Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda (Switch)

Crypt of the NecroDancer took rogue-like mechanics, dungeon-crawling, and rhythm based gameplay and rolled them all into one experience where every movement and attack moved along with the beat and you’d suffer the price if you couldn’t keep up with the tempo. It was an indie hit, and to celebrate the port to the Nintendo Switch, developer Brace Yourself Games went to Nintendo to discuss the potential for some DLC based on the magnificent music from The Legend of Zelda… only for discussions to turn into making a full-fledged game that married the elements of Crypt of the NecroDancer with the longstanding Zelda series. It was a crossover that was pretty much bound to be successful in some way, even after they decided to give it the unnecessarily cumbersome title to emphasize the two series being combined, but trying to capture the appeal of two different games in a single experience still wasn’t an easy task despite the fusion seeming so natural.

 

Crypt of the NecroDancer’s gameplay style necessitates paying close attention to the beat and performing your actions in time with. This means in Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda, all monsters, projectiles, bosses, and basically anything that moves is beholden to the rhythm when it’s time for combat. Making sure you make the most of each beat will let you gain advantages over enemies who often take extra beats to complete an action or leave themselves vulnerable due to limited movement on their part. Continued success in sticking with the rhythm will boost your power too as a reward, speeding up battles more as the monsters become easier to dispense with. However, this rhythm focus also makes many of the creatures common to the Zelda series more fearsome than usual, as rather than just staying out of their range, you need to consider their beat movements and often get in rather close to have a hope of hitting them.

All of your attacks and movement are done in relation to a grid, so a single hop forward moves you closer but also is meant to match with a single beat of the song. Some enemies like the Wolfos can hop grid tiles diagonally, others like the Octorok and Deku scrub only pop out of the ground and fire when you’re a fair distance away, reptilian warriors known as Lizalfos burst forward multiple steps in a beat but do so in predictable straight lines, and the chubby pig monsters known as Moblins like to hurl their spears from afar to overcome their limited movement. Monsters are often clustered so you have to watch your movement so you aren’t hit by some other creature while trying to exploit a different enemy’s movement pattern, and you thankfully have quite a few tools to help with this. Different equipable weapons can do things like attack two tiles forward or swing out to the sides as well, and you get plenty of weapons and items that can help in combat as you explore caves and find treasures on your fantasy journey. Expected Zelda staples like the bow take a few beats to fire but cover the entire lane in front of you when launched, the bombs can serve as explosive traps as well as proving useful for breaking down cracked walls in dungeons, and the shield or shield equivalent your character carries can reflect projectiles to mess up attackers like the Wizrobe mages with their elemental spells or the Zora fishmen who spit ice balls at you.

 

As you build up your power you can trivialize regular combat some as it becomes much easier to heal and thus damage isn’t a danger, although mistiming your movements will cause them to just not activate, meaning you can’t get totally sloppy. Some of the dungeon crawling does lose it spark as enemy types become familiar, but thankfully bashing baddies isn’t all there is to Cadence of Hyrule.

 

Combat is Cadence of Hyrule’s main focus and where its rhythm mechanics are shown off the best, but there is more to do outside of clearing dungeons and beating bosses. When you start a new game, the layout of the land of Hyrule is randomly generated, and while certain areas like cities assume consistent shapes, the layout of the rest of the world means the places you find hidden caves with extra goodies change each playthrough. Cadence of Hyrule hides many important items in the overworld in addition to extra goodies like health expansions or the contents of the hidden shops. Certain areas will even feature puzzles that can take many forms, some being simple block pushing puzzles, others relating to learning the music notes that play for a classic Zelda song and repeating them back, and some like the Lost Woods involving you following clues to navigate a supernatural forest. When you are in a dungeon or on the world map you often are dealing with plenty of baddies, but the game doesn’t forget to throw in some puzzle-focused moments that thankfully don’t ask you to work with the rhythm as you take your time figuring them out.

Despite retaining the common elements of Crypt of the NecroDancer, Cadence of Hyrule both adds in things that make it feel different or allow you to customize the experience to feel more like a typical Zelda game. Being punished for dying beyond setting you back some carries over from the rogue-like Crypt of the NecroDancer, the player losing all their rupees on death as well as special items like enhancement rings, shovels, and torches. You do collect diamonds by digging around or clearing out rooms that can be used to buy better items, a merchant waiting for you after death to help you stock up before you get back in the action, but this can be tweaked within the game options in the same way you can set the game to Fixed Beat mode. Fans of The Legend of Zelda have never really had strong rhythm mechanics crop up in their beloved series, so Fixed Beat mode can help them out by removing the need to move to the beat. All actions are instead tied to your movement, so when you hop a tile, every other creature or object takes action as if one beat had occurred. You can more slowly plan your approach with Fixed Beat, and thankfully the monsters are still challenging foes due to how their movement and attack options mix when in a group, but you definitely lose a few things by going for a more traditional Zelda approach to dungeon-crawling and adventuring. If you can be content with items like the War Drum being useless in Fixed Beat mode since they can’t enhance your ability to use the beat to your advantage, than you’ll find an experience that is still a blast to play, just easier to get into if you aren’t able to keep up with the music.

 

Speaking of the music, it stands to reason a rhythm game will depend heavily on the strength of the tunes you’re playing too, and Cadence of Hyrule does an excellent job with its Legend of Zelda source material. It does not merely remix the familiar tracks from the franchise, instead adding more layers to the melodies, new portions that lead into and out of the familiar portions, and generally add a more peppy rhythm the player can follow during the action. New instrumentation and added portions help spice up even some of the series best tunes, the Gerudo Desert theme already strong in its original games but becoming a more robust piece with a variety of instrumentation added to it as it progresses. Whistling carries the refrain in the regular version, but the combat version will ride through synths and keyboards before really hitting the guitars hard later in the song, all while carrying easily identifiable beats so you can keep up the battle you’ve found yourself in. Even the regular overworld music while exploring plainer grasslands is given a lot more energy to ensure you can tap your foot to the rhythm, and the boss battles all have fun touches to their sound. The regular bosses are twists on Zelda staples like the living Armos statues becoming Bass Guitarmos statues instead, or the Gohma spider becoming the Gohmaracas, and their new instrument focused form comes with an emphasized presence of that instrument’s sound in their boss themes.

 

As for why this adventure is taking place in the first place, a musician named Octavo has plunged the King of Hyrule, its Princess Zelda, and its hero Link into a deep sleep, the musician sealing off the castle with four magical instruments. All seems lost at first, but Cadence from Crypt of the NecroDancer is called into this world, the player getting to pick either Link or Zelda as the hero she rescues to help save Hyrule. Later in the adventure you can unlock the other characters to play as and they have small differences like weapons or items that the others can’t use, but they all go on the same quest to stop Octavo and save Hyrule. Storywise it is sort of a thinner take on games like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but it gets the important details set up for your musical journey. There are other modes available such as ones that dispense with the story and turn the world into one big dungeon, but since I played the physical release of Cadence of Hyrule, I also got the game’s downloadable content as part of the package. This release not only includes additional music tracks from different composers and additional playable characters but also adds two new major campaigns, one serving as sort of an easier and shorter version of the regular story mode where you play as a villain and the other being the Symphony of the Masks. Symphony of the Masks has you play as the unassuming Skull Kid who uses masks to switch his attack types on the fly, his game world being different from the main adventure and much harder because of it. Skull Kid never gets too big a health bar, his enemies are stronger, and some areas like the Temple of Brainstorms dispense with the decent puzzles of the main game as they pursue an intricate and difficult design that will make your mind melt. The villain campaign is pretty much just a power trip, but Skull Kid’s quest is an intensely challenging extra mode that is worth the experience once you’ve really got a handle on Cadence of Hyrule’s systems.

THE VERDICT: The tightly packed title of Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda practically says all you need to know. The enemies, world, monsters, and most importantly music of the Zelda series are all done justice in this dungeon crawler while Crypt of the NecroDancer carries over its intense rhythm based action, fighting to the beat making even regular encounters engaging. Clever twists on familiar bosses take this even further, and while sometimes the randomly generated dungeons and enemy screens feel like they don’t have enough variety to draw from, the game still does plenty to make its mix of action and puzzles interesting whether you’re doing it to a beat, customizing the campaign as you please, or playing one of the DLC stories.

 

And so, I give Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda for Nintendo Switch…

A GREAT rating. Most of Cadence of Hyrule’s small flaws emerge from trying to keep a piece of one game without having the room to fully integrate it. The enemy variety isn’t as consistent as a Zelda title due to the nonlinear structure, and the rhythm focus means puzzles often don’t get realized to their fullest. However, so much of the game does achieve the impressive task of combining these into something that benefits from both halves of the crossover. The soundtrack is familiar yet catchy in an entirely new way, with plenty of clever elements to help you keep up with the beat while also playing into themes of the area like the boss instruments. The action managing to maintain a consistent level of enemy difficulty and spiking during appropriate battles with tougher foes is the main success of the game, even if later areas let you cheese things a little once you’ve picked up enough goodies like health expansions. However, rewarding you for taking time to explore is important as well, and Cadence of Hyrule also does a good job of laying out its world even if the randomization means it isn’t as cleanly curated as a linear Zelda adventure. The dependence on the beat is both the challenge and sometimes the hindrance as it so often requires constant attentiveness despite making good use of its rhythm elements, but breaks for puzzles and towns do help keep you from getting worn out.

 

Perhaps the only thing that doesn’t mesh well about this crossover between a legendary gaming series and a quality indie title is the overly long name. Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda doesn’t get to pay individual elements as much attention as the source series they come from, but it instead uses much of what it carries over from both halves to complement each other. The music is mixed with a fast-paced gameplay approach, the familiar foes are made fearsome by the grid-based battle system, and the adventuring can hit on challenge and the joy of discovery rather frequently. Even if you need to play it in Fixed Beat mode, Cadence of Hyrule takes the composition of the two games it’s combining and manages to make a harmonious adventuring experience that fans of either half the crossover will likely enjoy.