How Age of Imprisonment makes you feel like a leader

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment is excellent at making you feel like a leader. The story puts a great emphasis on the fact that you play as these chiefs of the kingdom that don’t just sit there while their soldiers fight their wars for them. They love their land and their people and so they dirty their hands on the battlefield.

The most obvious way they represent you as a leader is that you can choose where the other characters should go on the map. But the thing I got obsessed with while playing this game is this games overworld map. On the most surface level it acts as a mission select screen. Besides showing the current state of the occupied or freed regions it also has shops, training camps and side quests. Although they are very minimalist I really liked these smaller points of interest.

The so called Aside Quests have you either defeat x amount of enemies or deliver y amount of items. They come from unnamed civilians or one of the more important story characters. The reward can be a new combo or extra hearts. From a gameplay perspective they were even less engaging than typical fetch quests for me because i was very likely that I already had the materials or slain the monsters. What made them interesting was a little story framework they used. There’s one setup text box that explains why people need you to do that stuff. And one at the end that concludes this micro story. Think of it like Pokémon NPC battles where they sometimes open with a setup line and after you beat them there comes a punchline. They have found so many angles from which to tackle this simple story structure and there are some cute little arcs here that gave these characters depth.

Although they are essentially only two text boxes, the writers gave the world more life with these especially since you can’t freely explore it. Whilst battling all you see are in true Musou fashion literal hundreds of enemies. You not only fight wars but look out for your people and comrades, which is something a good leader should do.