I wasn’t always a Zelda completionist. As a kid, my idea of beating any of the games was to get to the final boss, beat them up, and then wonder what I was going to do with my life. But now that I’ve grown up, I feel that if I truly enjoy a Zelda game, I should also complete every optional sidequest and get all the collectibles.
With that being said, I do have exceptions to this rule; I usually skip the Twilight Princess fishing games entirely, and I don’t bother to collect all 900 Korok Seeds when I play Breath of the Wild. Essentially, if the reward isn’t worth the effort, I won’t be inclined to do it.
I had this same thought process when I first played Age of Calamity. I wasn’t a big fan of the previous Hyrule Warriors game, mainly due to the overabundance of quests and the amount of time required to reach 100%. The Hyrule Warriors videos I had seen (most notably The Completionist’s 1000-hour playthrough) were particularly anxiety-inducing, and I feared that Age of Calamity would just be more of the same.
Thankfully, this didn’t end up being the case. The dev team retooled and fixed so many problems from the first game, so it felt much more rewarding to complete every single sidequest and task that Age of Calamity presented to me. It could be a bit frustrating at times, yes, but fixing Terrako and fully conquering the map (as well as all of the DLC quests) made me feel genuinely accomplished.
But that all changed when I made the mistake of attempting Apocalyptic Mode.
I wasn’t planning to do it at first, but when severe boredom set in during the summer of 2021, I decided to give it a go. Initially, it wasn’t too bad, especially since all of my characters were Level 100 and had their best weapons powered up to at least Level 30. But as I progressed further into the game, I discovered that some of the missions are next to impossible on Apocalyptic Mode. The one-hit kill missions were an absolute pain to get through (at least until I discovered how broken Revali was), and “A Royal Investigation” and “The Siege of Fort Hateno” were nothing short of disgustingly infuriating.
But none of this compared to the absolute mental trauma that every single Rudania segment inflicted upon me. Ironically, when I originally played the game on Hard Mode, Rudania was my favorite Divine Beast to pilot. But here? I don’t think I’m exaggerating by saying that this is the angriest I’ve ever been while playing Age of Calamity. Unlike the other three Divine Beasts, Rudania has no shield, which is enough of a problem on Hard Mode because it’s a huge target that takes tons of damage with every hit. But Apocalyptic Mode makes things even worse by adding a strict time limit, so you can’t even take the time to carefully navigate Rudania. Success seemed to be based more on luck than skill to me, and I probably burst several blood vessels completing all of these segments.
So after all that rage, what did I get for completing every single mission on Apocalyptic Mode? Absolutely nothing. It makes me wonder why they even added it to the game. If they throw in more DLC down the road, the extra materials and rupees that I accrued will definitely come in handy, but as things currently stand, Apocalyptic Mode was little more than a massive headache. Age of Calamity may be a great game overall, but I don’t think I’ll be touching this mode again any time soon.
