The much-anticipated Majora’s Mask 3D will be launching in 1 week, but Zelda fans won’t have to wait until then to get a taste of Termina. The Majora’s Mask DLC Pack for Hyrule Warriors was released last night in the US, a week after European and Japanese fans got it. I can personally confirm that it was more than worth the wait.
The Majora’s Mask Pack allows for players to take control of both Smash Bros washout Young Link and controversial cartographer Tingle. Young Link uses the Fierce Diety Mask as his weapon, with his playstyle centering around building up magic and keeping your focus energy going indefinitely. Next to a character who quite literally slices the moon in half for an attack, one might think that Tingle is a wimpy character by comparison. Much to my surprise, the greedy little fairy-wannabe is actually a blast to play as, using his balloon and riches as bizarrely effective weapons in battle. They’ll both be very useful for exploring the new Termina-based Adventure Mode map, which has a lovely rendition of the Clock Town theme accompanying it. Additional costumes were also added, giving Skull Kid duds to Lana, an Ocarina of Time makeover to Sheik and Impa, and numerous masks for characters to wear. Also added were a new arsenal of 8-bit weapons, my personal favorite being the giant 8-bit Fairy that Link can wield.
Even if you’ve met with a terrible fate and are unable to get this DLC, you’ve still got some nice additions in store for you next time you boot up the game. The new free update, version 1.5.0, added some highly requested new features. The level cap was raised to 200, new weapon skills and apothecary mixtures were made available, and more achievement medals were added. The smithy also saw some important changes, now letting you appraise locked weapon skills, sell weapons for rupees, and erase unwanted skills from weapons to free up weapon slots.
More than just the shop got an upgrade in this update. In Adventure Mode, you can now see how much damage you’ve taken over the course of a battle, which can be important to keep track of when you’re aiming to get an A Rank in a level. You can also now conveniently quick-restart levels instead of having to quit, go back to the map, and reload. It’s great to see a developer continue to put out added free functionality like this instead of wrapping it all up behind a payed DLC gate. One thing I did notice while playing was slightly longer loadtimes for maps, likely the result of the new quick-restart function. I’d say it’s a fair tradeoff, especially compared to the amount of time you’d have to spend manually quitting and restarting a mission.
If you want to just pick up the Majora’s Mask DLC on its own, it’ll cost you $7.99 on the Nintendo eShop. If you want to pick up the previous two DLC Packs and the upcoming Boss DLC Pack, then you can save yourself 7 extra bucks and drop 19.99 on the season pass, picking up a bonus Dark Link costume in the process. As previously mentioned, this update and all previous updates are entirely free for anyone who owns the game. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go use Tingle to beat up some moblins.
