God of War has been a huge hit for Sony and has been one of the biggest game releases of the year. The game continues to sell well and in the UK sales charts, the game has held the No. 1 spot for four consecutive weeks so far.

It has now broken the record for the most consecutive weeks at number 1 in UK Charts for a Sony published game. The record was previously held by The Last of Us: Remastered. However, there has been a 30% dip in sales of the game as compared to the previous week. It’s possible that the game will no longer retain the top spot with upcoming releases such as Detroit: Become Human, State of Decay 2 and Hyrule Warriors on the way but you never know. Other games on the charts this week include Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze at No. 2, Far Cry 5 at No. 3, and more.

Let’s wait and see just how much longer God of War will retain the top spot in the charts.

Nintendo’s hack and slash action adventure Hyrule Warriors, developed by Team Ninja and Omega Force and based on the popular Zelda franchise, will be releasing for the Nintendo 3DS. Check out the announcement trailer (in Japanese) above.

Hyrule Warriors originally launched last year for the Wii U and allowed players to assume the role of various characters across the Zelda universe to battle the forces of evil. The 3DS version seems to include two new characters with Tetra and King Daphnes Nohansen Hyrule, both from the Wind Waker. If you buy the 3DS version, you can use it to unlock all the Wii U version’s characters.

Interestingly enough, the 3DS version will apparently be featuring all the DLC characters released thus far. More information will likely be revealed at Nintendo’s E3 Direct presentation on June 16th, 9 AM PST so stay tuned for more information and let us know what you think of the news in the comments.

One of the big surprises of last year was Wii U exclusive Hyrule Warriors. What had initially seemed to be a cheap, Zelda themed Dynasty Warriors knock off turned out to be a genuinely compelling, and amazingly fun action game. Hyrule Warriors went on to be very well received, and proceeded to sell a million copies worldwide as well, adding a desperately needed heavy hitter to the Wii U’s lineup.

According to Tecmo Koei, the custodians of the Warriors franchise, its effects were even more far reaching than that, however. According to them, the game may have been responsible for revitalizing the brand.

“Over the years we’ve seen a sales decline. The Dynasty Warriors series is targeted towards the core fans. But we’ve had a few collaborations recently that have given the franchise a second wind because they’ve brought in new fans that hadn’t given Dynasty Warriors a chance. So Hyrule Warriors gave the series some freshness,” said Koei Tecmo producer Akihiro Suzuki.

He didn’t stop there either- according to him, it is very important to now manage the franchise’s newfound popularity and fans carefully. “Now our task is to keep the new players happy now that they’ve had a chance to play. But overall with the franchise, we need to keep it fresh, both the Dynasty Warriors and the Samurai Warriors brands.”

Of course, since then, Japan alone has seen the release of at least three Dynasty Warriors (or Dynasty Warriors-like) titles, so I’m not sure just how well the lesson was learned, really.

The Dynasty Warriors/Zelda hybrid action title Hyrule Warriors, created by Team Ninja, Nintendo and Koei Tecmo, has been announced to have shipped 1 million units worldwide since first launching in Japan this past August. Actual sales numbers haven’t been revealed but a game to have shipped that much in a handful of months indicates relatively strong demand.

Hyrule Warriors offers gameplay similar to Dynasty Warriors but features famous Zelda characters instead. You can control Link, Zelda, Sheik, Impa, Ganondorf and many other titular entities, each with their own attacks and special moves. Some characters even have additional weapons which further mix up the variety of attacks on offer.

If you’re interested in picking up the game, you’ll be happy to know there’s plenty of additional content also available including the Majora’s Mask DLC.

What are your thoughts on the overall success of Hyrule Warriors worldwide? Let us know in the comments below and stay tuned for more information on the same.

(Source)

The hype is real. For those of you that are well acquainted with The Legend of Zelda series, you will know that the Master Quest has been a long standing challenge offered to gamers since the 1986 original where players could name themselves ZELDA for a horribly more difficult version of the game.

 Today, the Hyrule Warriors Master Quest DLC drops and is available for $7.99. Included in the pack is Cia, the powerful black magic sorceress, her companions Volga who was designed around Volvagia (Link’s once friend turned enemy if you’ve followed the manga series which is excellent) the Dragon from Ocarina Of Time and Wizzro who seems to be designed around the classic Wizzrobe design. All three are available as playable characters, but there’s one more inclusion that is far more significant.

Links trusty steed Epona returns to take to the field alongside her master and do battle with the dark swarms. This, plus the inclusion of Adventure Mode and seven new weapons and new clothing makes for on hell of a package. Honestly, I personally find that this game is just moving from strength to strength.

Against all logic, common sense, or odds, Hyrule Warriors exists, has released, and is a success. And a roaring success at that, especially over in the west, where the idea of a high octane action game based in the Zelda universe seems to have gone down quite well. And that’s putting it mildly.

Anyway, we recently got three new character trailers for the game, one for each of the new villains that will be newly playable in the game via free DLC. The characters are Cia, Volga, and Wizzro, and they are already playable in the Japanese version of the game. But don’t fret, they will each be coming over stateside too.

In the meantime, if you are interested in seeing what each of them brings to the table, make sure to watch the character trailers for all of them, embedded above. And stay tuned to GamingBolt for our coverage of Hyrule Warriors.

Epona, Link’s iconic horse from the Legend of Zelda series, will be added as DLC to the Wii U exclusive action game based on the Zelda universe, Hyrule Warriors, Nintendo confirmed today.

This announcement comes to us from Zelda series director Eiji Aonuma, who posted this on Nintendo’s Miiverse, specifying that Epona would act as a weapon in the game.

“In the Zelda series, players never had a chance to tackle bosses by galloping around them with Epona like in Hyrule Warriors,” he added. “So I hope fans will enjoy playing as Zelda characters in a game with a different type of action than you typically find in the original series.”

The Master Quest Pack will be available to everyone for free who bought the Season Pass (which costs $20). It should also be available for purchase separately in the eShop.

Stay tuned for more of our coverage on the game.

The latest UKIE game charts are now available courtesy of Gfk Chart-Track and Bungie’s Destiny is still on top after debuting two weeks ago. Despite sales dropping by 78 percent, the PS4 bundles of the game are still selling strong. The bundles made up 72 percent of hardware in the past week.

Disney Infinity 2.0 surprisingly debuted in second place with 32 percent higher sales than the original. Nintendo’s Hyrule Warriors had a very strong start as well at third place while Watch Dogs sat comfortably in fourth place. The Sims 4 is now at fifth while Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Minecraft: PS3 Edition, The Last of Us: Remastered and Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare making up the remaining top ten.

Destiny has been doing extremely well since its launch with Bungie reporting the average play session to be three hours long (that too on weekdays) with more than 137 million hours logged since launch.

Hyrule Warriors is set to debut in North America and Europe this month for the Wii U, thus bringing the action of Dynasty Warriors-meets-Zelda to the English speaking masses. However, at one point, Hyrule Warriors was meant to be more like a classic Zelda title.

This was revealed by Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma in conversation with Nintendo Life. It was Omega Force producer Yosuke Hayashi who came forward with the idea. “At first, when Hayashi-san approached me, he wanted to make this title closer to a Zelda game than a Dynasty Warriors game – that extended to having boss battles in the dungeons and [having] certain characters in the game.

“However, Miyamoto came along and up-ended the tea table, saying, ‘no, that should not be the case. What we’re doing here is grafting Zelda onto the Dynasty Warriors experience’. It was a reversal of the original proposal from Hayashi-san, which was adding elements of Dynasty Warriors onto the Zelda franchise. It ended up being the other way around based on Miyamoto’s direction.”

Hayashi for his part wanted to “strike that balance of making a game that Zelda fans will enjoy that is different from a typical Zelda game, that has enough elements that people will enjoy but also not losing Zelda fans

“We ourselves are Zelda fans as well, so we had to ask ourselves the question of what is it that makes a Zelda game, and how many of those elements do we need to include. Up until the very end, we kept adding different elements to the game until we struck a balance that we were happy with.”

Hyrule Warriors has been reasonably successful in Japan as a result – how will it fare in the rest of the world? We’ll find out in the coming weeks.

Japan’s software sales for the week of August 18th to 24th have been revealed courtesy of Media Create and much to the surprise of no one, Level 5’s Youkai Watch 2 is still on top. It sold 77,465 units and has notched up 2,289,983 units over its lifetime. It’s a major success over the original over the original.

Meanwhile, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us: Remastered has debuted in Japan for the PS4 and managed to sell 30,587 units in its first week. Diablo III also made its debut with 15,816 units sold and interestingly enough, Nintendo’s Hyrule Warriors dropped down to seventh place in the charts. It managed to sell 15,142 units with lifetime sales at 84,232 units. It’s not bad but considering the hype and overall positive response in its first week, it seems a bit sobering.

Regardless, Nintendo’s still dominating in the charts. Yoshi’s New Island sold 12,931 units (lifetime units at 157,092) and Mario Kart 8 sold 12,075 units for lifetime sales of 639,710 units.