#oneaday Day 515: Don't let people who openly don't like a genre review something in that genre

A new Warriors game is on the horizon — specifically, a new Hyrule Warriors on Switch 2, based on the background lore of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom — and, sure as clockwork, a review has already emerged where the reviewer does little more than bemoan the fact that Warriors games have, to them, been nothing but the same exercise in "button-mashing" for the last 30 years.

As anyone who has ever spent a protracted amount of time with a Warriors game will know, this is absolute fucking nonsense, and I would say it blows my mind that we're still getting garbage reviews like this in 2025, but given how much the games media in general has been gutted over the course of the last few years, I'm really not even surprised any more.

The usual retort to something like this is "well, there's value in getting someone who doesn't know a series to review it". And yes. There is, sometimes. There are useful questions such a reviewer can answer, such as "is this a good jumping-on point for newbies, or does it assume knowledge from past installments?" and "does this game make you want to check out more games in a similar vein?"

It's absolutely fine for the answers to those questions to be "no" and for the reviewer in question to not get along with a game, but what is emphatically not okay, and never should have been okay, is getting someone who clearly has predefined negative opinions about what something is to spew vitriol about it, without providing any sort of meaningful criticism in the process.

What also should never happen these days is someone seeing a series or genre with a long history and then completely refuse to engage with that history. This awful review completely rejects the long history of the Warriors series and doesn't even bother trying to interrogate why this series has endured for so long and so very many games.

But that's nothing unusual. You see the same any time you're looking at something which has a long history, but which is somewhat outside the "mainstream". Hell, it even happens with RPGs, still, to this day, particularly if they have an anime-style aesthetic. And most of you reading know quite how fucking long I've been banging that particular drum.

You know what? Let's be fair. Let's go through the review in question (which you can suffer via this archive link if you really want to) and see what they have to say. I will note that the review is anonymous and uses the royal "We" throughout. Make of that what you will. Anyway:

Dynasty Warriors will be 30 years old in 2027, and we can't think of any franchise less deserving of having lasted that long. We don't want to put developers out of work, and clearly someone must like them, but despite innumerable sequels, spin-offs and crossovers, the games have barely seen any evolution in gameplay in all that time, which is a real problem when the core concept is so simplistic and repetitive.

Okay. First of all, this is bollocks. Warriors games have evolved considerably over time, even going so far as to spawn several sub-series — most notably the Empires games, which combine the hack-and-slash core Warriors action with grand strategy mechanics — and having markedly different "feels", both in gameplay terms and in thematic narrative content, between the various sub-franchises, including Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, Warriors Orochi, Hyrule Warriors, Fire Emblem Warriors, Warriors All-Stars and several others.

The overall slickness and fluidity of the combat has improved between "generations" of the series, and different series have experimented with different focal points. The Warriors Orochi series, for example, places a strong emphasis on progression through fusing and customising weapons; the Samurai Warriors series has a focus on completing sub-missions during complete stages; the Hyrule Warriors series has a lot of area capture and territory control elements, and the list goes on.

The crossover games, such as Persona 5 Strikers, do tend to be the best ones (the mainline games are all set in Ancient China)…

And… is there something wrong with them being set in Ancient China? This is a really weird way of putting it. Bonus points for mentioning something related to Persona 5, though, the one and only Japanese franchise that it is OK for People Like This to admit to liking.

This is the third Hyrule Warriors, with the first one being a straight reuse of the Dynasty Warriors formula but with Zelda characters. It had very little in the way of story…

I'm going to stop you mid-sentence there. Not only did Hyrule Warriors have a very strong story (which I wrote about in great detail when the excellent Switch version came out), it also has one of the deepest, most satisfyingly complex overall metagames the series has ever seen (which I also wrote about in great detail).

As the kids say, "tell me you never played Hyrule Warriors without telling me you never played Hyrule Warriors".

One of the key problems is the lack of memorable characters. 90% of the characters in Age of Imprisonment are either completely new — but just bland exemplars of the various races — or sages that were seen in cutscenes from Tears of the Kingdom but never named. They're given personalities here, but inevitably they're all boring, selfless martyrs.

I really don't understand this paragraph. There aren't memorable characters, new characters being introduced is somehow a bad thing, they all have personalities, but those personalities are "bad"? Is that it? I haven't yet played the game myself so I can't comment with authority on this, but there's so much scope for some meaningful engagement with the game and actual criticism of the narrative, and absolutely none of it is realised.

The only exception is a garrulous korok and a mute construct (i.e. robot) that is used as a surrogate for Link.

Okay. Are we getting somewhere? Are you going to tell us what you mean by a "garrulous korok" (should be capital K, by the way)? No? Or exactly how robo-Link came to be — and how his artificial nature affects how Zelda responds to him?

No, none of that. That's all we get.

He's much more versatile than the other characters, and able to use different types of weapons and abilities, but it really doesn't matter because all the game's combat boils down to is mashing the X and Y buttons. Technically there are combos, depending on how many times you press X before ending with a Y attack, which creates a different special effect, but the difference this makes is so mild, and the difficulty level so low, it's effectively meaningless.

This is another sign that the reviewer has spent no real time engaging with the game. Those "combos" are core to good Warriors play, with different combos having different utility functions. Some are great for dealing with solo enemies; some are crowd-control room clearers. Often they vary wildly from character to character, necessitating the player get to know how each character's combo works and how best to use it.

The difficulty level comment makes me feel like the reviewer probably only played on the easiest difficulty level. Warriors games have always had an array of much more challenging difficulty levels, and provided incentive to play them with significantly better rewards. I find it difficult to believe that Age of Imprisonment wouldn't have anything of the sort, but we don't know because the reviewer doesn't tell us.

There are other special moves, either intrinsic to the character or obtained via Zonai weapons, but their primary purpose is countering enemy special attacks, so you tend to just keep them in reserve for that and never use them willingly.

You're… literally describing what they're for, and given that in the next paragraph you heap praise on Tears of the Kingdom for allowing you "so much freedom in how you approach encounters it never gets dull" I find it strange that you never thought to try experimenting with these abilities even a little bit in this game.

The only thing breaking up the ground battles are brief Star Fox-style sequences where you take control of the not-Link construct, which can transform into a jet.

This entire bit — which sounds fucking awesome, by the way — is given only a short paragraph, and then not discussed any further.

The key appeal of Dynasty Warriors has always been that there are hundreds of enemies on screen at once and you can attack dozens at a time with any weapon. That fleeting novelty is all there is to the games, except for a strategy element where most missions involve capturing and holding bases on a larger map.

"This is all there is to this game, apart from this other thing which I'm not going to spend any more time discussing".

If they were going to make a new Hyrule Warriors it needed to have either more involved gameplay or at least a more compelling story.

As we've previously established, this reviewer has apparently never even looked at things like the incredible Adventure Mode in the original Hyrule Warriors, let alone the in-depth progression mechanics. And, given that they say nothing of value about the story whatsoever — which I'll be charitable and say is down to Nintendo heavily embargoing story spoilers — I'm not inclined to take their comments on the narrative too seriously either.

Ultimately, this isn't a review really worth getting angry about — I know that's pretty rich after all the above — because fucking Metro is not anywhere someone goes for worthwhile gaming commentary. But still, for one of the few remaining supposedly professional games media outlets (albeit as part of a larger publication) one would think the editorial standards would be a little higher.

But oh well. This is business as usual for Warriors games, and folks who already know they enjoy Warriors games are probably going to enjoy this one also — I certainly intend to. It's just a shame that we're still hearing the same regurgitated opinions as we had back in the earliest days of the PS2 entries in the series; they were nonsense then, and they're even more nonsense now.

I'll leave you with this, which sums it up probably better than I have (with the small correction that Metro is a British publication, not an American one):

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