The dynasty warriors thread

[BlueMemphis]

So with the announcment of Dynasty Warriors origins, i remembered i used to really like these games.

Saw i had Dw8 in my library, wondered wtf don't i remember much of it and..after playing an hour, i remember why: it sucks balls.
Graphics might be leaps and bounds above the primitive ps2 titles i remember so fondly , but the battlefields and levels were so static and lifeless, older games felt more like big battlefields with an ebb and flow but dw8 maps are linear af, you might aswell have a flashing sign saying "go" and pointing you in the direction of the next part of the level like in them old arcade beat them ups.

But wait, maybe i'm just remembering things wrong? My nostalgia goggles tricked me and the games haven't changed, just my tastes?
Only one way to find out, to the ps2 emulator!

*grabs dynasty warriors 3 and 4*
*has way more fun with both of them then dw8*
*checks the dw8 reviews and for some reason, it is considered one of the best dynasty warriors games*

Wtf...

Allright maybe it's time to commune with other enlightened minds and whilst we at it, try and figure out what is the best dynasty warriors game and why.

I only played a few of them so can only give my opinion on those:

-dw2: Going by memory here but i don't think i'm mistaken when i say it was hard as balls. Less enemies but they were tougher and there was less powerups and mechanics so the player had less tools and enemy officers were serious problems. I had no issue starting dw3+4+8 on normal but i remember even decades later it was suicide to dare try that on dw2.
No doubt it's age poorly and the map layouts probably suck, but there honestly if someone were to tell me this was one of their favorite dws still, i'd get it, there is purity in its simplicty, unburdened by the features of later titles and the difficulty is nice because you had to really sweat to rack up those kills compared to later games.

-dw3: The GOAT as far as i'm concerned. Yeah the fog is still horrible because we are talking early ps2 so enemies are more numerous then dw2 but spawn like a meter ahead of you like it's silent hill so you have to rely on the mini radar to tell where the enemies are far more then in dw2.

Despite that, it's still the goat because of the following reasons:
1) Best music, i can accept the case for dw4 being good too but its dw3 music that seems to keep getting remixed.
2) Levels that feel like battlefields with lots of things happening independent of the player
3) Lots of character specific content in cutscenes and dialogues including for the most niche and nonsensical scenarios the player could set up in free mode:


4) Cheesy voice acting that is more charming and memorable, Zhang Liao was my favorite character because of the way he talked, hated how they "fixed" it in later games:


My dying wish is for someone to remake dw3 exactly as it was, but to get rid off the enemy popup with the magic of modern tech.

-dw4: Very solid title even if i prefer dw3
1) Some great tunes even if dw3 edges it out overall as far as i'm concerned.
2) Battlefields are still good and look better, graphics in general is a clear step up from dw3
3) Does build on the bodyguard system and introduces officer bonds which admittedly leads to some good emergent gameplay on higher difficulties.

Bigger and better then dw3 is a fair assesment of dw4, but where it drops the ball for me is taking a step back in term of character specific content because this is the game that introduced Custom officers so i feel like they standardised the maps for all characters.

-dw1: Going by memory but i did play it.
Was a meh fighting game but it started it all so respect to the OG i guess.

-dw8
1) Battlefields might aswell be narrow corridors
2) Wtf is this weapon upgrade system? Looking this up on the net, my suspicions were confirmed: you got to do lots of money and material grinding and it's so tedious that people just don't do it until they get their final weapon usually.
Ain't played enough to have more of an opinion then that.

Empire series:
Don't remember the specifics other then i enjoyed them back in the day.

Overall conclusion: Dw3>Dw4>Dw2>Dw1------------------------->Dw8

Still there's a lot of missing DW titles there.

So yeah, general thoughts? Though really i'm mainly looking to be directed to the best titles that i might have missed, including the empire series.

Ending this with one of the best dw4 tunes:

[KnightoftheWind]

I tried Dynasty Warriors 4 a while back but just couldn't get into it. The combat felt so stiff and clunky compared to later entries, and fighting enemies felt more annoying than fun. DW8 gives me the sort of power fantasy I want from this franchise a LOT more than the early installments.

[BlueMemphis]

That's actually a valid complaint tbh.

I grew up with it so it was second nature for me but in dw2/3/4 characters are stiff and keep attacking in the direction they started in with no possibility to change direction. And you couldn't control the camera so you have to keep tapping the block button to reset the view in front of you, definitely awkward things if you are coming into these games fresh.

Can't deny then dw8 characters are more fun to actually play as. It's just a shame the game is a letdown in every other department, i still maintain the battlefields in dw8 are really meh and boring.

Updating my dying wish to be the following then: dw3 without popup and modern dw controls+camera

[BlueMemphis]

Slowly watching this, and his complaints about earlier dws pretty much echo what KnightoftheWind says: "DW8 gives me the sort of power fantasy I want from this franchise a LOT more than the early installments."

Dude comments a fair bit about earlier dw games having tough basic enemies who aggressively swarm and attack the player and i think this a big part of why i hated dw8 so much: enemies being so passive and easy.
Hence why i didn't have fun, my perception of dynasty warriors game is you gotta sweat and grind before you get to the point where you can just rush alone into the enemy army and slaughter them all with minimal effort, the whole one man army power fantasy comes after building up to it but at first you gotta fight with your army, i see dw games as a big battle simulator more then a straight beat them up.

Stiff controls also indirectly plays into it a bit, in earlier dw being surrounded is dangerous because other then musou attacks you can't really turn around and smack the guy poking you in the ribs midcombo, so you take constant chip damage if you yolo, with higher tiers of enemies taking a significant chunk of hp. If you get surrounded in dw8? You just don't care, basic enemies exist only to swell your kill count. So yeah big difference in mentality and how you approach swarms of enemies.

In my current zhang liao dw3 run, 2nd mission alone took me 2 hours and many retries because i kept trying to play it like dw8 in my desperation to catch up to liu bei (mission is him trying to escape the wei forces so there is pressure on you to hurry up) and i get WRECKED and have to sweat my *** off. So many close calls where i'm running around on 1hp literally begging guan yu or zhuge liang to stop bullying me, that i'm sorry i thought i could just rush them alone at the start and won't do it again.

In the end i beat the level by being super tactical and assisting and getting help from my army, as it should be. Had to plan things out like figuring out zhang fei is a lot weaker then other major officers in this scenario for some reason so rushing him at the start is actually doable, and doing so prevents the event where he single handedly holds a bridge and causes a cascade of morale failure. Then i focused on taking out gate guards to prevent enemy reinforcements and keep my allies pushing.

When i finally caught up to liu bei? He also wrecked me and made me cry like a ***** but Xiahou dun and Xu shu saved my arse and i focused on taking out liu beis soldiers and bodyguard so the other chad officers could focus on liu bei, in the end it was 100% a team effort to bring the guy and his bodyguards down and it felt so much more satisfying to me then in dw8 where i'd just keep killing in a direction and never even glance at the map or care what my allies were doing because ultimately they are but witnesses to my natural awesomeness.

I don't want to keep hating on dw8, it's clear lots of people like it and consider it the best of the modern dynasty warrior titles (dw9 seems like a complete abomination, jfc), but as it's the only modern dw title i played i can't help but keep contrasting it to earlier titles and feel like the series has radically shifted in its philosophy: earlier games tried to be battlefield sims and the one man army aspect was an incidental part of it. Later DW games seem to have been flanderised to be all about being a one man army from the get go.

[DDC]

I have some insight here because I started with DW2 at PS2 launch and have played all of them except some of the Empires and XL titles. And I also skipped 9.

Direct comparisons across generations are always sort of difficult, but if the question is which one was the best for its time, the answer is easily Dynasty Warriors 3. That game went so ******* hard and was a massive upgrade over DW2. Amazing music, awesome massive roster, gigantic levels with hard to kill officers, a high level of difficulty with enemy archers that would completely rape you just for THINKING about setting foot in enemy camp. At the correct difficulty level, the gameplay was very strategic in terms of needing to pause frequently and take stock of the battlefield and figure out which enemy officer to down (and you had to beeline and kill him quickly), when to go help your own officers, etc. If you just mindlessly killed enemies, you would get overrun and lose.

So on to the other games. This guy ranks DW2 unfairly low. It was good for being a PS2 launch title and the first game of its type. DW4 and 5 always melded together and were indistinguishable to me, but I could never shake the sense that they didn't feel as epic as DW3 even if they had improvements in some ways. DW6 had the awful Renbu system and is probably the worst mainline game. I have a hard time remembering DW7 but I think it was pretty decent. I also remember DW8 being good. I don't rank any of the Empires games very high because all of the empire-building elements are rudimentary compared to a Romance of the Three Kingdoms game, and the battles (being randomized) don't stack up well against some of the epic battlefields in the mainline games.

Now, moving onto the Warriors Orichi series, WO1 was great and had a lot of the difficulty and big sweeping battlefields I like, although I'm not a fan of the level design aesthetic and having generic demons as enemy "officers." WO2 as far as I can remember was more of the same. Warriors Orichi 3 is an absolute banger with massive levels, massive roster, a huge campaign, high difficulty, high enemy density, classic style movesets. If I had to pick only one "Warriors" game to play for the rest of my life, it would be WO3, even though again, not a fan of it aesthetically. The only thing I absolutely hate is the trinity attack, where after you trigger it the enemies freeze and you kill them by running around touching them. It's so ******* stupid and the opposite of visceral. WO3 was recently ported to PC and that is the best way to play it. WO4 is pretty good and introduces some graphical improvements, but their version of a trinity attack is some kind of giant fireball that DELETES sections of the battlefield, officers included. It ruins the strategy element because you aren't time-pressured to down officers on multiple fronts anymore.

The other game I'm going to mention is Kingdom Under Fire: Crusaders, which I would rank alongside the best DW games. It got ported to the PC recently and I played it again, and this Xbox-exclusive favorite held up really well over the years. Lower troop counts than DW games, but you control all the units, and it has a really good controller-based implementation of RTS control. You can seamlessly go from being in the thick of it beating the **** out of enemies to dropping waypoints so your cavalry runs back and forth through the mob, back to controlling your melee hero. Decent story with some meme-able characters, troops have good "weight" to them, good levels and battle scenarios. Especially at the time it came out, KUF was a true landmark game.

Lastly, the Crimson Sea games deserve honorable mention and were pretty fun back in the day.

[Oyster Sauce]

Played a bit of 2 and the combat was a real turn off. The camera, inability to move while attacking, and juggling mechanics were pretty rough.

[BlueMemphis]

Never played any warriors orochi games so kinda curious about those, will have to try out 3.
Whilst we at it, i know there's quite a few spin offs like for Berserk so curious to hear if any of those are worth a try or are just lazy dw ripoffs. If nothing else trying to survive the Eclipse feels like it could be fun if they didn't half arse it.

Got little experience with the empire games but they seemed fun from afar, the implication of repetitive generic battles though is something i hadn't considered, perhaps it is indeed best to stick to dedicated strategy games.

Otherwise dw3 run ongoing and i think i reached an epiphany in the dw3 vs dw4 comparison.
I said previously Dw4 campaign is more generic because they made a 1 size fits all format for every kingdom, and as a result i don't really care about playing another run. Why would i? A zhang liao run is the same as a cao cao one, even down to the cutscenes.
So really you just play this game 3 times (and even that's a stretch tbh, there are a lot of shared acts like the yellow turban levels), and you can even switch characters mid run.

It's clear they cut down a lot in accommodating custom officers, which is the way to roll in dw4: make an officer and use them for each run, little reason to do otherwise.

So in essence there are just 2 reasons to play dw4 over dw3:
-Playing your OC
-Officer bonds so on higher difficulties you form in game bromances with other characters who then dramatically come to help you out when you are struggling

Yeah starting to realise why dw4 wasn't as memorable, dw3 campaigns are god tier in comparison to dw4, every character gets their own story with usually a different mix of levels, sometimes unique ones (guan yus escape is only for guan yu and xiahou dun, with lubu's campaign reusing the level but it's drastically changed as tends to be the case for all the characters added in the expansion).
And you are constantly rewarded with those cheesy cutscenes emphasizing the character you play, it's a small thing but it really does add up in making you want to play with more characters to see their unique content.

Eugh i didn't make this thread to fanboy over dw3 and hail it as the one true DW title but if dw4/5 ain't better games and 6 onwards shifts completely to be about mowing down 1000s of enemies effortlessly then it's the only opinion i can form.

Also whilst we at it, circuit is a silly fun way to wrap up a run and i think embodies the dw spirit better then then some serious "epic" ending:

[DDC]

The demo for Dynasty Warriors Origins dropped, and it's pretty wild. On one hand, they ****** up big time. The last Dynasty Warriors was widely hated for stepping outside the traditional format to go open world, so much so that it almost killed a decades-old franchise. Desperately needing redemption through a "return to form," they decide to remove the "Warriors" from Dynasty Warriors. That's right, you can only play as a single ****** pre-created protagonist. The game is now "Dynasty Warrior."

On the other hand, they've finally delivered a true next-gen Dynasty Warriors game that is easily the biggest leap forward in terms of how alive the battlefield feels in the entire time since the making of the very first Musou game. This is what I've been waiting for the battlefield to feel like since the inception of the series: two truly massive forces clashing with genuine weight. When I started the demo, I saw hints and flashes of it--the game definitely feels different--but I didn't realize the full scope of what they had achieved until reaching the massive enemy force at the end.

I had a big ******* smile on my face because melee combat of this scale and detail just hasn't been done before.The closest you might get would be some mount and blade mods that put 3000+ troops on the field, but they look weak in comparison. And if hacking your way through hordes of mostly passive, resistanceless enemies in past Musou games can be analogized to wading through ankle-deep water, this is more like being repeatedly bashed against a rocky shoreline by a violent storm. If you go straight into the mob, the enemies are on you from all sides beating the **** out of you and knocking you around. It's glorious.

This will easily be the worst Dynasty Warrior"s" game feature-wise, but the best combat-wise.

[Statesman]

The demo for Dynasty Warriors Origins dropped, and it's pretty wild. On one hand, they ****** up big time. The last Dynasty Warriors was widely hated for stepping outside the traditional format to go open world, so much so that it almost killed a decades-old franchise. Desperately needing redemption through a "return to form," they decide to remove the "Warriors" from Dynasty Warriors. That's right, you can only play as a single ****** pre-created protagonist. The game is now "Dynasty Warrior."

On the other hand, they've finally delivered a true next-gen Dynasty Warriors game that is easily the biggest leap forward in terms of how alive the battlefield feels in the entire time since the making of the very first Musou game. This is what I've been waiting for the battlefield to feel like since the inception of the series: two truly massive forces clashing with genuine weight. When I started the demo, I saw hints and flashes of it--the game definitely feels different--but I didn't realize the full scope of what they had achieved until reaching the massive enemy force at the end.

I had a big ******* smile on my face because melee combat of this scale and detail just hasn't been done before.The closest you might get would be some mount and blade mods that put 3000+ troops on the field, but they look weak in comparison. And if hacking your way through hordes of mostly passive, resistanceless enemies in past Musou games can be analogized to wading through ankle-deep water, this is more like being repeatedly bashed against a rocky shoreline by a violent storm. If you go straight into the mob, the enemies are on you from all sides beating the **** out of you and knocking you around. It's glorious.

This will easily be the worst Dynasty Warrior"s" game feature-wise, but the best combat-wise.

Guess I'm ignoring Origins until it has proper customizable characters, instead of a pre-made twink. So best case scenario DLC/Expansion or Sequel at worst. Like OP, I have very fond memories of DW3/DW4, playing through each campaign in local-coop was most of the fun.

[DDC]

I'll write some more later, but I'd definitely rate Origins a 9-point-something. It moves the series forward as much as all of the other games post-DW3 combined. I really can't believe how good it is after playing dozens of Musou games that were sidegrades, minor upgrades, or downgrades. Has to be played on the hardest difficulty to appreciate what has been accomplished, but so far it's pretty balanced. The battlefield just feels so alive now, head and shoulders above every other game with large-scale combat.

Aside from the obvious issue of playing as a single generic, my main problem with it is that some of the character models and voice actors are comically bad, and not the good way of other DW games. Guan Yu for example is someone they've always nailed. For example, this scene sticks out as something I still remember vividly after watching it one time, over 20 years ago:



In Origins he just seemed "off" from the very beginning and I couldn't figure out why. Then he had an extended scene with quite a few lines and I realized he sounded suspiciously like a ******, and his model also had many of the requisite facial features if you ignore the beard and skin color. So I did the research, and sure enough, Guan-*******-Yu, a historical figure who is regarded as a national hero (perhaps even with deity-like status) in China, is voiced by a ******:

https://www.behindthevoiceactors.com/vi ... s/Guan-Yu/

That's a tough one to swallow and extremely disrespectful. However, the way the story is told in general, is amazing if you're a fan of the Three Kingdoms books, with a lot more historical context given and minor skirmishes playable. It's cutscene-heavy JRPG-style (complete with a beautiful explorable world map), and would be a 10 if they hadn't botched some key characters and had just stuck closer to their old portrayals. Also, the main character's tacked on fictional storyline should have been cut, as it's stupid and less interesting than the real events that transpired.

[Finarfin]

I'll write some more later, but I'd definitely rate Origins a 9-point-something. It moves the series forward as much as all of the other games post-DW3 combined. I really can't believe how good it is after playing dozens of Musou games that were sidegrades, minor upgrades, or downgrades. Has to be played on the hardest difficulty to appreciate what has been accomplished, but so far it's pretty balanced. The battlefield just feels so alive now, head and shoulders above every other game with large-scale combat.

Aside from the obvious issue of playing as a single generic, my main problem with it is that some of the character models and voice actors are comically bad, and not the good way of other DW games. Guan Yu for example is someone they've always nailed. For example, this scene sticks out as something I still remember vividly after watching it one time, over 20 years ago:



In Origins he just seemed "off" from the very beginning and I couldn't figure out why. Then he had an extended scene with quite a few lines and I realized he sounded suspiciously like a ******, and his model also had many of the requisite facial features if you ignore the beard and skin color. So I did the research, and sure enough, Guan-*******-Yu, a historical figure who is regarded as a national hero (perhaps even with deity-like status) in China, is voiced by a ******:

https://www.behindthevoiceactors.com/vi ... s/Guan-Yu/

That's a tough one to swallow and extremely disrespectful. However, the way the story is told in general, is amazing if you're a fan of the Three Kingdoms books, with a lot more historical context given and minor skirmishes playable. It's cutscene-heavy JRPG-style (complete with a beautiful explorable world map), and would be a 10 if they hadn't botched some key characters and had just stuck closer to their old portrayals. Also, the main character's tacked on fictional storyline should have been cut, as it's stupid and less interesting than the real events that transpired.

>and sure enough, Guan-*******-Yu, a historical figure who is regarded as a national hero (perhaps even with deity-like status) in China, is voiced by a ******:
Your own goddamn fault for playing a ******* dynasty warriors game in english. Play it in Chinese or Japanese.
I don't see the negroid features you attribute to Guan Yu.

[DDC]

Your own goddamn fault for playing a ******* dynasty warriors game in english. Play it in Chinese or Japanese.
I don't see the negroid features you attribute to Guan Yu.

It's a bit less apparent in the pic you posted because it's at an angle, but they really rounded his face off a lot. His sharp cheekbones were always a trademark feature of his design. They also flattened his nose. And not having the full mustache looks absolutely ridiculous. Now he looks like Brodus Clay with a beard. He went from intense and intimidating to a comedy character who says ambiguously gay **** to the PC. His old designs were a million times better.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/dynas ... 1202195133

And no way am I reading subtitles while I'm trying to play. As it is, I miss half of what is said in battle even in English. If you play on the top difficulty, enemies no longer drop health, so healing is extremely limited and you can't just hack through everyone on autopilot. Especially if you're fighting a strong officer with high morale, you have to be Dark Souls careful.