Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity guide: Four tips for high-level gameplay (2024)

Throughout your journey in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, you’ll knock out literally thousands of enemies. The experience is straightforward enough, but for players looking add some more depth to their experience, this guide is for you.

For general advice on the game, check out our Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity beginner’s guide. This guide takes you beyond mashing attack buttons to get through the game in style.

Get Mipha first

In chapter two, you can begin the process of unlocking the four Champions in Hyrule. You can add Daruk, Mipha, Revali, and Urbosa to your party in any order, but you should prioritize heading to Zora’s Domain first to get Mipha.

Image: Koei Tecmo Games/Nintendo via Polygon

She’s a valuable member of your party, especially if you’re playing on harder difficulties, because she’s the only character who can heal others. While you can find food across each map to refill your health at any time, it’s a limited resource. You barely come across it in higher difficulties, so Mipha’s your best bet to stay alive if you plan on playing the game on a more challenging setting.

When fighting alongside her, the pools of water she creates with her attacks heals allies who are standing in them. Bring her to any boss fights along with other characters to increase your damage output and passively heal other members of your party.

When her special attack is fully charged, she lets out a huge wave of water around her that damages any enemies in the splash zone. This move also refills a large chunk of her health — and the same goes for party members caught in waves.

Do quests to get longer combos

The further you get into the game, the more character-related quests you’ll unlock. These easy-to-complete missions have icons based on each character in your party. To complete them, you must turn in different sets of items based on each quest. These are usually items that you obtain after beating enemies, completing missions, or purchasing them from shops.

The types of quests you can complete will either give your characters more health, or they’ll add more attacks to their combos. You can figure out what you’ll get by checking the reward listed at the bottom of the quest description. Since most of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity requires you to knockout thousands of enemies, having longer and stronger combos makes this process easier.

Whenever new character-specific quests appear on the map, complete it as soon as possible. If you can complete a quest with the materials you currently have, the icon will be larger and pulsating. If you don’t have the materials to complete it, use your Sheikah Sensor to find the items you need.

Do combat challenges as Link

Combat challenges are a frequently unlocked type of quest, denoted by their their sword-shaped map icon.

The purpose of these smaller battles is to familiarize you with certain combat mechanics, such as enemies with different elemental types. Completing them will help you understand more about combat, but you’ll also end up giving the character who finishes them more experience.

For most of these combat challenges, you can do them as any character you like, but do them as Link. He’s is required in most main missions, which means he’ll likely have the most experience out of any of your party members at any given time.

Do this, and Link may have a much higher level than everyone else. This is a good thing. When you level up characters by using the Military Training Camp, you can only increase their level to that of the highest member. If you ensure that Link always has a much higher level than everyone else, then you whole party benefits (as long as you have the rupees to spend at the training camp).

Learn the Sheikah Rune differences between characters

Every character in the game can use the four Sheikah Rune attacks: Stasis, Remote Bomb, Cryonis, and Magnesis. For each member of your team, Stasis and Magnesis act exactly the same when activated. However, Remote Bomb and Cryonis work differently between each party member.

Whenever you get a new character, it’s worth looking at their move list, and then pressing right on your thumbstick to see the explanations for their different Sheikah Rune abilities. No two are alike, so it helps knowing how varied they are.

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

For instance, when Link throws his Remote Bombs, you’ll gain the ability to aim while he tosses out several before chucking a large one to finish. On the other hand, Zelda’s Remote Bomb becomes a controllable robot that passively throws small bombs around it before exploding.

It’s important to know the difference between these attacks because some enemies like bosses and Wizzrobes will be stunned when hit with a Remote Bomb or Cryonis. Knowing how these two specific attacks work for each character will help you be more effective in battle when it comes time to use them to land a decisive hit on a big enemy.