Hyrule Warriors - The 1000 Hour Complete NIGHTMARE

i live in a prison of my own design i obviously love video games but by dedicating myself to completing them no matter the cost i have charted a course for myself that's guaranteed to have some roadblocks whether it's games that can't truly be completed achievements that kick my ass over and over again or simply games with so much content that they loom in the distance like an unclimbable mountain and when it comes to games with an unreasonable amount of content none looms larger than hyrule warriors definitive edition this game was already huge when i first played it on the wii u but after loads of dlc and two separate ports it's easily inflated into one of the most daunting frustrating and time-consuming challenges i have ever faced hey everyone welcome to a very special episode of the completionist new game plus where i am re-completing all the 120 games i ever featured here on the channel in case you can't tell i'm upset hire warriors was a huge game to begin with but the amount of content in this game has grown and grown over the years and i say years because the process of completing this game has literally taken years off of me it's become a part of my daily life a daily routine for me and while there are lots of games in the new game plus lineup with elements that i've dreaded higher warriors has been only one of a few that genuinely made me wonder this whole experiment in being plus may have been a bad idea it was even possible to achieve something this foolish and if so at what cost who will i be afterwards what will remain of my affection for this weird hybrid mutant of a game how many hours my life would be lost in the endless void spent hacking and slashing my way through countless waves of enemies how much punishment can one person take how much and the answer is a lot it's a lot let's begin when hyrule warriors was first announced just like everyone else i was taken aback i've never really played any of the many dynasty warrior games but i love zelda because come on get real who doesn't love zelda but that's exactly why the very existence of a zelda game made by someone who isn't nintendo was so mind-blowing that's bonkers on its own but matching it up with an entirely different franchise is even more bonkers and then you factor in the way that hyrule warriors also serves as an inter-franchise crossover between a bunch of disparate zelda games and the overall bonkers levels have reached near unprecedented heights and it only even got crazier with each subsequent burst of dlc and ports to the 3ds and switch that basically quadrupled the amount of content from the original vanilla base of the game that consumed my life for a couple of weeks and while i had plenty of quibbles with the game back when i first completed it for the show and definitely still do i really appreciate what a wild experiment it is and so i was even more shocked when it turned out not to be a one-off and that nintendo announced this year that age of calamity which would serve as the legit prequel to breath of the wild is coming out what the hell that's insane because one of the things that is so crazy about this game is the way it serves as a celebration of zelda history standing outside the main continuity while also bringing together an insane number of characters and locations from across the series ever shifting timeline so instead of classic zelda shenanigans like facing off against ganondorf this new version of link is just a grunted zelda's army who eventually finds himself up against a sorceress named sia who uses the power of the triforce to open up a bunch of gates through time and space which is you know never really a good idea so to save the various versions of hyrule link and his multiversal pals have to engage in classic dynasty warriors gameplay which mostly involves clearing vast waves of enemies and bosses in order to secure and defend a series of keeps with a whole bunch of weapons items and collectibles along the way look i'm not gonna get too detailed yet about all the stuff there is to do in this game because i'll start wading into the unceasing ocean of content and would have asked of me in just a bit but know that when i played the original version of this game on the wii u it had already felt like a monumental task and at the time i played it there was no dlc i sank several hundred hours into it and was pretty proud of myself when i finished it reasonably glad to have played the game but also very glad to have it over and done with but i was blissfully ignorant that i would soon start doing new game plus and have to do it all over again or that the flow of dlc imports would never stop inflating an already huge game to absurd proportions and like i said before once i did know i was going to launch new game plus as a series i pretty much immediately started worrying about what completing this game again would look like and those worries only grew when i did a brand integration with nintendo where they challenged me to play through the story mode and the majora's mask map if i lost i had to dance at their headquarters in a tingle costume as you can see i was um i was not successful but it was when i did that video the enormity of the game's definitive edition began to fully weigh on me and as the years bore on i felt it more and more as i chipped away at it one little bit at a time feeling like i was barely making any progress even as i played it for hours day after day week after week month after month with a little voice in the back of my head getting louder and louder and you know what that voice told me it told me i was screwed and for a long time i thought it was right alright look here's the thing about completing the definitive edition of hyrule warriors on nintendo switch it not only takes an insanely long time but the process is also incredibly involved poorly explained very frustrating and okay fine occasionally pretty damn fun but it's no exaggeration when i say this is easily the hardest and most time-consuming completion experience in the history of the show so far sit with that for a minute let it sink in really process what it means coming from someone who has chosen to call themselves the completionist and then come along with me on this journey as i break down the process walking through each of the game's modes because i want no i need someone to share in my suffering my pain must become your pain my burden is now your burden join me in this awful dungeon of completion that i have built for myself to walk through the labyrinth there's completing this game i'm gonna go through the game's modes one at a time the first is legend mode which is the game's story and a relatively small chunk of the overall completion but beating legend mode was actually a pretty different experience than it was the last time around because as new characters and dlc has been introduced some of them have been integrated into legend mode and you know what i actually think the story here is pretty dope as a big old zelda nut seeing all the various timelines and characters crammed into a relatively cohesive story was really wild and cool and the fact that some dlc characters were integrated into the experience rather than feeling like afterthoughts is something i really appreciated i'd go so far to say that a lot of the dlc characters like tingle or young link are actually more fun than the base characters and they all play super differently from each other especially lincoln who is basically a female version of link armed with a crossbow and a pair of boots and she's extremely cool i want a lingual game man she is awesome legend mode also has 32 stages which doesn't sound like a lot but here's the thing each stage has a heart piece a heart container and two golden sculptures and to collect those you have to fulfill challenges or conditions that are often specific to a certain character and one of them can only be done on hard mode but i had to do hard mode anyway because this game features freaking check marks for each difficulty which means that in order to obtain true completion i had to do each of these levels in legend mode four times you're gonna hear me use the word repetitive a lot in this video because well yeah it is super goddamn repetitive and i'm not great at math but i'm pretty sure 32 times 4 is well over a thousand wait it's it's just 128 well well it felt like a thousand let's just call it a thousand but overall legends mode only took a little bit longer this time than it did last time there's also free mode which has a lot of overlap with legend mode but allows you to play any mission with any character or weapon combo that you please and was actually a much more convenient way to get some of those specific character collectibles now a feature they added in the first port of the 3ds that i actually really love is the ability to instantly swap characters on the fly though it mostly just made me wonder why i couldn't do that from the very beginning the reason being is that in the original version of hyrule warriors when you play as a character you may not like for me in this case agatha i would have to get good at playing as a character i really dislike however now i can pick another character i'm really great at and i can switch to that character and not play as agatha or whoever else i don't like playing as alright so that's two modes down it probably seems like we're making really great progress right wrong so wrong and naive and foolish our struggle has not even really begun let's be real next up is challenge mode which was also a dlc edition you may notice a trend here there are many many things that weren't in the base game and this entire mode is one of them there are three types of challenges the battle challenges which mostly involve killing a certain number of enemies in a time limit and of which there are only three actual challenges and they're relatively quick to do piece of cake except no nothing is easy or simple you and i.e fool because i had to do each one of them with every single one of the characters in the game because of course i did life is pain and meaningless and then there are the boss challenges which also break down into three types one in which you have to defeat a certain number of enemies in the time limit and can make more enemies appear by defeating bosses and then there's the brave battles where i had to face indefinite waves of enemies and bosses until the timer ran out and lastly survival battle which limits your ability to heal as waves of deadly assassins come after you and if that's not enough yes i also had to earn a perfect a rank on all of these challenges with every single character why not and then there's ganon's fury which is the only mode in the game that allows you to play as the dark beast version of ganon and this is actually pretty cool even if it means more missions to get a ranks on now the only other issue is his missions are super long and he's just another character that needs to be leveled up all the way through which can only be done in this specific mode which means you have to do the challenges over and over and over again in order to get gannon into a better levels position so he can actually beat all of his challenges the same goes for cuckoo's fury which unlocks after completing ganon's fury and essentially is the same thing but with a gigantic cuckoo chicken which is funny i'm not saying it's funny but the humor wears pretty quickly thankfully i didn't have to worry about leveling either of these big boys all the way up actually this is a great chance to take a break from walking through these modes to talk about leveling up these characters the base game of hyrule warriors had a level cap of 100 which you may notice is considerably lower than 255 and with so many more characters that means a lot more grinding to get to the max level although on a personal note i don't actually consider getting everyone to level 255 to be a completion requirement but it ended up being absolutely necessary if i wanted a chance in hell of doing all the challenges all the adventure map stuff all the basically everything in the game okay which brings me to the bazaar let's talk about the bizarre real quick which breaks down into a few different categories there's the training dojo which is specifically for leveling up characters by spending rupees to bring all the characters levels up to the level your main character is at now this sounds super convenient but gets very expensive really fast and the game caps you at only 10 million rupees so at the end of the day it's easier to just grind for levels on a certain map or two then we have the apothecary where you can use parts from enemies to give your characters bonuses some of which are pretty dope and can help rack up more experience points rupees or food drops for your fairies which oh my god i'm gonna get into it in a bit i don't want to but i will then there's the smithy which is where you can modify your weapons some characters only have one weapon type and some have way more link's got six because of course he does but each weapon has a base attack power and modification slots some of which have locks on them that can only be broken by killing a certain number of enemies and you can fuse weapons with each other if you want to transfer certain skills over and it's all much more involved now there are so many more characters but the most important weapon obviously is the master sword because this is a zelda game it's kind of a zelda game either way you gotta have the master sword and once i unlocked every single weapon for every single character in the game the purple lock on the master sword skillset locks becomes red meaning i can unlock the true power of the master sword and by doing so not only does it make it the master sword the most powerful weapon in the game but it also unlocks every 10 000 locked moveset for every weapon in the game for every other character this skill that is locked is called legendary and it raises the base stat of any weapon to be much higher than most meaning you can make a pretty powerful weapon for any of your characters however you can't unlock the 000 kill lock on the master sword until you've unlocked every single level of every weapon in the game for every character which is a way bigger ass this time around because there are so many more characters and getting that trait early would be very helpful for completing everything else but it's typical of the interlocking nonsense of this game that it's locked behind its own series of insurmountable tasks got it no good there's one last element of the bazaar and it's easily the most important and most annoying from a completion perspective i of course am talking about the badge market which is you know the market where you buy badges shut up there are three types of badges attack defense and assist and they come in varying levels all the way up to gold providing permanent buffs and new combos for every weapon for every character in the game unlocking those badges means farming for specific materials and it's just it is so much farming to get them all and i had absolutely no choice but to get them all for every character because each character even has a 100 meter tracking their badge progress and you know i love a good 100 meter but this many characters is just it's so much you guys and it's so much more than it was last time and i'm i'm just i'm so tired and getting them all isn't even as linear or simple as it seems because some of the dlc characters require specific materials that can only be obtained by other characters including other dlc characters so it's all interlocking and required me to actually plan out what order to do what stuff in on what map zone and what enemies to hunt down if i didn't want to waste a bunch of time and by the end of it all i had basically turned into that charlie day meme you know the one yep there i am that's me because so much of the stuff in this game is like that either poorly explained or interlocking and interconnected to the point that completing it means drawing up graphs and schedules if you want to do it in even a remotely efficient way which brings me to the last two modes which i saved for last for a reason well actually for two separate reasons one of them is bizarre overly complicated and so confusing that i'm honestly trying to even have to explain it at all so we'll start with the other one the big grand daddy of them all adventure mode which is honestly the meat and potatoes of this game legends mode may be a good spite-sized meal adventure mode is where it's at it's where most of the content is and is largely responsible for my number of gameplay hours ballooning the way that it did that's right everything i've detailed so far is only a small fraction of the game isn't that a fun fact that doesn't make you feel like you've suddenly untethered from reality because while adventure mode did exist in the base game it was a much more limited form initially there was just one adventure mode map based on the map from the original legend of zelda which i thought was pretty damn cool especially considering that the knowledge of the original map actually helped me locate secrets on this specific map and i felt like i was actually rewarded for being an obsessive zelda fan and that probably would have been enough because this map is huge some of the challenges are really quick but just that first map alone has 126 squares if you're thinking that sounds like a lot or that's too many well then guess what you're right but also you're so so so wrong because it's only scratching the surface as they've added maps with dlc adventure mode has become monstrous there's the master quest map which is basically just a way harder version of the zelda one map but there's also a twilight map that knots twilight princess the termina map from majora's mask the great scene map from wind waker a master quest version of that wind maker map the cohen island map from link's awakening the grand travels map from phantom hourglass and spirit tracks and the low rule map from a link between worlds and if you're thinking that i just said the word map too many times and it no longer sounds like a real word you're not wrong map map map maps maps on maps on maps and maps map map map map map map map any way you cut it there is an ass load of maps most of them are smaller than the first one but it still adds up to an unreasonable number of challenges and essentially quadruple the game's overall completion time and even though it's admittedly kind of cool to see all those zelda games paid homage to it's probably not worth well i don't know the hundreds and hundreds of hours grinding that is required to complete them oh you know it's kind of crazy uh in all this map talk i almost forgot the rewards map which is a much smaller but requires puzzle pieces obtained from collecting the sculptures and what's even crazier is that a lot of the maps have their own mechanics but they all use something called item cards which you need to solve puzzles and find those aforementioned secrets each square's challenge gives a battle victory item just for beating it which is usually an item card but sometimes it could lead to a cosmetic item like a costume for a character each square also has an abric requirement for specific character and a treasure to find it's a lot of things for each square and there are so many squares on each map and there's just so many more maps there used to be and you got sculptures to collect you got weapons to unlock you got characters to unlock you've got heart containers and heart pieces to unlock there's there's just there's just so much this took me so long you guys first i had to worry about getting everyone upgraded and leveled up just so i even stood a chance in the master quest maps but even just playing for an hour or two most days over the course of multiple years it just felt like a never-ending slog let me be real with you guys uh if you were trying to power level your characters the best way to do it is to play uh the bottom left map in zelda one master quest map because for some reason there's a lot of guys a lot of enemies and you can average one to three levels sometimes seven levels if you're good i have hours and hours and hours of footage of me grinding for levels on this map this should not be how you play a game play one map to get to the highest level possible so you can even just remotely play the rest of the game that's how [ __ ] up this all is and when i got to the majora's mask map i definitely have flashbacks to the goddamn train experience please stop reminding me and doing all these maps with the other modes was another case of interlocking objectives where doing things in an unnecessarily complex order was actually super helpful which brings me to the last mode which i honestly hesitate to even call the mode because it overlaps with every other mode in the game and actually has the potential to break the game and help you really well if you play your cards right i am talking about my fairy mode which i'm honestly dreading even having to explain it because it's so weird and poorly designed and explained and unnecessarily complicated that i probably going to explain it wrong to you guys my brain is trying to put the words in order they're just turning into soup and completing this game has already turned my brain into soup so now the word soup and the brain soup and the map soup are just mixing together and it's just soup all the way down you guys soup city [ __ ] here we come but i'm gonna try so here it goes my fairy mode was added in the 3ds version and it goes like this a fairy can now be found in many jars in different squares in adventure mode and these fairies come with five personality traits these traits are presented on a little graph and can be altered by feeding your fairy specific foods and feeding certain foods to your fairy will boost some of their personality traits while negatively affecting others now this is important because getting specific traits to a certain level is what allows you to unlock moves and spells for your fairy and some of these moves especially the rainbow tier moves that require you to boost basically all of your fairy stats are incredibly powerful to the point of being broken there are big aoe attacks which are great but i was a bigger fan of the fountain spells which give you infinite magic or special for 90 seconds and stack with each other which means that in conjunction with some of those big fairy bomb moves i was able to literally rack up thousands of kills in seconds like an unstoppable murder god that i am in order to max out all those traits though you have to revive these fairies which means looping it back from level 99 to level one prestiging if you will this will allow you to change a personality trait along with its name although i honestly was fine with the ridiculous default names like boy lee or left lee or becca but i just named mine trogdor because the burninator always burns the countryside and theoretically it's possible to have a bunch of fairies who are all specialized with different types traits moves names and outfits but i took the route of pouring all of my time into one ultra fairy which was a really tedious and confusing process that took over 20 hours just on its own but ultimately this paid off a huge amount by letting me wipe out enemies in the blink of an eye and essentially becoming invincible in a lot of the challenges and adventure remote stuff i just explained to you all all told though it felt like it's super unnecessary addition to the game there are already so many weapons and badges and characters and then my fairy mode asks you to do a whole bunch of freaking math to figure out the stats of each food how to farm for it and how to reincarnate your fairy and do it all over again and again and again and again until you have all the spells because fun fact there's a metal aka achievement that you have to get to get all of the spells on one fairy sometimes math is a necessary evil but i don't want to have to take an ap stats quiz in my head just level up a fairy's personality traits and don't get me wrong some people might get joy out of customizing their fairy but after so many hours spent on this game it almost felt like hyrule warriors was trolling me with so many new fairy specific things to worry about gear spells traits food it's just between the endless maps and the collectibles and more than 30 characters and a whole bunch of the goddamn fairy things it was all just too much and progress was always so incremental i would grind for hours only to make just a little bit of headway on whatever problem i was working on but unfortunately now that i've gone through every mode i'm done i'm done i did it hell yeah you guys i get my life back oh no wait no i don't because the universe is nothing but cruel and random chaos because i haven't even talked about the medals which are hyrule warriors list of in-game achievements because i simply can't have nice things anymore normally one of the nice things about playing a switch game is not having to worry about achievements but of course hyrule warriors from wii u to 3ds to switch provides some of its own because it's just thoughtful and considerate like that the metals are also one of the main reasons i had to literally do everything there are medals linked to the fairies to each of the maps to getting all the badges to leveling up characters to beating everything on the hardest difficulty to getting an a rank on every single mission on every single square on every single map and on and on and on and on and on and on and of course the last medal is for getting all the other medals because they wouldn't be achievements if there wasn't a platinum equivalent and then of course on top of all of that there's there's that's it all those modes and maps and collectibles and foods and resources and moves and combos and badges and medals and the nightmare is it over i think i think it's finally over i'd say i'm relieved but it feels too good to be true i'm warned that if i let my guard down this game will find a way to drop even more new content on me somehow because this isn't the same game that i completed back in the day it's five times worse with an ocean of new content all of which interlocks together into a true completion nightmare that makes the original version of the game feel like a cakewalk in retrospect look i hate to complain about extra content in the game but after a certain point it feels less like added value and more like a personal insult to me i still can't get over the fact that i am done with this game and completed it you guys again it's done sword in the heart i did it and what did i get for all my troubles just take a guess not much which you'd think i'd be used to by now but on this one it still really stings yes there's a steady stream of weapons and badges and moves and costumes being thrown at you throughout the game and those costumes include the cool ones you get by completing the rewards map but for a game that literally has something called a rewards map the game is shockingly light on actual rewards that i feel are tangible the rewards don't feel like rewards they feel like mechanics that are integrated into the game metals serve as markers for completion progress but they don't actually do anything it's all just completion for the sake of completion which really doesn't feel like enough when the game is this damn huge it was unsatisfying the first time around and that was when the game was way way shorter and honestly even though i largely enjoyed the experience back then it left me feeling like i never needed to play another dynasty warrior style game as long as i live and let me be clear the big difference this time around versus the previous time is that i completed the original hyrule warriors in a bubble i got it early for nintendo as an early product i had it for three to four weeks and there was nothing online other than japanese tutorial videos from then until now there are plethoras and plethora of tutorials and methodologies to optimize your time spent which helped a lot but it didn't make a difference because the content that was included in the end was just so much more that the optimization eventually runs out and you know what i'll make that statement again about how i never need to play another dynasty warrior style game as long as i live which may seem like a bold statement given that age of calamity just came out but i don't care between semi lackluster sales and the huge amount of additional content in this game i am honestly shocked that they even announced a follow-up and looking at what's out there the game is probably much much better than hyrule warriors originally and while it's cool that it's rekindled interest in hyrule warriors as a franchise and focuses a lot on the early days of breath of the wild which everyone loves obviously i learned my lesson from this game and i will not be fooled again if i ever do complete age of calamity it'll be way down the road when i am sure that all the content has been released so i'm not constantly trying to play catch up i poured weeks possibly months of my life into this game i'd say years at this point and then i got hit in the face by a constant flood a new content that never stopped and it made that first playthrough feel like it meant absolutely nothing even though that first playthrough was hundreds of hours and with no real completion reward i'm done i know i'm a glutton for punishment but even i have to draw the line somewhere this game has been hanging over me for years and i truly cannot tell you how good it feels to have it done gone banished from existence the thought of subjecting myself to this again is ridiculous no thank you it's not happening i would never in my life never on my worst enemy have them complete this game never while i recompleted hyrule warriors definitive edition there were 29 playable characters unlocked with all their 45 weapons to max level of level 255 which unlocks a total of 1 740 heart containers as well as unlocking over 200 of their playable costumes and while we're at it let's just talk about how i also knocked out 260 sculptures and i also unlocked the ganon and cuckoo challenges which i totally beat speaking of beat 10 separate adventure maps each with countless squares and challenges it was manageable the first time but with all the dlc added just trying to figure out the exact number of squares i traversed through made my brain melt so i don't know let's just say a million a million squares conquered just kidding it's one thousand and seventy map squares conquered and all right let's talk about all of the a ranks i achieved i achieved one thousand three hundred 380a ranks across the entire game on all map squares and of all challenges for all characters 60 achievement medals earned which is a bit more than last time because of the ones tied to the dlc maps i'm still not sure why this game needs in-game achievements but here we are 1020 hours of play time which means that between both play-throughs on the wii u version and this version i have sunk approximately 1 270 hours of my life into some variants of this game even just saying this out loud bums me out a lot but hey it also makes me feel like an unstoppable hero completion giveth and completion taketh away and one tingle costume to mark my shame at being defeated by this game on a train with bill trinin challenging me at that which if we're being honest yeah i still have that stupid costume for some reason i did it it's done and while there are still plenty of new game plus games left i truly feel like this marks the end of a stage in my life one in which i thought about hyrule warriors at least a little bit every day for multiple years but if i can complete this game then there's no game i cannot master no mountain i cannot climb and so it's time to look to the future and put the past behind me hyrule warriors is still a decent game at best and there's truly a disgusting amount of content here for completionist out there but i cannot in good conscience recommend that you try to complete this game this was my burden and my burden alone and it's no longer my burden so with that in mind guys i still give this game my completionist rating of finish it finish it you

Channel: The Completionist

Views: 752,392

Rating: 4.9445682 out of 5

Keywords: hyrule warriors, zelda, link, hyrule warriors gameplay, hyrule warriors review, hyrule warriors definitive edition, hyrule warriors definitive edition review, hyrule warriors definitive edition gameplay, age of calamity, age of calamity ganon, ganon, calamity ganon, completionist, PBG, peanutbuttergamer, jirard khalil, zelda month, nintendo, game reviews, hyrule warriors legends, hyrule, switch, nintendo switch, review, gameplay, barry kramer, dynasty warriors, the legend of zelda

Id: u5siRHAQXIs

Length: 31min 42sec (1902 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020