Dynasty Warriors is a very popular Japanese game series in which super-powerful warriors take to historic battlefields and turn the tide of war in their favour.

With Hyrule Warriors, Nintendo has lent out the lore, characters, music and iconic items of the Legend of Zelda series to Dynasty custodians Koei Tecmo, and the result is incredibly weird.

As in many Japanese mash-up games, the story of Hyrule Warriors has the walls of reality collapsing, and the worlds of three seperate Zelda legends - Ocarina of Time, Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword - collide. You'll battle across familiar locations, alongside a large cast of characters from the three games (and beyond), fighting hundreds of insignificant enemies at a time to the strategic benefit of your batallion.

This is the kind of game that can have you laughing out loud at how completely stupid it is, even as you're having a great time playing. The minor enemies are outrageously weak, and as you run from place to place you'll often push your way through crowds of them while they refuse to even try to attack you. Even so, your allies are rarely any stronger, and so if you don't intervene to thin out the crowd with a few sweeps of your weapon you can be overrun and lose.

Most of the game has you sprinting from one side of a battlefield to the other, accomplishing small tasks or protecting certain units while making sure your allied forces have the edge in battle. Enemy captains and bosses, all from various pockets of the Zelda universe, provide the only slight challenge you face in combat, and all the while you're treated to a soundtrack that can only be described as butt-rock cover versions of iconic Zelda music. It's loud and dumb and virtually all power chords, but it's amazing.

Each character feels significantly different to control and fight as, and each has the option of several weapon styles so you can equip yourself appropriately for each mission. There are plenty of game modes to keep you busy, but fighting always boils down to memorising different combinations of button presses to execute huge combos, building up your power to unleash massive finishing moves. This is the same for all characters, but learning to pull off the best-looking moves with all your favourites is still very rewarding.

The depth of the character roster is very impressive, and any Zelda fan will be delighted at some of the more obscure characters you can take control of over the course of the game and the bizarre way characters and features from different games come together in a surprisingly Zelda-like story.

To protect Nintendo's precious characters in terms of image and narrative, Hyrule Warriors introduces four completely original characters. These four stand in contrast to the restrained, demure Zelda creations by being 100 per cent Dynasty Warriors — i.e. one's huge and brawny, one's impossibly sexualised, one's an innocent child with an exposed midriff and one's a ring that transforms into a wizard —  which is jarring, but ultimately fits in with the reality-collapsing motif.

The game may hold special appeal for female fans or those looking for a bit of a shift from the very masculine stoicity of The Legend of Zelda's main character Link. Taking the field as any of a decent range of female Zelda characters is a wonder of fan service, and something you aren't likely to see in the main series.

Royal guardian Impa and the mysterious Sheik are early standouts for their unique fighting styles, while playing as Zelda herself is a blast, and there are some brilliantly weird picks like insect princess Agitha from Twilight Princess and ice-skating spirit Fi from Skyward Sword. With the exception of the aforementioned original characters all are presented with the utmost respect and without the tired tropes often associated with female fighting game characters.

Anybody who's a fan of both Dynasty Warriors and Zelda has reason to be ecstatic with how the result of their weird little venn diagram has turned out.

This is pure, stupid fun mixed with big explosions and a whole lot of celebration for one of Nintendo's most beloved franchises (the over-the-top treatment of traditional Zelda items is particularly smile-worthy). And while all this means Hyrule Warriors doesn't necessarily tick all the boxes a Zelda purist would like in a game featuring their favourite characters, it does a great job of shining those characters in a new light.

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