i played the first game on the psp years ago, and it was fairly normal: dynasty warriors and samurai warriors characters teaming up to fight a time-distorting demon and his army.
i got the third game while it was on sale on psn last week, and things have apparently spiralled out of control
there’s battles in modern-day cities
At some point the natural conclusion of Dynasty Warriors is having every famous historical and mythological warrior fighting it out in some sort of cosmic Best of the Best right?
There can be more or less to it depending on the game and difficulty level you choose. I have found Dynasty Warriors to be boring because I find the movesets too similar in effect and lacking in variety. Outside of that the enemies or levels don’t do a lot for me so I just find it extremely un-interesting. I had a similar issue with Orochi Warriors 3 and couldn’t play past the second or third level- I just didn’t find the feel of the combat satisfying. I’ve been waiting to find Samurai Warriors for cheap but Koei is very stingy with how long it takes for their games to hit lower prices in sales (I don’t have my hopes up for it though).
I had a lot of fun with One Piece: Pirate Warirors 1 and Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage 1 because if you just start the game straight away on Hard Mode I found them to become interesting games about crowd control. Both of those games control a bit differently from DW and provide a broader range of character concepts and move interactions, and perhaps most importantly ways to cancel animations, so there’s more to do than just mash a particular string over and over. Since you’re so under-leveled you have to be very careful with how you approach the enemy crowds since you can get into deadly situations really easily. You have to find ways to splinter people off from the crowd or you need to find a way to hit enough of them at once that you won’t be hurt mid-animation (which can become even more difficult if projectile based enemies are involved).
Likewise, the Sengoku Basara games provide an interesting array of movesets and character concepts but that’s a game more explicitly about score than strict enemy difficulty (the more recent games have put more emphasis on developing the enemy variety and AI but it’s not quite there yet). I enjoy those for figuring out the individual character mechanics and how to get the best scores and longest combo. Since you need to keep enemies around to hit and maintain your combo going, you effectively use your attacks as transportation mechanisms for the enemy crowds, moving them across the battlefield in the directions you need to go to form a “combo bridge” from one area to the next. Every character’s moveset is very gimmicky and is fun to play with this goal in mind.
Not really, I only ever played around 5 minutes of the JP version as a curiosity. My immediate impression was that it was the State of Emergency of Musou games, just giving you huge crowd to mash buttons in, but that really isn’t enough time to judge the game off of. Is it good?
Oh neat, I didn’t know it had some strategy based stuff in there. I’ve been meaning to try out Bladestorm: Nightmare because I hear it’s like Kessen (I enjoyed K2 greatly back in the day) but, again, the thing never goes cheap enough for me.
