Nintendo's Potential Holiday Hit — Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity
By: Dylan Micheli
Tags: Gaming, Video Games News, Games, Nintendo, Videogames

Nintendo's Potential Holiday Hit — Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

Nintendo is pushing Hyrule Warriors as it’s big Holiday 2020 title, but not just because they have to.

2020 has been a particularly brutal year for everyone, including the games industry. The cancellation of E3, along with many games pushed back to late 2020 or even 2021 has combined to make some understandable yet frustrating video game news. But perhaps no developer has been hit as hard as Nintendo.

Many speculate pandemic related issues have caused the dry spell on general Nintendo Directs, resulting in smaller “partner directs” and individual game announcements instead of the typical 20–40-minute presentations Nintendo fans have grown accustomed to over the past few years. And these supposed issues don’t just stretch into how Nintendo is announcing their games. Nintendo’s largest title of 2020, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, released soon after the world felt the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. But past that, they’ve pushed out just four titles: Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics, Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition, Paper Mario: The Oragami King, and Super Mario 3D All-Stars. Two of those are ports to the Switch. And of Nintendo’s titles coming later this year, Pikmin 3 Deluxe and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, one of them is too (that being Pikmin).

It’s tough to say how well Pikmin 3 will do on the Switch, being a port of a 2013 game and having a 60 dollar price tag attached. Nintendo’s winter lineup this year is therefore banking on Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity to be the big seller.

But honestly, it could be.

The recently announced game falls into the genre of musou, commonly referred to as ‘warriors games’ thanks to the main face of the genre: Dynasty Warriors. In essence, the player runs around open battlefields and fights hordes of enemies in third-person hack’n’slash/beat-em-up style gameplay.

Musou games in general have never been huge sellers. The Dynasty Warriors franchise has been on a downward decline in recent years, sales-wise. Dynasty Warriors 9 reportedly sold around half of what Warriors 8 sold when comparing opening weeks, and 8 had sold less than it’s predecessor, Warriors 7.

But despite the decline in the genre’s popularity, Age of Calamity is in an interesting position for success.

The first installment of the Legend of Zelda branded spinoff, simply titled Hyrule Warriors, originally released in 2014 on the Wii U, with ports to the 3DS in 2016 and Switch in 2018 respectively. The original version sold over a million copies, and the 190k opening weekend units in North America was particularly surprising to developer Koei Techmo. While numbers for the Switch version aren’t public, Koei has stated they were once again surprised at the overseas success.

The Switch version also saw a rise of 1500% on Amazon sales rankings after the Calamity announcement.

The success of Hyrule Warriors on its various platforms, both on release and newfound, proves that there are people interested in this IP and genre combination, and bodes well for the “sequel”. Sequel in quotes because, well, it’s only kind-of one.