The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Expansion Pass DLC (Nintendo Switch)

The Breath of the Wild Expansion Pass bundles two separately released content packs into a single purchase: The Master Trials and The Champions' Ballad. Neither pack reinvents the open-world action-adventure formula Nintendo built with the base game, but both add meaningful hours of content for players who already know they want more time in Hyrule. Pack 1, The Master Trials, is primarily for people who felt the base game wasn't demanding enough. The headliner is Trial of the Sword, a 45-room gauntlet that strips Link of all armor, weapons, and food before it starts. Survive all three sets of floors and the Master Sword stays fully powered up permanently, not just near Guardians. That's a real, tangible reward for a real, genuinely hard challenge. Master Mode runs alongside this, bumping every enemy tier up by one rank, adding regenerating health on all enemies and bosses, introducing floating sky platforms stocked with tougher encounters, and cutting autosaves to a single slot. It makes the whole map feel freshly hostile. The Travel Medallion and Korok Mask round out Pack 1 as quality-of-life tools, the latter being quietly one of the most practical items in the game if you're hunting all 900 Korok seeds. Pack 2, The Champions' Ballad, is the more substantial half. It kicks in after clearing all four Divine Beasts and sends Link through a new sequence of Shrine challenges, including 16 brand-new puzzles, re-battles against each Champion's boss, and a fifth Divine Beast-style dungeon built around a One-Hit Obliterator weapon that forces cautious, tactical play. Completing it unlocks the Master Cycle Zero, a motorcycle that genuinely has no business existing in Hyrule and is absolutely fun to ride anyway. The Ballad also expands the story with cutscenes that flesh out Zelda's relationships with the four Champions, and while the narrative depth still sits on the lighter side, those scenes are among the most charming moments in the whole game. Community reception has been mixed-but-leaning-positive: Pack 1 was widely criticized as thin, while Pack 2 largely redeemed the bundle. The new Shrine puzzles are harder and more inventive than many of the original 120, the final boss is legitimately good, and the new music is a high point. The honest caveats: Pack 1 leans heavily on asset reuse and challenge structures the series has done before for free. The new armor sets are mostly cosmetic nods to past Zelda entries (Majora's Mask, Phantom Ganon, Tingle, Twilight Princess references) and some become outclassed quickly since they can't be upgraded the same way as base-game gear. The overall package offers roughly 15-20 hours of focused new content, more if you do a full Master Mode run, less if you only dabble. The packs cannot be purchased separately, so you're buying both or neither. If you burned through the base game and already miss it, the Expansion Pass delivers exactly what it promises: more of the same, tuned harder. If you walked away feeling done, nothing here will change your mind.

Alex · Scout Team

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