Treasure trove.
Anyone who bought Breath of the Wild’s Expansion Pass likely did so on the promise of its second, story-focused installment. With several months to go until the Champions’ Ballad DLC, however, Nintendo’s offered something of a stop-gap in the form of a grab-bag set of additions to its bucolic masterpiece. It may not be precisely what fans are clamoring for, but that might be its strength, as The Master Trials offers a couple of very pleasant surprises.
The headline act, without any doubt, comes in the form of the Trial of the Sword. A new challenge mode of sorts, the Trial draws its primary idea from Breath of the Wild’s best challenge - Eventide Island.
That tantalising landmass draws most players, siren-like, across the sea to its southeastern shores, before promptly stripping them of all their items, and facing them against a series of challenges, without the opportunity to save. Eventide is magnificent, somehow cramming ideas from survival games and XCOM’s Iron Man mode into the game’s already near-perfect structure. It challenged players to forget about the things they’d earned and engage purely with what they’d learned. Utilising Breath of the Wild’s many overlapping systems became the key to surviving (and winning little more than the pleasure of a save point at its final Shrine).
Trial of the Sword is Eventide on a grand scale. Provided you’ve earned the right to hold the Master Sword, you’ll have the option of plonking it right back into its pedestal and progressing through a series of 45 one-shot rooms, most of which are specific combat trials. You’ll begin with no armour, no weapons and no Divine Beast powers, scavenging what you can along the way. Die before you hit one of three checkpoints and you have to do it all again. Depending on your speed, that can mean anything up to a couple of hours’ progress can be lost if you’re not careful. This is truly something for Breath of the Wild’s endgame.
The idea of centering an endgame challenge around combat - one of Breath of the Wild’s most simplistic features - might seem antithetical. That’s because combat is only the means of progression - the challenge comes from applying all your knowledge of the wider game. Sets of five stages work around similar themes, asking the player to engage with environmental conditions while killing off all of the stages’ occupants.
One set takes place entirely in a thunderstorm, meaning you’re best off ditching any metal items you’re carrying (or even better off using them as lightning traps). Another sees you in a vertical wind tunnel of sorts, with enemies placed across floating platforms and almost all armed with bows and arrows, turning it as much into a test of your skilful paragliding as it is your slow-motion bow work. There are areas where you need to deal with constant cold without the clothing to withstand it, or simply defeat boss enemies with the scant resources you have left after all the preceding stages. Even its quiet interim stages (each one appearing after a mini-boss fight) are trials of a kind - you’ll need to turn what little food you have into the most effective possible recipes, and forage for as much as you can. Please, learn from my mistakes: lifesaving fairies run away if you sprint desperately up to them.
Hitting each checkpoint in the Trial may offer a permanent 10-point damage buff to your Master Sword but, like Eventide, completing it all really is its own reward. It may not bring the sheer wonder of stumbling across the main game’s biggest surprises by accident - if you’re able to finish this, it will likely be because you’ve played enough to know how - but it condenses the mechanical joy of Breath of the Wild into a four-hour gauntlet. The upcoming story expansion is rightfully the most exciting post-release addition to the game, but it will genuinely have some trouble beating the pure, adrenal fun of making it through the Trial of the Sword.
That sets an unassailably high bar for the rest of the DLC pack, but much of the rest of the Master Trials’ additions are certainly welcome, if not hugely significant.
Hero’s Path, for example, takes the last 200 hours of your time in the game and presents it as a scrawled track drawn across the game’s map (just press the minus button and hit X to see it). Designed primarily to show you areas you’ve missed while exploring, it’s an extremely useful new tool (I almost immediately spotted a whole jutting landmass I’d never bothered to travel around), but it’s just as pleasant when used as a short-form replay of your time in Hyrule.
There’s an argument to be made that - in its capacity as a navigational feature - Hero’s Path should have been included in the game from the beginning, but the ability to watch it trace its way around the map in fast-forward adds a different dimension. There’s an odd nostalgia invoked as you watch your journey flitting around Hyrule: a shrine detour you remember taking, the first time you retreated from the Hebra mountains to get something warmer to wear, those three to four hundred deaths in the Yiga Clan hideout. That feeling could only really be achieved when used in hindsight. Few are likely to forget their first run around Breath of the Wild, so it’s nice to have the game itself acknowledge that fact.
The Travel Medallion is another new, utilitarian feature that some will argue should have been in the game from the beginning. On this, I’m not as inclined to disagree. After you’ve found the medallion (following a short quest), it can be dropped anywhere, creating a bespoke fast travel point. It’s particularly useful for return trips to areas with materials to grind for, cutting out travel time from Shrines. Nintendo might argue that having it in the game from the beginning would have taken away from Breath of the Wild’s philosophy that players should have to interact with the world as much as possible, but adding the equivalent of a single movable Shrine doesn’t feel as though it would detract from that idea all too much. Either way, for those still on the hunt for the game’s rarest materials, this will be a boon.
The weakest addition comes in the form of new clothing items, all of which are direct references to past games: Midna’s helmet from Twilight Princess, Phantom Guardian armour from The Phantom Hourglass, Majora’s Mask. Most useful of all is the Korok Mask, which shakes when you’re near one of the game’s 900 hidden Koroks. Perhaps better, however, is the Tingle outfit, simply because it causes almost every NPC to recoil in horror when you approach.
Each offers a dose of fan service but, barring the Korok Mask, the effects of each clothing item are familiar enough - attack buffs, higher speed at night, and the ability to avoid being spotted by certain enemies are all abilities present on existing armour. They’re clearly more suited to new players than those who’ve already dealt with the worst Hyrule has to offer. Given how much time has passed since release, it’s unlikely that the first group is larger than the second, making each feel a little underwhelming when you pick them up.
To compound that problem, to avoid simply giving you each item Nintendo includes a set of hints to follow. Those hints, it tells you outwardly, correspond exactly with various areas in the Hyrule Field region. Unfortunately, for anyone who’s spent a fair bit of time in the Field, it turns what should be treasure hunting into a dull trudge from obvious point to obvious point, intermittently turning on the Magnesis power to spot a buried chest. These items are teed up as legendary relics of a forgotten past - finding them half-buried in an old barn seems a tad underwhelming. Simply put, it’s not a great deal of fun to find the items, and they’re not all that useful when you do.
Thankfully, there’s a final addition that adds a great deal more for those who’ve seen most of Breath of the Wild already. Only available from the main menu as a totally fresh start, Master Mode was previously referred to as Hard Mode by Nintendo, but it’s not difficult to see why it would opt for a more grandiose title upon release. This is a more creative increase in difficulty than most games’ upper levels.
While allowing players only a single save slot and increasing each enemy type’s rank by one (red Bokoblins become Blue Bokoblins, for example) aren’t unfamiliar tactics, it has crueler ideas up its sleeve. Familiar enemy placements are disrupted, with new mobs ready to swarm you in unexpected places - not least with the addition of weird, floating platforms (held aloft, grimly, by still-living Octoroks) hovering above the Hyrule horizon. Plus, those enemies now regenerate health if you stop attacking them, and can spot you from further away.
Nintendo’s clearly aiming to indulge those looking for a real New Game+ experience. Stronger enemies earlier on means that Link ends up better equipped than he would usually be, even before he leaves the Great Plateau tutorial area. On the other hand, the addition of what used to be the game’s hardest regular enemy, a Silver Lynel, in the Great Plateau speaks to how much of a challenge the mode will be. That there are entirely new, gold-ranked enemies (including Lynels) is a further promise. It won’t be for everyone (I guarantee some will throw in the towel after being killed by the game’s first enemy after 150 hours of play), but Master Mode is a fantastic way of adding a lot more by changing a little. That’s emblematic of the Master Trials DLC as whole.
The Verdict
The Master Trials doesn’t make any epochal changes to the established Breath of the Wild formula, but by packing in one of the game’s best quests, some welcome new features, and a hard mode to be reckoned with, it more than paves the way for the starrier story expansion to come.
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