Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition

A lot about this game is great. But it's the third release of basically the same game, going for full new game price, with many issues. And these are issues which are not present in, say, Fire Emblem Warriors - the same style of game that was released for the switch quiet a while ago. If they had copied some of improvements in the series present in that game, it'd be 5 stars. Or if they had just said "hey, this is a straight up port, we're only gonna charge 30 bucks because we don't feel like improving it" it would have been five stars. But no, full new game price with issues. EDIT: it also crashes occasionally. I've had it crash twice after a mission (losing progress). I think it may have been updated, but since then, I've had it crash twice before a mission (not losing progress). I expect this to be fixed eventually, but as of 6/3/18 it has not been fixed. This game compares most directly to Hyrule Warriors for the Wii U and 3ds, and to Fire Emblem Warriors for the switch. First, the good: The actual combat of the character you're controlling is great. And the variation between characters, and even between weapons of the same character is great - each character and each weapon feels unique. That uniqueness is where Hyrule Warriors really beats, say, Fire Emblem Warriors, where many of the characters are clones, and even the ones who aren't often feel like they basically are clones of each other. But keep in mind all of that was present in the earlier Hyrule Warriors games - none of it is new to the switch version (which is given the same price as a brand new, AAA release game). The bad: In this game, you can command characters you aren't directly controlling at the time to go do things. Pretty much every single thing about this feature is bad, except that it exists. Let's walk through it: First, you have to actually tell you're other character (Impa, say) to do something. This is the most common reason you'll ever open up the + button menu, so you'd think that when you pressed + you'd get straight to the command map. But no: +, move thing down, A. Silly annoyance, but there. So now you're on the command map. there's a list of characters on the left side of the screen to choose from. (Personally I preferred the Fire Emblem Warriors map, where you selected characters from the map because it made it easier to choose commands based on who was closest to where you needed to send someone, but that is a small detail.) So you select Impa, and want to tell her to go capture a fort. Forts are squares, the map is a grid of squares, so you should just be able to select the square that's the fort and hit a, right? Nope. The forts don't line up with the grid. Well, this just allows maps to be more flexible, that way they don't have to all be layed out in a grid like way. Surely as you scroll through the squares of the map's grid, there is some way of telling which square counts as the square where the fort is, right? No. What you have to do is get kind of close ish, and command Impa to go to a square. If it's the one with the fort, a list will pop up and you can select the fort. If it's not, you have to try every square around the fort until find the one that was arbitrarily chosen to be the square containing the fort. Ok, so you finally commanded Impa to go to a fort. So she should just go there and capture it, right? No and no. She might go there. But if, say, the door into the fort closest to here is closed, she'll walk up to that door and wait outside. Even if there is another door to the fort that is open and accessible to her. And if she does get there, she won't actually capture the fort - or at least I haven't seen it happen. There's a progress bar for how many monsters have to die in the fort before the fort boss appears, and it barely depletes. So to use this feature, you have to spend too much time going through menus to get to the map and then too much time actually just figuring out how to tell your characters to go where you want them to, and then you have to hope they actually do it, and then you still have to take direct control of them and do it yourself. This is all in contrast to Fire Emblem Warriors - a switch game that came out a long time ago and is basically the same except for characters and a few minor feature differences - where you hit +, select the character you want, send them to the objective that is easily found on the map, and then continue with your primary objective while they actually go there and actually do it. And it's even worse than the 3ds version, where you issued these commands from the touch screen, which involved less backing in and out of menus. So, should you buy this game? It's basically a worse version of the 3ds version, except you can play it on a TV with multiplayer. And though I haven't personally tried multiplayer, I've heard that it's also bad. So I'd suggest waiting until the price comes down if you really want it. Again, a lot of these issues might be because it's a port - maybe it was just not feasible to update a port to have the same standards of the newest games in the series. But then it shouldn't cost the same amount of money as the newest game in the series did brand new.