Breath of the Wild’s Questionable Food is Age of Calamity’s Best Recipe

The kitchen is a big part of Breath of the wild, but if you ever end up with a rasterized plate, it’s usually a sign that you got it wrong somewhere along the way. For the most part, you didn’t want to produce “dodgy food,” which the game says is so bad you can’t even watch it. But in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, there is a very good reason for making questionable food.

In fact, my Link’s diet is almost exclusively questionable food now. That’s because, in this hack-and-slash version of The Legend of Zelda, eating questionable food allows you to double rupees per mission. The trap? You will have fewer hearts while the Horrible Food is active. Note that the image below shows that in order to make questionable food you need frogs and the ancient Hylian equivalent of durians, which … gross.

Image: Koei Tecmo / Nintendo Games via Polygon

While Age of Calamity is quite generous with its materials, if you want to do all the side quests on the map, or completely upgrade your weapons and characters, you will inevitably have to grind a bit. But there are some foods that can help you collect more ingredients and rupees, so I found myself cooking these options almost every time. Fortunately, I’ve added enough hearts to all of my main characters that I barely notice when I have questionable food active. But I still get a kick out of knowing that my Link has to soak up a plate of trash every time we go out on a mission.

It is a good Easter egg, reminiscent of the versatility of questionable food in Breath of the wild. In this open world game, questionable food usually only replenishes a single heart … unless you meet Moza, a Hylian cook who specializes in trash making. If you talk to Moza, she will teach you how to cook questionable, rock hard foods that fill your health much more than their standard variants. Thus, some players may find themselves preparing questionable food on purpose. Breath of the wild, as well.

In Age of Calamity, this all harkens back to my gremlin approach to the game. Besides feeding him the old equivalent of a dumpster, my Link is running around with a plush Bokoblin mask on his head – and it creates some hilarious cutscenes.