Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment shows it's Zelda's era and we're just living it. Not only did the titular princess take over from the green-garbed hero Link in the top-down The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom last year, she's back to do it again in this lavish prequel to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Where Echoes highlighted her book smarts with a copy wand to solve puzzles, here in Age of Imprisonment she's handed a light-powered beam saber and told to get slicing.
Following some accidental time travel shenanigans at the beginning of Tears of the Kingdom, Princess Zelda spends most of that game benched back in the past – Link uncovering the mystery around what happened to her by tracking down collectible flashbacks. In Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, we get to live that history as Zelda links up with the founding rulers of Hyrule as they forge alliances with neighboring clans and take on the might of the evil Ganondorf – whose malevolent power is responsible for the later threats throughout both those main Switch games. It's a similar set-up to predecessor Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, which told an alternate history of a different conflict closer in the timeline to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Age of Imprisonment, however, goes to efforts to stay canon).
