Breath of the Wild’s Guardian will be playable in Hyrule Warriors, which rules

If you took a brief pause during the Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity section of today’s Nintendo Direct to tweet snarkily about the new Mario Party or excitedly about a new Advance Wars game, you might’ve missed an important announcement: The Guardian from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is coming to Age of Calamity as a playable character.

This forthcoming option — it will be part of Hyrule Warriors’ $19.99 expansion pass — will let you unleash eye-laser fury on waves of Bokoblins in the delightful don’t-think-about-it-too-hard mass-murder style of Koei Tecmo’s Dynasty Warriors games. Fighting a Guardian in Breath of the Wild can be pretty miserable, but fighting as the (Battle-Tested) Guardian looks like it is going to absolutely kick ass.

The Battle-Tested Guardian will be added to Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity in Wave 1 of the expansion pass, Pulse of the Ancients, on June 18. The second wave is slated for November.

Here’s everything else coming in that expansion pass:

Image: Koei Tecmo/Nintendo

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity was released in November 2020. In our review of the Switch game, we called it the “next best thing” to experiencing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild all over again. “Age of Calamity allows you to spend more time with beloved characters in a world you may not have wanted to leave in the first place,” we said in our review. “Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this is that Age of Calamity pays homage to everything that made Breath of the Wild great while also establishing its own distinct sense of grandeur.”