So, instead of doing the right thing and buying the discounted Persona 5, or Yakuza 0/Kiwami on the PS4, I’ve added another new (i.e. old) title to my recently acquired stack of Koei/Romance-series games that, all in all, cost me as much as a full-price release nowadays.
Romance of the 3 Kingdoms XIII
Samurai Warriors: Kingdom of Sanada
Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate
and now I’ve added Dynasty Warriors 8 ultimate to that stack
So, I think I must have clocked… about 30ish? maybe 40 hours in Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate, and wonder what makes those games so gratifying to play … I haven’t touched any warriors game since Gundasty II came out, so it has been a while, yet it didn’t take me long to feel at home in the admittedly ridiculous fanservice-extravaganza that is Orochi 3, with its rather bizarre mashup of Jean d’Arc, Ryo Hayabusa, Kaguya or Dong Zhuo (spelling kinda right?) …
anyway, iirc at least two people here regularly (or sometimes?) play those games, so I wanna know why you play them, and what brings you back.
… tbh though, what I really came here for:
Where to start with Romance XIII, since the initial entry level here is … high, uh.
it’s been a while since i played an actual koei warriors game, the last one would have been the first dragon quest heroes. it’s nice beating up massive crowds of big cartoony monsters, though it seems like it’s even more grindy than a typical musou game, and it’s only now that i type about it that i realise that that’s probably an intentional bit of tthematic gimmickry, with it being dragon quest and all.
i’m currently playing oneechanbara z2 chaos, in my bid to complete a few of the ps4 games that are taking up hdd space. i guess that series has moved from being a low budget musou knock off with boobs and gore into being a kind of hybrid between a musou game and a stylish action game. with boobs and gore.
also i played orochi warriors 3 on vita a couple of years ago and can confirm that it is an amazing mash up of nonsense
Samurai Warriors absolutely delivers, and brings a nice cast of weirdos to the table, DW8 (which i started playing this weekend) feels like a serious sim in comparison.
And while playing DW8, WO3 and SW4 now, i still have that craving for beating up some Zakus…
I think the musous I’ve enjoyed the most and spent a lot of time with are ones that have unique and varied movesets for the characters (the Samurai Warrior lineage of design that tends to be used for the licensed Koei Musous) and have mechanics give me a bit more to chew on than just mashing against mobs.
Fist of the Norths Star structurally works like a regular DW game but I started it on the hardest difficulty available with my Level 1 characters and that turned it into an incredibly tense game. You are so weak and die so easily, and your attack animations are so slow, that I had to plan my actions in a way that you don’t typically expect from a musou. I had learn how to maneuver enemy crowds and myself into the correct positions to get all potential threats into hitsun otherwise I’d risk getting killed mid-combo. Environmental awareness became important because walls and corners restricted the knockback on attacks and let you do longer combos are a larger group of enemies, and they could like-wise do that against me.
Often times, since I was so weak, most moves in my attack chains would not actually cause hitstun, forcing me to position and time my attacks such that I wouldn’t actually reach the enemy until I was doing a mid-chain attack that hit harder and could actually cause hitstun. This was doubly hard against bosses who were the most resistant to hitstun but I found the challenge legitimately satisfying. The enemy variety also kept things fresh, with the variety of projectile enemies and biker enemies and grunts of different sizes. They all required different approaches and strategies when mixed in groups.
The jump cancel system was the most important feature of that game, followed by the Special cancel, and it’s telling that Koei US recognized this and unlocked them by default for every character in the US release. While every character had unique movesets and a unique Special skill, the ability to jump cancel out of any attack is what granted you versatility in combat. You could choose how much you committed to a combo and cancel it with a movement option that worked as a defensive tool, a spacing tool, and a combo tool (jump combos, changing positioning mid-combo, or starting a different attack chain after the jump). Attacks in FotNS had slow animations but the jump cancels made combat feel very fast paced. The second game removed that mechanic and it was all the worse for it.
I put in over 100 hours into that game, constantly losing and retrying levels from the beginning, until I finally beat the main story mode. By that point I had gotten the PSN Platinum Trophy. I never did go back play the Extra Story modes though.
Some other musous I’ve enjoyed off the top of my head: One Piece Musou 1, the Sengoku Basara Series, Kessen 2 (does that count?)
short update while i wait for the xb1 to finish copying games to the SSD:
Warriors Orochi 4 has been a christmas present, although we did not yet finish co-op’ing WO3.
WO3 status report:
Kasumi has a baseball-bat, and this game gets batshit-insane easy with it. At least on normal difficulty setting, haven’t tried chaos yet … still, favourite team has to be Kuroda with his flying bowling balls, the paperplane dude with the little wolf, and whatever character is en vogue atm. Nothing can stop those three ~~~
service announcement:
I've seen Samurai Warriors-II is listed in the january sale, for those that haven't tried any samurai-warriors flavor yet ...
oh yeah, i really liked how absurd warriors orochi 3 was. everyone from ancient china, japan, greece and also mythology and ninja gaiden having big battles in post apocalyptic cities where there’s also sometimes huge dragons and stuff
i pretty much only play the spin offs and like everyone has acknowleged Hyrule Warriors owns. Fire Emblem warriors is also pretty good, except they didnt put in most of the actually cool fire emblems and gave us shitty fates characters instead
I picked up Hyrule Warriors for switch because people heap praise on it in comparison to Dynasty Warriors, but I was pretty disappointed. Dynasty Warriors 8 is much better in my opinion.
For one, the story is much more interesting. And Hyrule Warriors seems even more tedious because instead of unique officers you fight the same generic wizards over and over. I also find the mechanics of HW overly complicated, which is also a problem with newer DW games but HW is even worse. There are too many meters and charge attack types. I also find navigating the menus in HW to upgrade weapons and such pretty confusing.
being at the helm atm, backlog pruning has commenced a few days ago, and i’ve been starting to rough up Japan’s daimyōs and clans left and right, and it just feels so satisfying to experience these famous battles which actually, absolutely totally, for real, took place in ancient Japan.
yyyyyeppp.
But damn if it doesn’t entertain yer soul to watch these staged battles inacurately taking place in cardboard-cutout kitschy japanese dioramas!
Up next, the Legend of Oda!
I bought Samurai Warriors 4-2 a while back, after trying to decide between getting vanilla or 4-2. Koei always makes it hard to decide because they never put out upgraded versions of a game, just a different version. So vanilla SW4 has the full fledged story mode while SW4-2 has smaller story routes. But I chose SW4-2 anyway because I wanted to play the afro woman.
A week ago I impulse bought One Piece Pirate Warriros 4 after a friend texted me about it. I always thought the OP games have been quite good in their character designs and OP4 is no different. It really amps up the frenetic speed this particular musou sub-series thrives on, adding a dedicated jump button that can be used for jump cancel combos and air dashing, and there’s an entire class of characters built around the potential to stay in the air permanently. It’s got larger enemy numbers with larger area attacks than most musous, and the destructible environments really add to the sense power and scale of an anime property like One Piece. Oh yeah, and you can play genuinely gigantic characters.
The combat is a lot more system heavy. You have unlockable and equippable special abilities instead of a completely defined movelist (this includes the “musou” style supers). You have a stamina bar that limits your ability to do quick-dashes and dash cancels. Characters are classified into four types (Power, Speed, Technique, Sky) that categorize some of their general mechanics, their design sense, and their super mode effects. Power characters can create shockwaves when you slam enemies into walls or the ground with strong attacks while Speed characters use less stamina when dashing, for example. Some characters have longer combo strings in the air than on the ground, some characters only have two hit combo strings.
Commanders and Giant Enemies have armor bars and shield bars whose presence severly dampen your actual damage and you’re encouraged to bait and dodge enemy attacks because their armor bars take massive damage while the enemy is doing an attack. There’s the aforementioned stamina management for both combo purposes and defensive management (you can’t dodge with your dash if you’re out of stamina). Characters have their unique Growth Charts (skill trees) but there’s also a general skill tree that provides stat bonuses for everyone you play, so you can bring up the general stat level of everyone instead of needing to build everyone from scratch if you want to play them for the first time at higher difficulty levels.
There’s just a lot going on mechanically. Still, it’s been a fairly easy game so far. I’ve had it on Hard mode since I started and I’ve rarely had to seriously consider my defense. But it’s fun to see the different kinds of character designs the game has. There’s this one dude who can lay down volcanoes and every time you do strong attacks they erupt and spew boulders everywhere. There’s this other dude who can freeze enemies and kick them to cause a huge domino style chain reaction. Some lady can throw out thunder clouds everywhere and make then spew lightning bolts on command. There’s a guy who can make donuts hover around everyone and they shoot black laser beams periodically. There’s this one lady who can fly around and throw poisonous tornadoes everywhere. It’s seriously great just how well developed the cast is and how much personality they have.
In SW4, they have these Sumo fighter units that look like a scale model version of these giant marine commanders, it’s interesting to see that they went to town with that idea, excellent.
Regarding the numerous spin-offs I have played, the Zelda one (Hyrule Warriors) stands out a bit as making good use of the enemies as DW-style unit templates, and reading your examples of the OP-version, it seems like they had a great time picking them based off the show? I’ve actually never watched much of one piece, but know a bit about their wacky chara design, and it sounds like they transitioned very well to the musou template.
Hell, it sounds like the EDF formula works as well there:
redress the environment, pack in a new batch of weapons/characters with quirks, stick to the lore and just run with it, get someone doing the score that has fun at his job and you’re set.
Seriously, the gameplay shouldn’t work as well as it does for so many different kinds of games they mash up into that template, and it seems to trigger the exact same spot in my brain that gets triggered when watching Kaiju- or asian action history-flicks.
I’m glad you started with Dynasty Warriors 2 because I’m not sure there’s any better way to develop an appreciation for the depth these games have other than seeing how fucking weird the PS2 installments are in comparison to the modern ones.
