The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – The Master Trials

What does a landmark title like Breath of the Wild get for its first DLC? A retread of the bonus dungeons from Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, apparently. Rather than a malicious reselling of established content, however, it feels more like the developers scrabbling to put something together on short notice. There’s some new (mostly redundant and self-referential) equipment and some exploration assistances that are actually extremely useful. But the centrepiece is the Trial of the Sword, a 45-floor combat challenge that strips away your existing equipment and leaves you to scavenge what you can from your enemies.

A forcibly balanced version of BotW’s solid combat sounds theoretically worthwhile, but it forgets that the beauty of that combat was its complete openness in approach and difficulty. The Trial of the Sword gives you little to no protection and asks you to take on endgame threats, making it a series of unpredictable one-hit kills and time-consuming retries for a reward that’s not even worth the effort. There’s certainly no valuable story content to be found. Furthermore, despite explicitly stating that “anything can happen,” most of its floors are simply bite-size versions of existing encounters in much less interesting environments.