
there is a genre of video game, the japanese term is "musou", characterized by "one versus one thousand" style combat. you swing your sword once and send two dozen enemies flying. it's not a genre i'm very familiar with, but i believe fire emblem and genshin impact are well-known examples of musou franchises. the basic point of the musou genre is that you have a couple dozen playable characters, unlocked through gameplay (or sometimes gacha mechanics), with different movesets and playstyles, and you can replay battles with different characters as you like. it's... not too dissimilar from mass effect 3 multiplayer, really, with the limited but endlessly intermixable sets of playable maps, characters, and weaponry.
it was decided that, to tell the story of the botw backstory with properly epic-feeling battle sequences, a musou game would be appropriate. there had been a zelda musou, called appropriately in japanese simply "zelda musou", and in english "hyrule warriors", which pulled the playable characters from the entire previous spectrum of zelda games. it didn't have much of a plot, being an excuse to throw a wide variety of characters into one game and let people mess around.
age of calamity is not primarily an excuse to let people mess around playing as beloved characters and villains. it is that, but *primarily* it is a love letter to breath of the wild. the two games together form an emotionally cohesive whole.
aoc was marketed as a straight prequel, the story of the great calamity, how we got to the beginning of botw. but, as i mentioned above, there is a twist. right at the beginning, we find out there's a time-travel element, a little robot that comes back in time to try to stop the great calamity from starting. and there's a point halfway through where the time travel turns the story into a canon-divergence everybody-lives au.
people say, positively and negatively, that it feels like fanfic. and it does, in the best way. it's official, it's beautifully produced with the same voice actors, and it's written so fucking well, with an understanding of the characters and their arcs that maybe one in a thousand actual ficcers could have pulled off. it's beyond incredible.
age of calamity is not an open world game. the botw map was recreated, in sections, in pre-apocalypse form, to serve as the level maps. it was rescaled at times to make the battles fit properly, but i had to actually load back and forth between botw and aoc in certain areas, running around checking landmarks and making notes, to figure that out, because it feels absolutely one-for-one -- to the point that i can actually navigate certain parts of botw much better now because i know the areas from age of calamity's more linear interpretations of the same maps.
so. what is the story of age of calamity? botw's earliest story flashback (other than excavating the divine beasts and guardians) only reached to the point after the four champions had all been recruited. there was a dlc, the champions' ballad, which included recruitment scenes for each of the champions and gave their characters a bit more depth. but age of calamity picks up before link has even been recruited as zelda's bodyguard. it's slightly au from the start, but in ways that make it work better as a relatively standalone game.
in order to avoid getting bogged down as soon as i reach the recruitment sequence, i should probably introduce the four champions now. botw tried pretty hard to push the player into encountering them in a specific order, which also happens to be roughly the order their species were introduced into the zelda universe, so let's start there.
the zora are a species of bipedal fish people, in botw specifically styled after sharks. (they have their tails on their heads instead of their butts. look, i don't make the character designs.) mipha, the zora princess, is a childhood friend of link's and has a massive crush on him. she also has a superpower of magical healing known as "mipha's grace". she's... at least in her original presentation in botw, very much the designated waifu? the breathy, demure, helpless healer girl-next-door that the player character is intended to be sweet on. she's a fish with tits, for christ's sake. small and nippleless, but very there and very bare. and a key plot item is a piece of armor she made for link that's explicitly the zora equivalent of an engagement ring. she is Designated Girlfriend. she's also a dutiful daughter to the zora king and a good big sister to the zora prince, sidon.
(in age of calamity, where she's a playable character and actually gets to make use of her trident which in botw only existed to be gifted to link after he beat the relevant dungeon, she's one of the most powerful early-game kits and scales well enough to be worth bringing to the final boss. one of many reasons i love aoc: it gives mipha an existence not solely defined by the men around her.)
mipha pilots the divine beast vah ruta, named after previous zora princess ruto, who was *also* really interested in marrying her era's link for some reason. i don't even know. anyway, vah ruta is a giant mechanical elephant that spouts water out of its nose. in age of calamity, where the divine beasts *also* get to move around for gameplay in certain limited sections instead of just standing still being dungeons and moving briefly in cutscenes, it adds "shoot icicles" and "smack things with nose" to its repertoire.
i should expand a bit on mipha's brother sidon. the zora live for centuries, and sidon is still alive during the "present day" of botw, a hundred years after mipha's death during the great calamity. in each of botw's four dungeon entry segments, link works with a member of the pilot's species to defeat the defense mechanisms keeping him from accessing the relevant divine beast's interior. there's not a good collective name for these four characters; the closest shorthand has been "champion descendants", although only one is explicitly a descendant. for the vah ruta entry segment, it's sidon who helps link gain access to the divine beast. he's very young for a zora, and we see him as a toddler in mipha's flashback during the champions' ballad dlc, as well as in age of calamity.
(i'm going to need a collective name for this group. i refuse to call sidon a champion descendant, that's weird. the group has significant but not complete overlap with tears of the kingdom's sages, so that won't do either. "future champions" is clunky but probably the best available option.)
next to discuss are the gorons, introduced in the game "ocarina of time". these are spherical rock people with tiny limbs, who also eat rocks and roll around everywhere in the volcanic region where they live. if i was going to be a zelda character, i'd want to be a goron.
the goron champion is daruk, who is large and jolly even for a goron. he looks rather like a santa-themed pet rock, calls link "little guy" (in japanese "aibo" which means partner or buddy), calls zelda "tiny princess", and is extremely friendly but doesn't really get cultural differences like "other species don't eat most rocks". i love daruk a lot. his superpower is "daruk's protection", an impenetrable shield that will deflect all attacks as long as it's active.
(each of the superpowers link gets from the champions have a cooldown to keep them from being too overpowered. mipha's grace will revive link with full health once every 24 realtime minutes; daruk's protection can activate 3 times and then has an 18-minute cooldown. the other two superpowers are quicker, and all the cooldowns can be shortened by completing the champions' ballad dlc.)
daruk pilots divine beast vah rudania, named after previous goron chief darunia, who also looked more or less like a santa claus pet rock. rudania is supposed to be a salamander, i think, because it's definitely a lizard and it crawls around in the lava of the volcano, but its hand shape just really says gecko to me. like many lizards, it doesn't do much; in age of calamity it's the only divine beast that lacks a proper barrier shield, and its moveset is limited to "hit things with tail" and "stomp".
daruk's descendant, the only one of the future champions to be explicitly descended from an original champion, is yunobo, a young goron who's scared of pretty much everything. but he inherited daruk's protection, so you can pop him into a series of cannons and shoot him at vah rudania to take down its defenses. it's pretty funny. (in japanese, yunobo has a female voice actor, for maximum running around being scared in a stupid squeaky voice. in english, impressively, the same voice actor who does daruk's gruff jolly bass pulls off yunobo's squeaky countertenor. even more impressively, this isn't the most astonishing bit of double casting in the english voice work. i'll get there.)
the other species returning from ocarina of time are the gerudo. these are, well, arabic stereotypes; they're an all-female race of desert warriors with brown skin and long noses, dressed in bra-tops and poofy pants (and usually but not always nose veils), wielding scimitars, sprinkling foreign-sounding words through their dialogue, and with a soundtrack of middle eastern instruments. in botw they live in a forbidden city where no men are allowed to enter, which forces link to dress up in an admittedly fetching gerudo outfit in order to gain entrance and talk to their chief.
(technically no "voe" are allowed to enter the forbidden city, only "vai". this terminology, combined with an interview where the executive producer talked about wanting link to have an androgynous quality, have produced a lot of what i will frankly call bullshit about link being "canonically" gender-variant and the gerudo being some sort of nonbinary-accepting, which gets spread around fandom. can you get there from here? sure, but it's a stretch.)
where was i? right. the gerudo champion is urbosa, who controls lightning, her superpower being known as "urbosa's fury". the tooltip for her weaponry which link inherits says that her movements in combat "resemble a beautiful dance", and age of calamity fucking delivers on both that and her extreme badassery. playing as urbosa gives me female gender euphoria, which is not a thing that has otherwise ever happened to me in my life. she's also got this full, deep, mellow contralto voice I only wish I could sound like; I have a contralto, but not like *that*.
urbosa pilots divine beast vah naboris, the "zap-zap camel" as I have heard it described. in botw it zaps you with lightning when you try to enter it, and in age of calamity it can also fucking sprint, the only divine beast to move at more than a ponderously slow speed. (you don't get to play as naboris in aoc until a good third of the way into the story, because it's just too overpowered.)
ganon's original human form ganondorf was one of the rare male gerudo, which is why they're so emphatic about excluding men; urbosa takes calamity ganon's continued existence quite personally. she was also a close friend of zelda's late mother, and calls zelda affectionately "little bird", trying to be supportive, though she can only do so much with rhoam's tiger parenting in the mix.
urbosa's maybe-descendant, the "present-day" chief of the gerudo, is a teenage girl named riju whose mother has died unfortunately young, leaving her in charge. riju and urbosa both wear skirts instead of the poofy pants for some reason. riju has a braid as long as she is -- all the gerudo have long dark red hair -- and a pet sand seal named patricia.
(sand seals are um. they're seals or walruses. that swim through sand. they substitute for horses in the desert region, you stand on a shield and surf behind the seal while hanging onto its halter. i don't know what else to tell you.)
the last species to discuss here are the rito. these are bird people. when they were introduced in 2002's "the wind waker", they looked like humans wearing beaks over their noses, and had supposedly evolved from the zora somehow. in botw, they're proper anthro birds of different styles, including a chief who's a wise old owl and a bard who's some sort of parrot.
the rito champion is revali. you must understand two things about revali. i adore him, and he is an utter jackass.
look, there's this specific style of video game character, right? the player character is the greatest thing since sliced bread, everybody says so... except this guy. this is the character who says "you were chosen by the narrative, huh? that means nothing." (yes, i also adore khalisah bint-sinan al-jilani in mass effect. i've seen me getting stuck on one-inch ledges, i don't buy my hype either.)
revali, though, revali takes it a step further. see -- rito can't fly. they can glide. they can jump off a high platform, they can ride a thermal, and they can flap to gain some height, but rather like loons, they can't just take off from a flat surface.
except revali. because this little overachiever -- and he is little, it's implied he's about the same developmental age as link and zelda, not even really considered an adult yet -- this little overachiever fucking invented his own superpower. he taught himself a form of magic, from scratch, that had not existed before. he can generate an updraft underneath himself wherever he is and use it to yeet himself upwards. it's called revali's gale. he's also the best archer the rito have ever produced, which means the best archer ever, full stop. he trains like an olympic athlete.
and he is a jackass! he's haughty, he's standoffish, he's openly rude to everyone around him. he very much thinks he's all that -- but he's right! he's trying (badly, rudely) to demand respect that he truly deserves and is not getting, because "chosen by a sentient sword" is the leadership quality everyone around him values.
(to be clear, revali would be a terrible leader. he has no social skills whatsoever. but link literally doesn't even talk. he's the leader only in that he's required to get within melee range of ganon, and this nets him a special status above the divine beast pilots, with an extra investiture ceremony and everything. thus revali is jealous.)
anyway. can you tell i have feelings about revali. towards the end of my last job i was identifying with him pretty strongly, or with his perception of his own situation, because my boss was an idiot who felt threatened by my skills, my competent coworkers had all been fired and replaced with idiots, and customers are largely idiots anyway. revali is not actually surrounded by idiots, but he is very underappreciated both by the surrounding characters and by the fandom. in this house we respect revali. (but we also call him ravioli, because he would certainly call us stupid names if given the chance.)
revali pilots divine beast vah medoh, which is a giant bird and actually flies around, defying physics even more than revali himself. each divine beast has a noise it makes when you move it around during the dungeon puzzle segments in botw, all mechanically-flanged animal noises: naboris and rudania have different pitches of "gronk", ruta makes an elephant trumpet noise, and medoh makes the red-tailed hawk call they use for bald eagles in movies.
since revali is implied not to be an adult, i doubt he has any blood descendants. rito are also quite short-lived compared to the other races -- even the elder kaneli didn't know revali or link personally -- so most of the details of revali's character have been lost in a haze of hero worship. the rito who helps link board medoh in the botw present day is called teba, and he's a big fan of revali in theory but doesn't actually know what he was like other than the whole greatest archer thing.
revali and teba also have the same voice actor, sean chiplock. revali has a brassy light tenor with a mid-atlantic accent, what i think of as a katharine hepburn voice, and teba has a gravelly baritone. but sean chiplock also voices another character, the great deku tree, who watches over the master sword in the forest while link is in hibernation. the great deku tree talks like an ent, being in all essentials except mobility an ent -- he has the whole slow sonorous contrabass, like john rhys-davies voicing treebeard.
and the thing is, sean chiplock is a twitch streamer as well as a voice actor. in fact, he streamed age of calamity when it came out. his natural speaking voice is a reasonable light tenor, a bit deeper than revali's, noticeably higher than teba's. but at one point in one of the streams he was talking about how he was first cast for the deku tree role, before they double-cast him for the two rito, and he mentions that sometimes people will ask him "so how far did they have to pitch you down for the deku tree?" and then he leans into the mike a bit and -- remember, this is live on stream -- just says in the exact deku tree voice, "they did not. they did not have to pitch me down at all." and *that* is why joe hernandez getting yunobo's falsetto is only the second most impressive voice acting feat in the botw english cast.
god, explaining this shit takes forever. i'm really worrying i'm going to run into the character limit. or the reader patience limit.
anyway! age of calamity! the story is told entirely through combat sequences and cutscenes. i joke that i bought a fighting game for the story and don't regret it one bit.
we open with a cutscene. possessed guardians are swarming over hyrule castle. explosions shake the area. a box falls off the shelf in zelda's study and a tiny egg-shaped guardian falls out. we know it's a guardian mainly from the styling of its tiny legs and its big round eye. it wakes up and skitters around a bit. a big evil guardian comes into the study and tries to shoot it. we hear zelda's distant voice cry out "i must... protect... everyone!" and a weird portal appears, pulling things in. trying to dodge the big guardian's laser, the baby guardian falls through the portal along with some blobs of the magenta-black possession goop, ganon's "malice" (this was a thing in botw, i just didn't go into it).
smash cut to unruined, pre-apocalyptic hyrule castle on a beautiful sunny day. king rhoam gives the army, including a helmeted link, a quick as-you-know-bob pep talk explaining that as ganon's revival approaches, monster incursions are becoming more frequent and powerful (this was also a thing in botw), and right now an especially large horde is coming right for the castle and we need to fight it off. then we get tossed into tutorial combat and given some pop-ups to teach us the controls.
link does good work in this battle, and also discovers the baby guardian, which will spend most of the rest of the game scuttling around at his heels being invulnerable. (it has a name, but that's not revealed until the postgame, so i tend to just think of it as baby guardian.) he doesn't yet have the master sword, because that would make for a weirdly paced game, but he kills some moblins and is appointed zelda's bodyguard in an ensuing cutscene. sheikah technology also starts to activate earlier than it did in the main botw timeline, due to the presence of the baby guardian.
link, zelda, and zelda's handmaid impa (also a playable character, with ninja stylings including a naruto run) travel toward a sheikah research lab, wanting to get the researchers' opinions on the baby guardian. on the way, they encounter a couple of guardians which have been possessed by the time-traveling malice, and have to battle them. as they arrive at the tech lab, we see what looks like a possessed version of the baby guardian lurking nearby.
the main tech lab researchers are also characters from botw, impa's sister purah and another sheikah scientist named robbie. (i think... i think out of the entire roster of close to two dozen playable characters including dlc, there's only one who didn't appear in some form in botw. it's a big fucking game.) they retrieve photos of the calamity in progress from the baby guardian's memory, letting everyone know that preparations for the defense had better ramp up.
from there, four main missions open up at once, to recruit the four champions. daruk's is simple: he's happy to help, we just have to fight our way up the mountain to rudania with him. mipha's is almost as simple: her father forbids her to become ruta's pilot, fearing for her safety, but once we fight through another assortment of monsters and she uses ruta to save her father's life, he agrees "on one condition: you must promise to come back safely". which, if you're playing blind and expecting the calamity to go as it did in botw, is a genuine gut-punch: every single adult zora in botw remembers mipha personally and has words for you about getting her killed. (you think) you know none of them will come back safely, but mipha is the one where you know it'll hurt people that she doesn't.
urbosa's recruit mission adds a twist: the gerudo are trying to kill zelda? that doesn't seem right, but nobody seems to know enough about what's going on to dispute it. so you have to fight your way through some gerudo (this was really funny on sean chiplock's stream because he went "i don't want to fight women! i respect women!" and spent a good five minutes looking for a way around; there isn't one but it was cute nonetheless) and get into urbosa's throne room, where it turns out that the "urbosa" ordering zelda's death is an imposter. another botw character i haven't explained yet.
so the yiga clan are traitor sheikah who worship calamity ganon and are trying to work towards his revival, and especially trying to kill link so he won't defeat ganon. they're ninjas who dress in all red, teleport, disguise themselves as random travelers, and for some reason really love bananas. they have a hideout on the edge of the gerudo desert, and in botw you have to sneak into the hideout as part of the leadup to the vah naboris dungeon segment. it's a nerve-wracking stealth mission: if you're seen at any point, you get oneshot, no matter how much armor or health you have. even mipha's grace won't save you, it's a straight instakill.
and then when you reach the actual boss battle of the hideout, it's a joke. literally a joke. the yiga leader, master kohga, is a joke boss, the only fat human-esque character in the game, who does nothing but nap and eat bananas. he tries to throw giant balls at you, you bop him on the head with them a few times, and then he summons too giant a ball and knocks himself down a bottomless pit. done.
so, back to age of calamity, the imposter urbosa is master kohga, in person. "yiga, assemble! me excluded of course." he's got a voice actor, which he did not in botw; he sounds rather like a disney parrot, and it fits him. so you have to battle through a bunch of yiga clan grunts, as well as the tankier yiga battlemasters, before a boss battle with master kohga.
something that age of calamity does really consistently is take botw bosses who were kind of pushovers and make them not remotely pushovers. aoc kohga is tough. he clones himself and throws multiple moves at you that you're supposed to counter with superpowers on a cooldown, faster than the cooldown can happen. he zips at you from the other side of the boss arena and blindsides you. even if you go in with three playable characters with full special meters, you can have a tough time.
when you get kohga's health down, a cutscene plays, introducing i think the only voiced character who didn't appear at all in botw. this is kohga's sidekick, sooga, a total beefcake with a bass voice you hear through the soles of your feet. he is utterly loyal to kohga, dual-wields katanas, and is a royal pain in the ass to fight. luckily, you don't have to fight him here; he just grabs kohga like a sack of potatoes and teleports away.
revali's recruit mission is completely different, because he and link are rivals, so the game had to give you the opportunity to fight him as the boss of the level. so rito village has been under attack by monsters led by the possessed black-and-magenta baby guardian we saw in an earlier cutscene, and on seeing that link is accompanied by our white-and-blue baby guardian, the rito including revali assume link and company are associated with said monsters. so you have to fight through waves of rito (and a few monsters) and finally get revali's health down to about an eighth before zelda, who was supposed to stay back in safety, manages to get there and scream for you both to stop. revali is even more of an asshole to link in aoc than in botw, and with less justification since it starts before link is put in charge, but he gets some really fun dialogue out of it. "you may think you're good, but i'm better!"
anyway, once all four champions are recruited, there's another yiga clan ambush trying to kill zelda, where you have to fight sooga as link. my first playthrough, i forgot i'd been messing around with stupid weapons and had to defeat him with a mop, because you can't switch weapons during combat. luckily i play on easy difficulty (and had somewhat powered up the mop).
it's revealed that the possessed baby guardian is going by the name "harbinger ganon" and is working with a wannabe cult leader who calls himself astor. astor has promised to give the yiga clan the intel they need to kill zelda and link before the calamity, protecting ganon from them. ("hey! prophecy man! you missed the part where we get walloped!" master kohga is really fucking fun in this game. it gives everybody so much more character development.)
next step after collecting the four champions is to go get the master sword. unfortunately, astor knows we're heading to the forest, so it's full of monsters and malice enemies called "hollows". we collect another playable character, hestu. hestu is... picture a ten-foot-tall broccoli, but instead of a stalk it has a very chubby pale green stripy bipedal gourd, with a face and a leaf beard, and an adorable little tail like a hamster. he dances with maracas and (in age of calamity) is voiced by cristina vee doing the most enthusiastic five-year-old impression you've ever heard. "i LEARNED a THING!"
anyway. astor and his hollows are no match for link and the master sword, so that's another piece of the ganon-slaying puzzle in place. the next big setpiece is a timed mission designed to demonstrate that link plus the master sword equals one entire badass, causing zelda to mope about her own lack of progress.
the sheikah researchers use the extra technology enabled by the baby guardian's presence to start tracking down the yiga clan's hideout a century early. the yiga clan objects and battles ensue, including the first use of vah naboris, which is completely invulnerable while sprinting and deeply overpowered. (all of musou is about becoming overpowered, but naboris is pretty epic even for this game.)
the researchers were able to pull the exact date of ganon's revival from the baby guardian's memory: the evening of zelda's seventeenth birthday. with this deadline in mind, rhoam pushes zelda even harder to forget all about the ancient technology that fascinates her and focus solely on her latent goddess power. there's a little ancient gadget she's been carrying with her, a palm-sized disc of unknown use, which she found on one of her last outings with her late mother; rhoam tells her it's a distraction and confiscates it, harping on her duty to her kingdom as he has been all along.
zelda goes to pray at the spring of courage, but the group is ambushed by monsters and nearly trapped. however, zelda spots a small piece of ancient sheikah technology in the forest and is able to figure out how to use it to clear a path so they can escape. impa points out a main theme of this game, that zelda's so down on herself for her inability to unlock her sealing power that she doesn't give herself credit for the ways she's already helping the cause with her actual talents and interests.
the day before zelda's seventeenth birthday, just as she gets ready to set out from the castle to travel toward the spring of wisdom, ganon awakes a day early, catching everyone by surprise. all the guardians in and around the castle are possessed, as are the divine beasts. link and zelda fight their way out of the castle, but are cornered at the last minute by guardians. king rhoam saves them and tells them to flee while he holds the line, since neither of them are expendable if ganon is to be defeated. "you are the knight to princess zelda," he tells link simply. "i trust that you understand your duty." he does, and link drags zelda away as rhoam faces down multiple guardian targeting lasers; we simply see the flash and boom of a laser firing offscreen, but anyone who's played botw has died to those lasers often enough to know that rhoam is dead. the calamity has claimed its first (named) victim.
zelda does not take it well. outside the castle, she falls to her knees and cries, cursing her power for failing to awaken. her tears fall on the baby guardian, and something... weird happens. a light and sound effect like the portal we saw at the beginning of the game when the baby guardian traveled through time. but we don't see an actual portal, and nothing seems to have changed.
then -- christ, just thinking about it still gives me chills, this game -- you hear a noise. the metallically flanged screech of a red-tailed hawk. and you start to realize as the camera pans up... you see, in the distance, vah medoh. there's magenta in the lights, but there's also blue fighting it, and it's shedding malice bits as it flies, like it's trying to expel the possession.
impa says it at the same time you realize it. "can we still do something?" you don't know whether to trust it. whether the game is just going to twist the knife. make you go to each champion, try to save them, fail, watch them die. it'd be good storytelling.
then you get a choice of two main missions. "water and fire" or "air and lightning". you have to play both, in whichever order you choose. one focuses on mipha and daruk, the other on revali and urbosa.
whichever one you click on, it opens with a cutscene. one of the champions, fighting the blight, almost failing, faltering. they're going to die. you see it in their eyes. this is how i die. the blight is about to strike the final blow.
then the portal flash. someone leaps out -- the future champion of their race -- and drives the blight back. and you realize that if, if you can pull it off, this is no longer a prequel. this is the everybody lives au.
it's a hard fight. four hard fights. in botw, two of the blights were pushovers and only thunderblight was a real pain in the ass. in age of calamity, even fireblight poses a major threat. you're on a timer defined by the health bar of the champion you're trying to rescue, and even after you get into the divine beast (no easy feat in itself), the champions keep getting in the way and getting themselves hit, especially urbosa, so you can lose the level right at the end if one of the champions takes a bad hit.
but it's worth it. once you get out of both fights, you have not only your four original champions rescued but the four future champions added as playable characters as well. (they're tricky as hell to play, with unique gimmicks like timing or holding a button press to improve damage. sidon's gimmick is just labeled "employ boundless optimism", which amuses the hell out of me.)
anyway, you've changed the course of history, but you haven't won the war yet. king rhoam is still dead, and you don't even have time to mourn. you have four new characters to master, side missions to run for each one, weapons to improve, and zelda still isn't any closer to unlocking her actual sealing power. time-travel-portal-activation tears are not going to seal away calamity ganon.
the battle of akkala citadel, where the hylian army was wiped out in botw, goes much better with mipha available to heal the soldiers and daruk to kick some extra ass. (did i mention -- i don't think i did. mipha's moveset in age of calamity is mainly built around water manipulation, but certain moves allow the water to heal allies and npcs. so when you have one of these missions where the timer is a health bar and you can't let it get down to zero, but you have mipha available, you can get the opportunity to refill it.)
having freed akkala citadel, we head to the other place the hylian army is pinned down: fort hateno. otherwise known as the chokepoint where link nearly died and zelda finally unlocked her power. knowing botw ramps up the tension here: everything is different, but will this be the same? how will it happen? will it even happen?
astor shows up with all four blights. link, because he is a hero even if revali gets sassypants about it, goes to make a last stand while impa hauls zelda away. but this time zelda snaps. she slips her wrist out of impa's grasp, runs back toward link, and as she runs, the power flares out of her hand and wipes the blights away just as it did the guardians. her weapon changes; instead of the sheikah slate with its basic powers, magnesis and ice blocks and remote bombs, she's wielding the bow of light, zelda's equivalent to the master sword. this is zelda godmode time. she wipes out the rest of the enemies without breaking a sweat.
astor, furious, pulls the yiga clan's souls out of their bodies, trying to gather extra energy to feed calamity ganon. but when he goes after kohga, sooga fights back and tells kohga to flee. kohga, for perhaps the only time in his life, refuses, and they stand against astor together.
later, kohga, alone, comes to zelda and begs for her help in avenging his people. fuck ganon, he wants astor dead. (we don't see sooga again outside of the age of calamity dlc. it's implied he died securing kohga's escape after all. but in the dlc he's available as a playable character if you handle the relevant mission right.)
it's three in the morning and i'm flagging badly, but the next mission is the one that made me go buy the game at like 10pm one night because i couldn't stop thinking about it. because of reasons, the group goes to the great plateau, which was the tutorial area in botw. there's fighting and teleporting and whatnot, but the important part is: there's a point where zelda walks into the temple of time, the church that's the last place you speak to the king's ghost in botw, and she sees a figure that from the back looks like her father. and it's like... this is a trap, this has to be a trap. but you watch her walk up to him, and he turns around, and he's alive.
and he explains. the ancient disc he confiscated from zelda -- just before the guardians fired, it activated, and once you see it active you realize why it looked so damn familiar. it was a guardian shield, which you get from certain shrines. it deflected the lasers. zelda's love of ancient technology directly saved her father's life.
and he apologizes. every show -- you know every show where a cruel, harsh, or abusive parental figure is redeemed with the snap of a finger because they meant well or truly loved the child underneath or some crap? i yell at them every time. "let the bastard die unmourned!" this one isn't that. this one sticks the landing. he apologizes and he understands exactly why he was wrong, and the whole thematic line of the story supports it. i literally... the rest of the game is good too, i love the whole thing, but the difference between "might pick it up someday" and "hello mr walmart associate i am here to buy a game" was that this one scene is that fucking solid.
and it goes with what was set up in botw. it matches. there's a place in the castle in botw where you can find the king's diary, which he was writing in while zelda was at the spring of wisdom, and the final entry says that he regrets pushing her so hard and when she comes back he means to apologize. it's so sad. the unfinished business... botw alone is a very sad story. there's so much that can never be made right. but age of calamity is the other half. it fits together like a cartoon eggshell. every notch matches. it makes the story whole.
that's not the end of the game, of course. they go fight ganon. astor tries to command ganon and gets eated. we find out that zelda actually built the baby guardian herself as a young child, before her mother died, and that rhoam confiscated it too in his same misguided drive to make her focus, and zelda had forgotten it. it gets possessed and we have to kill it, which is amazingly heartbreaking, and then it revives just enough to sacrifice itself to put a dent in ganon's invulnerability and let us fight him. you can only bring four playable characters to the final fight, but once ganon's health is down and it's time for link to strike the final blow, everyone is watching. daruk yells "you can do this, little guy", and revali gets the last word in the most revali way of all time, telling link "don't screw this up!"
he does not screw it up. he cuts ganon entirely in half. and then zelda seals him away. roll credits.
and then there's a postgame! zelda games don't usually do a postgame, but this one isn't a mainline zelda game, so it has a postgame section where you do a bunch of difficult missions which reward you with parts, and when you get them all, you can repair the baby guardian and recruit him as a playable character instead of just a scuttling aesthetic add-on. and because part of the draw of hyrule warriors is getting to play as the villains, you can even recruit calamity ganon to fight as, which is pretty silly on any lore level but it's just fun.
also once you repair the baby guardian you get secret special end credits in a really cool papercut style where he does a little trip through the different locations in the game and interacts with stylized papercut versions of each of the recruitable characters. (revali even gives him a flying piggyback ride, which is the most adorable.) and finally he comes home to zelda and everybody is friends.
this is a good game.
other than napping, i have mostly spent the day playing hyrule warriors: age of calamity, a spinoff of breath of the wild, which is one of my favorite video games of all time and also incredibly difficult to explain from a standing start.
(describing video games is a whole unique skillset, because with books or audiovisual media there's usually an assumption that your reader might or at least should want to consume it themself if you sell it well. but most people are not going to play a specific video game, because they would have to have the correct hardware, the money for the software, the necessary skills and abilities, and a *lot* of time. a single completionist playthrough of the mass effect trilogy takes me about 260 hours. that's equivalent to binging almost 350 episodes of a 45-minute drama, or 13-15 seasons depending on season length. admittedly mass effect is long even for three AAA video games, but they are not a quick medium to experience a story in.)
anyway. i had a point. my point is that it's awkward talking about spoilers for video games because you very especially cannot do the "it's so good people, go watch it and come back, i'll wait" shtick. which is a shtick that annoys the fuck out of me anyway because i personally require spoilers to convince me to invest my energy in most media, but i understand that a lot of people do Not want spoilers. and the thing about age of calamity specifically is that it was marketed one way and then had a mid-game twist that completely alters the tone, and it really does hit best when you see it unspoiled but also with the background of having played through breath of the wild. also the subplot that made me specifically buy the game instead of just watching playthroughs is a *different* spoilery twist that changes the entire shape of the game story and refracts back into the characterization from breath of the wild.
so. i feel like trying to explain why i love these two games. possibly somewhat incoherently, because i still have a headache. but there Will be major spoilers for both games under the cut. if i can remember how to code a cut.
so. breath of the wild. the game that changed the industry. every franchise since 2017 that has pivoted to the open-world model has been inspired by the success of breath of the wild, from soulsbornes (elden ring's devs explicitly credit botw as an inspiration) to pokemon (legends arceus literally opens with the same iconic shot as botw). and not one has done it better.
where to start? the legend of zelda series began in 1987. in each game (or sometimes pair of games), different characters called link, zelda, and ganon or ganondorf play out a battle of good and evil, usually in a country called hyrule.
as the lore currently stands, these three characters are reincarnated intermittently for these recurring faceoffs. link is a swordsman fated to wield the "master sword", which glows with a holy light, also called the sword that seals the darkness or the blade of evil's bane. zelda is a princess descended from the great goddess hylia and able to use the goddess's holy power -- hyrule's monarchy does not otherwise appear to be matriarchal, as the ruler is always zelda's father the king, but this contradiction is never addressed. and ganon is the incarnation of evil, attempting to take over and/or destroy hyrule, whose reincarnations link and zelda are always fated to battle and must defeat but cannot destroy, only seal away for a time.
breath of the wild tells a story of two different links and zeldas in a total of three different eras. ten thousand years before the game's present day, hyrule was home to a highly technologically advanced race called the sheikah, who are mostly human-looking but all have white hair. (link and zelda's race, hylians, look mostly human but have long pointy ears. i've never quite figured out whether sheikah have pointy ears.) the sheikah of that time built a bunch of fancy machines to help defeat that era's ganon. everything went smoothly: four immense animal-shaped mechs called the divine beasts shot ganon with powerful lasers, an army of six-legged robots called guardians (shaped like upside-down pottery from japan's ancient jomon era) aided link and zelda in the battle, link struck the final blow against ganon with the master sword, and zelda used the sacred power of the goddess to seal ganon away for the next ten thousand years.
a hundred years before botw begins, it was known in hyrule that this version of ganon, known as calamity ganon, was about to awaken again. the king at the time, an imposing white-bearded gentleman with the equally imposing name/title of king rhoam bosphoramus hyrule, took steps to be prepared in accordance with prophecies left by the previous era's hylians. the era's incarnation of link, a teenaged son of a royal guardsman, was found, properly made acquainted with the master sword (which "chooses" its wielder), and appointed as zelda's bodyguard. the four divine beasts and the massive army of guardians were excavated from underground, and the remaining sheikah began researching how to make them work, since the user manuals had not survived. superpowered members of hyrule's other four sapient species were recruited to pilot the divine beasts and dubbed "champions" (along with link, but when i use "the champions" as a group noun, it usually means these four).
however, there was A Problem. the problem was zelda. she could not access the holy sealing power, like a proper princess of hyrule should. her mother had died when she was very young, before passing on her knowledge of how to use the power, and there were no written records to help. for years she had prayed and meditated daily, traveling to all of hyrule's sacred sites, with no results. when the ancient sheikah technology was discovered, she wanted to help the fight by studying it instead along with her best friend and personal maid, a sheikah girl named impa. however, king rhoam, worried that ganon would be unstoppable if zelda could not seal him away, forced her to focus more and more on her meditations and prayers. this Did Not Help At All.
(having link as her bodyguard also did not help at all. he's a well-behaved little inheritor of prophecy. the master sword accepts him immediately. so having him constantly tagging around feels like rubbing her face in her own failures.)
there was one sacred site in hyrule that zelda could not visit until she became an adult, on her seventeenth birthday. this was the spring of wisdom, where no one lacking wisdom was permitted to go. so she traveled there that day with link and spent her seventeenth birthday praying, more or less -- we see her at one of the other holy springs and it's more or less "yelling at the goddess for stonewalling her for ten years", but obviously nothing else had worked. this didn't either.
that evening, at the foot of the mountain where the spring of wisdom lay, as zelda explained to the four champions that shit was still fucked (not in those words), calamity ganon returned from deep under hyrule castle -- and he had spent the last ten thousand years devising a Plan.
sheikah technology uses orange lights to denote neutral or standby status, and blue lights to denote active or completed status. ganon possessed all the guardians, turning their lights magenta. the now-evil guardians swarmed through hyrule castle, killing the inhabitants, and headed out to attack the various headquarters of the hylian army as well.
the four champions (not counting link) dashed to the divine beasts in order to begin a counterattack, only to discover that each divine beast was now possessed by a large fragment of ganon's power. these "blight ganons" trapped the champions inside the divine beasts and killed them, then turned the divine beasts' running lights magenta as well.
link and zelda attempted to get to the castle to confront ganon, but had to turn back. they fell back to a wide field near a fortified chokepoint on the road, where a small remnant of the army was fighting a holding action. there, they were overwhelmed by guardians, and link was nearly killed. zelda, faced with losing the very last person she cared about, finally gained access to her sealing power and absolutely nuked every guardian on the field and many more across hyrule, leaving them as burned-out husks.
link, actively dying, was rushed to a location called the "shrine of resurrection" to be placed in healing stasis. zelda took the master sword, left impa with a message to pass on to link whenever he should wake up healed, deposited the master sword back where it came from (in a hidden forest under the care of a talking tree), and then went to the castle. without link or any of the other pieces of the puzzle, she couldn't defeat ganon, but she bound him and herself to the confines of the castle along with most of the remaining un-nuked guardians, leaving the country of hyrule to limp along in a postapocalyptic medieval state.
a hundred years later, the actual game begins when link wakes up, amnesiac, as the player character. the ghost of zelda's father guides him through the tutorial level, introducing him to hidden shrines that act as warp points and mini-dungeons. link gathers superpowers such as magnetism and ice-pillar creation from the four tutorial shrines, then gets a short version of what happened a hundred years ago from the king's ghost, along with a paraglider which lets him hang-glide from any high point, and instructions on where to go talk to impa for more information.
from there, the game pretty much consists of finding out by gradual degrees what happened, gathering weaponry, defeating enemies for resources and practice -- there are a lot of smallish goblin-type monsters that wander the land, as well as larger minibosses and an assortment of surviving guardians -- and eventually battling through the four divine beasts to free the champions' imprisoned spirits and acquire their superpowers before finally defeating calamity ganon.
(the game is a true open world after the tutorial ends. receiving the paraglider is the only "you are not allowed to go to Place before this point" marker. so speedrunners go straight from the tutorial to fight calamity ganon, who summons any undefeated blights for a boss rush before you can even reach him. the world record stands at 23 minutes and one second, from link waking up to the first frame of ganon's final form's dying cutscene. unless the streamer currently grinding on sub-23 achieved it today; i haven't checked.)
anyway! so! that is breath of the wild. in brief, ish. look, i haven't even touched on korok seeds or armor upgrades or weapon durability. it's a big game.
hell, i haven't even touched on the fucking world map. you know how video game worlds are, well, stylized? minecraft is the most obvious example, it being Entirely Squares, but most video games will have their landscapes sort of tiled and repetitive to some extent, to save on graphics space.
botw has some repeated buildings and trees, but nothing about the geology is tiled. it's so well individuated that i can glance over at a youtube stream and usually know exactly where the streamer is, so closely i could put my finger on the map, just from the landforms and scenery. the zone transitions are a bit minecraft biome -- there's the autumn area, the jungle area, the volcanic area -- but the map overall is a fucking work of art. the traditional japanese village is placed in a limestone karst region with those sugarloaf mountains they have in some parts of china, and they just make me so damn happy. especially since if there's a vertical surface that isn't 100% sheer, you can climb it like a little humanoid gecko. so i get to clamber up and down geology from all over the world, which is a delight in itself.
having thus created an impressively habitable world, nintendo's zelda team very reasonably wanted to put more games in it. the botw sequel, tears of the kingdom, uses almost entirely the same map, somewhat altered to reflect the events that cause there to be a sequel. but age of calamity, which as the name suggests is a prequel set during the hundred-years-ago era known as the great calamity, is a completely different genre and requires a certain amount more explanation before we even get into the story.
so breath of the wild has fairly standard "realistic" video game combat. most enemies are roughly your size, and you fight them one-on-one or in small groups. if you get surrounded by a dozen enemies, you are probably in for a bad time.
there is a genre of video game, the japanese term is "musou", characterized by "one versus one thousand" style combat. you swing your sword once and send two dozen enemies flying. it's not a genre i'm very familiar with, but i believe fire emblem and genshin impact are well-known examples of musou franchises. the basic point of the musou genre is that you have a couple dozen playable characters, unlocked through gameplay (or sometimes gacha mechanics), with different movesets and playstyles, and you can replay battles with different characters as you like. it's... not too dissimilar from mass effect 3 multiplayer, really, with the limited but endlessly intermixable sets of playable maps, characters, and weaponry.
it was decided that, to tell the story of the botw backstory with properly epic-feeling battle sequences, a musou game would be appropriate. there had been a zelda musou, called appropriately in japanese simply "zelda musou", and in english "hyrule warriors", which pulled the playable characters from the entire previous spectrum of zelda games. it didn't have much of a plot, being an excuse to throw a wide variety of characters into one game and let people mess around.
age of calamity is not primarily an excuse to let people mess around playing as beloved characters and villains. it is that, but *primarily* it is a love letter to breath of the wild. the two games together form an emotionally cohesive whole.
aoc was marketed as a straight prequel, the story of the great calamity, how we got to the beginning of botw. but, as i mentioned above, there is a twist. right at the beginning, we find out there's a time-travel element, a little robot that comes back in time to try to stop the great calamity from starting. and there's a point halfway through where the time travel turns the story into a canon-divergence everybody-lives au.
people say, positively and negatively, that it feels like fanfic. and it does, in the best way. it's official, it's beautifully produced with the same voice actors, and it's written so fucking well, with an understanding of the characters and their arcs that maybe one in a thousand actual ficcers could have pulled off. it's beyond incredible.
age of calamity is not an open world game. the botw map was recreated, in sections, in pre-apocalypse form, to serve as the level maps. it was rescaled at times to make the battles fit properly, but i had to actually load back and forth between botw and aoc in certain areas, running around checking landmarks and making notes, to figure that out, because it feels absolutely one-for-one -- to the point that i can actually navigate certain parts of botw much better now because i know the areas from age of calamity's more linear interpretations of the same maps.
so. what is the story of age of calamity? botw's earliest story flashback (other than excavating the divine beasts and guardians) only reached to the point after the four champions had all been recruited. there was a dlc, the champions' ballad, which included recruitment scenes for each of the champions and gave their characters a bit more depth. but age of calamity picks up before link has even been recruited as zelda's bodyguard. it's slightly au from the start, but in ways that make it work better as a relatively standalone game.
in order to avoid getting bogged down as soon as i reach the recruitment sequence, i should probably introduce the four champions now. botw tried pretty hard to push the player into encountering them in a specific order, which also happens to be roughly the order their species were introduced into the zelda universe, so let's start there.
the zora are a species of bipedal fish people, in botw specifically styled after sharks. (they have their tails on their heads instead of their butts. look, i don't make the character designs.) mipha, the zora princess, is a childhood friend of link's and has a massive crush on him. she also has a superpower of magical healing known as "mipha's grace". she's... at least in her original presentation in botw, very much the designated waifu? the breathy, demure, helpless healer girl-next-door that the player character is intended to be sweet on. she's a fish with tits, for christ's sake. small and nippleless, but very there and very bare. and a key plot item is a piece of armor she made for link that's explicitly the zora equivalent of an engagement ring. she is Designated Girlfriend. she's also a dutiful daughter to the zora king and a good big sister to the zora prince, sidon.
(in age of calamity, where she's a playable character and actually gets to make use of her trident which in botw only existed to be gifted to link after he beat the relevant dungeon, she's one of the most powerful early-game kits and scales well enough to be worth bringing to the final boss. one of many reasons i love aoc: it gives mipha an existence not solely defined by the men around her.)
mipha pilots the divine beast vah ruta, named after previous zora princess ruto, who was *also* really interested in marrying her era's link for some reason. i don't even know. anyway, vah ruta is a giant mechanical elephant that spouts water out of its nose. in age of calamity, where the divine beasts *also* get to move around for gameplay in certain limited sections instead of just standing still being dungeons and moving briefly in cutscenes, it adds "shoot icicles" and "smack things with nose" to its repertoire.
i should expand a bit on mipha's brother sidon. the zora live for centuries, and sidon is still alive during the "present day" of botw, a hundred years after mipha's death during the great calamity. in each of botw's four dungeon entry segments, link works with a member of the pilot's species to defeat the defense mechanisms keeping him from accessing the relevant divine beast's interior. there's not a good collective name for these four characters; the closest shorthand has been "champion descendants", although only one is explicitly a descendant. for the vah ruta entry segment, it's sidon who helps link gain access to the divine beast. he's very young for a zora, and we see him as a toddler in mipha's flashback during the champions' ballad dlc, as well as in age of calamity.
(i'm going to need a collective name for this group. i refuse to call sidon a champion descendant, that's weird. the group has significant but not complete overlap with tears of the kingdom's sages, so that won't do either. "future champions" is clunky but probably the best available option.)
next to discuss are the gorons, introduced in the game "ocarina of time". these are spherical rock people with tiny limbs, who also eat rocks and roll around everywhere in the volcanic region where they live. if i was going to be a zelda character, i'd want to be a goron.
the goron champion is daruk, who is large and jolly even for a goron. he looks rather like a santa-themed pet rock, calls link "little guy" (in japanese "aibo" which means partner or buddy), calls zelda "tiny princess", and is extremely friendly but doesn't really get cultural differences like "other species don't eat most rocks". i love daruk a lot. his superpower is "daruk's protection", an impenetrable shield that will deflect all attacks as long as it's active.
(each of the superpowers link gets from the champions have a cooldown to keep them from being too overpowered. mipha's grace will revive link with full health once every 24 realtime minutes; daruk's protection can activate 3 times and then has an 18-minute cooldown. the other two superpowers are quicker, and all the cooldowns can be shortened by completing the champions' ballad dlc.)
daruk pilots divine beast vah rudania, named after previous goron chief darunia, who also looked more or less like a santa claus pet rock. rudania is supposed to be a salamander, i think, because it's definitely a lizard and it crawls around in the lava of the volcano, but its hand shape just really says gecko to me. like many lizards, it doesn't do much; in age of calamity it's the only divine beast that lacks a proper barrier shield, and its moveset is limited to "hit things with tail" and "stomp".
daruk's descendant, the only one of the future champions to be explicitly descended from an original champion, is yunobo, a young goron who's scared of pretty much everything. but he inherited daruk's protection, so you can pop him into a series of cannons and shoot him at vah rudania to take down its defenses. it's pretty funny. (in japanese, yunobo has a female voice actor, for maximum running around being scared in a stupid squeaky voice. in english, impressively, the same voice actor who does daruk's gruff jolly bass pulls off yunobo's squeaky countertenor. even more impressively, this isn't the most astonishing bit of double casting in the english voice work. i'll get there.)
the other species returning from ocarina of time are the gerudo. these are, well, arabic stereotypes; they're an all-female race of desert warriors with brown skin and long noses, dressed in bra-tops and poofy pants (and usually but not always nose veils), wielding scimitars, sprinkling foreign-sounding words through their dialogue, and with a soundtrack of middle eastern instruments. in botw they live in a forbidden city where no men are allowed to enter, which forces link to dress up in an admittedly fetching gerudo outfit in order to gain entrance and talk to their chief.
(technically no "voe" are allowed to enter the forbidden city, only "vai". this terminology, combined with an interview where the executive producer talked about wanting link to have an androgynous quality, have produced a lot of what i will frankly call bullshit about link being "canonically" gender-variant and the gerudo being some sort of nonbinary-accepting, which gets spread around fandom. can you get there from here? sure, but it's a stretch.)
where was i? right. the gerudo champion is urbosa, who controls lightning, her superpower being known as "urbosa's fury". the tooltip for her weaponry which link inherits says that her movements in combat "resemble a beautiful dance", and age of calamity fucking delivers on both that and her extreme badassery. playing as urbosa gives me female gender euphoria, which is not a thing that has otherwise ever happened to me in my life. she's also got this full, deep, mellow contralto voice I only wish I could sound like; I have a contralto, but not like *that*.
urbosa pilots divine beast vah naboris, the "zap-zap camel" as I have heard it described. in botw it zaps you with lightning when you try to enter it, and in age of calamity it can also fucking sprint, the only divine beast to move at more than a ponderously slow speed. (you don't get to play as naboris in aoc until a good third of the way into the story, because it's just too overpowered.)
ganon's original human form ganondorf was one of the rare male gerudo, which is why they're so emphatic about excluding men; urbosa takes calamity ganon's continued existence quite personally. she was also a close friend of zelda's late mother, and calls zelda affectionately "little bird", trying to be supportive, though she can only do so much with rhoam's tiger parenting in the mix.
urbosa's maybe-descendant, the "present-day" chief of the gerudo, is a teenage girl named riju whose mother has died unfortunately young, leaving her in charge. riju and urbosa both wear skirts instead of the poofy pants for some reason. riju has a braid as long as she is -- all the gerudo have long dark red hair -- and a pet sand seal named patricia.
(sand seals are um. they're seals or walruses. that swim through sand. they substitute for horses in the desert region, you stand on a shield and surf behind the seal while hanging onto its halter. i don't know what else to tell you.)
the last species to discuss here are the rito. these are bird people. when they were introduced in 2002's "the wind waker", they looked like humans wearing beaks over their noses, and had supposedly evolved from the zora somehow. in botw, they're proper anthro birds of different styles, including a chief who's a wise old owl and a bard who's some sort of parrot.
the rito champion is revali. you must understand two things about revali. i adore him, and he is an utter jackass.
look, there's this specific style of video game character, right? the player character is the greatest thing since sliced bread, everybody says so... except this guy. this is the character who says "you were chosen by the narrative, huh? that means nothing." (yes, i also adore khalisah bint-sinan al-jilani in mass effect. i've seen me getting stuck on one-inch ledges, i don't buy my hype either.)
revali, though, revali takes it a step further. see -- rito can't fly. they can glide. they can jump off a high platform, they can ride a thermal, and they can flap to gain some height, but rather like loons, they can't just take off from a flat surface.
except revali. because this little overachiever -- and he is little, it's implied he's about the same developmental age as link and zelda, not even really considered an adult yet -- this little overachiever fucking invented his own superpower. he taught himself a form of magic, from scratch, that had not existed before. he can generate an updraft underneath himself wherever he is and use it to yeet himself upwards. it's called revali's gale. he's also the best archer the rito have ever produced, which means the best archer ever, full stop. he trains like an olympic athlete.
and he is a jackass! he's haughty, he's standoffish, he's openly rude to everyone around him. he very much thinks he's all that -- but he's right! he's trying (badly, rudely) to demand respect that he truly deserves and is not getting, because "chosen by a sentient sword" is the leadership quality everyone around him values.
(to be clear, revali would be a terrible leader. he has no social skills whatsoever. but link literally doesn't even talk. he's the leader only in that he's required to get within melee range of ganon, and this nets him a special status above the divine beast pilots, with an extra investiture ceremony and everything. thus revali is jealous.)
anyway. can you tell i have feelings about revali. towards the end of my last job i was identifying with him pretty strongly, or with his perception of his own situation, because my boss was an idiot who felt threatened by my skills, my competent coworkers had all been fired and replaced with idiots, and customers are largely idiots anyway. revali is not actually surrounded by idiots, but he is very underappreciated both by the surrounding characters and by the fandom. in this house we respect revali. (but we also call him ravioli, because he would certainly call us stupid names if given the chance.)
revali pilots divine beast vah medoh, which is a giant bird and actually flies around, defying physics even more than revali himself. each divine beast has a noise it makes when you move it around during the dungeon puzzle segments in botw, all mechanically-flanged animal noises: naboris and rudania have different pitches of "gronk", ruta makes an elephant trumpet noise, and medoh makes the red-tailed hawk call they use for bald eagles in movies.
since revali is implied not to be an adult, i doubt he has any blood descendants. rito are also quite short-lived compared to the other races -- even the elder kaneli didn't know revali or link personally -- so most of the details of revali's character have been lost in a haze of hero worship. the rito who helps link board medoh in the botw present day is called teba, and he's a big fan of revali in theory but doesn't actually know what he was like other than the whole greatest archer thing.
revali and teba also have the same voice actor, sean chiplock. revali has a brassy light tenor with a mid-atlantic accent, what i think of as a katharine hepburn voice, and teba has a gravelly baritone. but sean chiplock also voices another character, the great deku tree, who watches over the master sword in the forest while link is in hibernation. the great deku tree talks like an ent, being in all essentials except mobility an ent -- he has the whole slow sonorous contrabass, like john rhys-davies voicing treebeard.
and the thing is, sean chiplock is a twitch streamer as well as a voice actor. in fact, he streamed age of calamity when it came out. his natural speaking voice is a reasonable light tenor, a bit deeper than revali's, noticeably higher than teba's. but at one point in one of the streams he was talking about how he was first cast for the deku tree role, before they double-cast him for the two rito, and he mentions that sometimes people will ask him "so how far did they have to pitch you down for the deku tree?" and then he leans into the mike a bit and -- remember, this is live on stream -- just says in the exact deku tree voice, "they did not. they did not have to pitch me down at all." and *that* is why joe hernandez getting yunobo's falsetto is only the second most impressive voice acting feat in the botw english cast.
god, explaining this shit takes forever. i'm really worrying i'm going to run into the character limit. or the reader patience limit.
anyway! age of calamity! the story is told entirely through combat sequences and cutscenes. i joke that i bought a fighting game for the story and don't regret it one bit.
we open with a cutscene. possessed guardians are swarming over hyrule castle. explosions shake the area. a box falls off the shelf in zelda's study and a tiny egg-shaped guardian falls out. we know it's a guardian mainly from the styling of its tiny legs and its big round eye. it wakes up and skitters around a bit. a big evil guardian comes into the study and tries to shoot it. we hear zelda's distant voice cry out "i must... protect... everyone!" and a weird portal appears, pulling things in. trying to dodge the big guardian's laser, the baby guardian falls through the portal along with some blobs of the magenta-black possession goop, ganon's "malice" (this was a thing in botw, i just didn't go into it).
smash cut to unruined, pre-apocalyptic hyrule castle on a beautiful sunny day. king rhoam gives the army, including a helmeted link, a quick as-you-know-bob pep talk explaining that as ganon's revival approaches, monster incursions are becoming more frequent and powerful (this was also a thing in botw), and right now an especially large horde is coming right for the castle and we need to fight it off. then we get tossed into tutorial combat and given some pop-ups to teach us the controls.
link does good work in this battle, and also discovers the baby guardian, which will spend most of the rest of the game scuttling around at his heels being invulnerable. (it has a name, but that's not revealed until the postgame, so i tend to just think of it as baby guardian.) he doesn't yet have the master sword, because that would make for a weirdly paced game, but he kills some moblins and is appointed zelda's bodyguard in an ensuing cutscene. sheikah technology also starts to activate earlier than it did in the main botw timeline, due to the presence of the baby guardian.
link, zelda, and zelda's handmaid impa (also a playable character, with ninja stylings including a naruto run) travel toward a sheikah research lab, wanting to get the researchers' opinions on the baby guardian. on the way, they encounter a couple of guardians which have been possessed by the time-traveling malice, and have to battle them. as they arrive at the tech lab, we see what looks like a possessed version of the baby guardian lurking nearby.
the main tech lab researchers are also characters from botw, impa's sister purah and another sheikah scientist named robbie. (i think... i think out of the entire roster of close to two dozen playable characters including dlc, there's only one who didn't appear in some form in botw. it's a big fucking game.) they retrieve photos of the calamity in progress from the baby guardian's memory, letting everyone know that preparations for the defense had better ramp up.
from there, four main missions open up at once, to recruit the four champions. daruk's is simple: he's happy to help, we just have to fight our way up the mountain to rudania with him. mipha's is almost as simple: her father forbids her to become ruta's pilot, fearing for her safety, but once we fight through another assortment of monsters and she uses ruta to save her father's life, he agrees "on one condition: you must promise to come back safely". which, if you're playing blind and expecting the calamity to go as it did in botw, is a genuine gut-punch: every single adult zora in botw remembers mipha personally and has words for you about getting her killed. (you think) you know none of them will come back safely, but mipha is the one where you know it'll hurt people that she doesn't.
urbosa's recruit mission adds a twist: the gerudo are trying to kill zelda? that doesn't seem right, but nobody seems to know enough about what's going on to dispute it. so you have to fight your way through some gerudo (this was really funny on sean chiplock's stream because he went "i don't want to fight women! i respect women!" and spent a good five minutes looking for a way around; there isn't one but it was cute nonetheless) and get into urbosa's throne room, where it turns out that the "urbosa" ordering zelda's death is an imposter. another botw character i haven't explained yet.
so the yiga clan are traitor sheikah who worship calamity ganon and are trying to work towards his revival, and especially trying to kill link so he won't defeat ganon. they're ninjas who dress in all red, teleport, disguise themselves as random travelers, and for some reason really love bananas. they have a hideout on the edge of the gerudo desert, and in botw you have to sneak into the hideout as part of the leadup to the vah naboris dungeon segment. it's a nerve-wracking stealth mission: if you're seen at any point, you get oneshot, no matter how much armor or health you have. even mipha's grace won't save you, it's a straight instakill.
and then when you reach the actual boss battle of the hideout, it's a joke. literally a joke. the yiga leader, master kohga, is a joke boss, the only fat human-esque character in the game, who does nothing but nap and eat bananas. he tries to throw giant balls at you, you bop him on the head with them a few times, and then he summons too giant a ball and knocks himself down a bottomless pit. done.
so, back to age of calamity, the imposter urbosa is master kohga, in person. "yiga, assemble! me excluded of course." he's got a voice actor, which he did not in botw; he sounds rather like a disney parrot, and it fits him. so you have to battle through a bunch of yiga clan grunts, as well as the tankier yiga battlemasters, before a boss battle with master kohga.
something that age of calamity does really consistently is take botw bosses who were kind of pushovers and make them not remotely pushovers. aoc kohga is tough. he clones himself and throws multiple moves at you that you're supposed to counter with superpowers on a cooldown, faster than the cooldown can happen. he zips at you from the other side of the boss arena and blindsides you. even if you go in with three playable characters with full special meters, you can have a tough time.
when you get kohga's health down, a cutscene plays, introducing i think the only voiced character who didn't appear at all in botw. this is kohga's sidekick, sooga, a total beefcake with a bass voice you hear through the soles of your feet. he is utterly loyal to kohga, dual-wields katanas, and is a royal pain in the ass to fight. luckily, you don't have to fight him here; he just grabs kohga like a sack of potatoes and teleports away.
revali's recruit mission is completely different, because he and link are rivals, so the game had to give you the opportunity to fight him as the boss of the level. so rito village has been under attack by monsters led by the possessed black-and-magenta baby guardian we saw in an earlier cutscene, and on seeing that link is accompanied by our white-and-blue baby guardian, the rito including revali assume link and company are associated with said monsters. so you have to fight through waves of rito (and a few monsters) and finally get revali's health down to about an eighth before zelda, who was supposed to stay back in safety, manages to get there and scream for you both to stop. revali is even more of an asshole to link in aoc than in botw, and with less justification since it starts before link is put in charge, but he gets some really fun dialogue out of it. "you may think you're good, but i'm better!"
anyway, once all four champions are recruited, there's another yiga clan ambush trying to kill zelda, where you have to fight sooga as link. my first playthrough, i forgot i'd been messing around with stupid weapons and had to defeat him with a mop, because you can't switch weapons during combat. luckily i play on easy difficulty (and had somewhat powered up the mop).
it's revealed that the possessed baby guardian is going by the name "harbinger ganon" and is working with a wannabe cult leader who calls himself astor. astor has promised to give the yiga clan the intel they need to kill zelda and link before the calamity, protecting ganon from them. ("hey! prophecy man! you missed the part where we get walloped!" master kohga is really fucking fun in this game. it gives everybody so much more character development.)
next step after collecting the four champions is to go get the master sword. unfortunately, astor knows we're heading to the forest, so it's full of monsters and malice enemies called "hollows". we collect another playable character, hestu. hestu is... picture a ten-foot-tall broccoli, but instead of a stalk it has a very chubby pale green stripy bipedal gourd, with a face and a leaf beard, and an adorable little tail like a hamster. he dances with maracas and (in age of calamity) is voiced by cristina vee doing the most enthusiastic five-year-old impression you've ever heard. "i LEARNED a THING!"
anyway. astor and his hollows are no match for link and the master sword, so that's another piece of the ganon-slaying puzzle in place. the next big setpiece is a timed mission designed to demonstrate that link plus the master sword equals one entire badass, causing zelda to mope about her own lack of progress.
the sheikah researchers use the extra technology enabled by the baby guardian's presence to start tracking down the yiga clan's hideout a century early. the yiga clan objects and battles ensue, including the first use of vah naboris, which is completely invulnerable while sprinting and deeply overpowered. (all of musou is about becoming overpowered, but naboris is pretty epic even for this game.)
the researchers were able to pull the exact date of ganon's revival from the baby guardian's memory: the evening of zelda's seventeenth birthday. with this deadline in mind, rhoam pushes zelda even harder to forget all about the ancient technology that fascinates her and focus solely on her latent goddess power. there's a little ancient gadget she's been carrying with her, a palm-sized disc of unknown use, which she found on one of her last outings with her late mother; rhoam tells her it's a distraction and confiscates it, harping on her duty to her kingdom as he has been all along.
zelda goes to pray at the spring of courage, but the group is ambushed by monsters and nearly trapped. however, zelda spots a small piece of ancient sheikah technology in the forest and is able to figure out how to use it to clear a path so they can escape. impa points out a main theme of this game, that zelda's so down on herself for her inability to unlock her sealing power that she doesn't give herself credit for the ways she's already helping the cause with her actual talents and interests.
the day before zelda's seventeenth birthday, just as she gets ready to set out from the castle to travel toward the spring of wisdom, ganon awakes a day early, catching everyone by surprise. all the guardians in and around the castle are possessed, as are the divine beasts. link and zelda fight their way out of the castle, but are cornered at the last minute by guardians. king rhoam saves them and tells them to flee while he holds the line, since neither of them are expendable if ganon is to be defeated. "you are the knight to princess zelda," he tells link simply. "i trust that you understand your duty." he does, and link drags zelda away as rhoam faces down multiple guardian targeting lasers; we simply see the flash and boom of a laser firing offscreen, but anyone who's played botw has died to those lasers often enough to know that rhoam is dead. the calamity has claimed its first (named) victim.
zelda does not take it well. outside the castle, she falls to her knees and cries, cursing her power for failing to awaken. her tears fall on the baby guardian, and something... weird happens. a light and sound effect like the portal we saw at the beginning of the game when the baby guardian traveled through time. but we don't see an actual portal, and nothing seems to have changed.
then -- christ, just thinking about it still gives me chills, this game -- you hear a noise. the metallically flanged screech of a red-tailed hawk. and you start to realize as the camera pans up... you see, in the distance, vah medoh. there's magenta in the lights, but there's also blue fighting it, and it's shedding malice bits as it flies, like it's trying to expel the possession.
impa says it at the same time you realize it. "can we still do something?" you don't know whether to trust it. whether the game is just going to twist the knife. make you go to each champion, try to save them, fail, watch them die. it'd be good storytelling.
then you get a choice of two main missions. "water and fire" or "air and lightning". you have to play both, in whichever order you choose. one focuses on mipha and daruk, the other on revali and urbosa.
whichever one you click on, it opens with a cutscene. one of the champions, fighting the blight, almost failing, faltering. they're going to die. you see it in their eyes. this is how i die. the blight is about to strike the final blow.
then the portal flash. someone leaps out -- the future champion of their race -- and drives the blight back. and you realize that if, if you can pull it off, this is no longer a prequel. this is the everybody lives au.
it's a hard fight. four hard fights. in botw, two of the blights were pushovers and only thunderblight was a real pain in the ass. in age of calamity, even fireblight poses a major threat. you're on a timer defined by the health bar of the champion you're trying to rescue, and even after you get into the divine beast (no easy feat in itself), the champions keep getting in the way and getting themselves hit, especially urbosa, so you can lose the level right at the end if one of the champions takes a bad hit.
but it's worth it. once you get out of both fights, you have not only your four original champions rescued but the four future champions added as playable characters as well. (they're tricky as hell to play, with unique gimmicks like timing or holding a button press to improve damage. sidon's gimmick is just labeled "employ boundless optimism", which amuses the hell out of me.)
anyway, you've changed the course of history, but you haven't won the war yet. king rhoam is still dead, and you don't even have time to mourn. you have four new characters to master, side missions to run for each one, weapons to improve, and zelda still isn't any closer to unlocking her actual sealing power. time-travel-portal-activation tears are not going to seal away calamity ganon.
the battle of akkala citadel, where the hylian army was wiped out in botw, goes much better with mipha available to heal the soldiers and daruk to kick some extra ass. (did i mention -- i don't think i did. mipha's moveset in age of calamity is mainly built around water manipulation, but certain moves allow the water to heal allies and npcs. so when you have one of these missions where the timer is a health bar and you can't let it get down to zero, but you have mipha available, you can get the opportunity to refill it.)
having freed akkala citadel, we head to the other place the hylian army is pinned down: fort hateno. otherwise known as the chokepoint where link nearly died and zelda finally unlocked her power. knowing botw ramps up the tension here: everything is different, but will this be the same? how will it happen? will it even happen?
astor shows up with all four blights. link, because he is a hero even if revali gets sassypants about it, goes to make a last stand while impa hauls zelda away. but this time zelda snaps. she slips her wrist out of impa's grasp, runs back toward link, and as she runs, the power flares out of her hand and wipes the blights away just as it did the guardians. her weapon changes; instead of the sheikah slate with its basic powers, magnesis and ice blocks and remote bombs, she's wielding the bow of light, zelda's equivalent to the master sword. this is zelda godmode time. she wipes out the rest of the enemies without breaking a sweat.
astor, furious, pulls the yiga clan's souls out of their bodies, trying to gather extra energy to feed calamity ganon. but when he goes after kohga, sooga fights back and tells kohga to flee. kohga, for perhaps the only time in his life, refuses, and they stand against astor together.
later, kohga, alone, comes to zelda and begs for her help in avenging his people. fuck ganon, he wants astor dead. (we don't see sooga again outside of the age of calamity dlc. it's implied he died securing kohga's escape after all. but in the dlc he's available as a playable character if you handle the relevant mission right.)
it's three in the morning and i'm flagging badly, but the next mission is the one that made me go buy the game at like 10pm one night because i couldn't stop thinking about it. because of reasons, the group goes to the great plateau, which was the tutorial area in botw. there's fighting and teleporting and whatnot, but the important part is: there's a point where zelda walks into the temple of time, the church that's the last place you speak to the king's ghost in botw, and she sees a figure that from the back looks like her father. and it's like... this is a trap, this has to be a trap. but you watch her walk up to him, and he turns around, and he's alive.
and he explains. the ancient disc he confiscated from zelda -- just before the guardians fired, it activated, and once you see it active you realize why it looked so damn familiar. it was a guardian shield, which you get from certain shrines. it deflected the lasers. zelda's love of ancient technology directly saved her father's life.
and he apologizes. every show -- you know every show where a cruel, harsh, or abusive parental figure is redeemed with the snap of a finger because they meant well or truly loved the child underneath or some crap? i yell at them every time. "let the bastard die unmourned!" this one isn't that. this one sticks the landing. he apologizes and he understands exactly why he was wrong, and the whole thematic line of the story supports it. i literally... the rest of the game is good too, i love the whole thing, but the difference between "might pick it up someday" and "hello mr walmart associate i am here to buy a game" was that this one scene is that fucking solid.
and it goes with what was set up in botw. it matches. there's a place in the castle in botw where you can find the king's diary, which he was writing in while zelda was at the spring of wisdom, and the final entry says that he regrets pushing her so hard and when she comes back he means to apologize. it's so sad. the unfinished business... botw alone is a very sad story. there's so much that can never be made right. but age of calamity is the other half. it fits together like a cartoon eggshell. every notch matches. it makes the story whole.
that's not the end of the game, of course. they go fight ganon. astor tries to command ganon and gets eated. we find out that zelda actually built the baby guardian herself as a young child, before her mother died, and that rhoam confiscated it too in his same misguided drive to make her focus, and zelda had forgotten it. it gets possessed and we have to kill it, which is amazingly heartbreaking, and then it revives just enough to sacrifice itself to put a dent in ganon's invulnerability and let us fight him. you can only bring four playable characters to the final fight, but once ganon's health is down and it's time for link to strike the final blow, everyone is watching. daruk yells "you can do this, little guy", and revali gets the last word in the most revali way of all time, telling link "don't screw this up!"
he does not screw it up. he cuts ganon entirely in half. and then zelda seals him away. roll credits.
and then there's a postgame! zelda games don't usually do a postgame, but this one isn't a mainline zelda game, so it has a postgame section where you do a bunch of difficult missions which reward you with parts, and when you get them all, you can repair the baby guardian and recruit him as a playable character instead of just a scuttling aesthetic add-on. and because part of the draw of hyrule warriors is getting to play as the villains, you can even recruit calamity ganon to fight as, which is pretty silly on any lore level but it's just fun.
also once you repair the baby guardian you get secret special end credits in a really cool papercut style where he does a little trip through the different locations in the game and interacts with stylized papercut versions of each of the recruitable characters. (revali even gives him a flying piggyback ride, which is the most adorable.) and finally he comes home to zelda and everybody is friends.
this is a good game.