This game is a fucking anomaly

KT was smoking some wild shit in the studio when they made this game and I'm gonna need them to do it again. The age progression in this game needed to be a staple for every warrior's series after but sadly that didn't happen. I believe the reason it's not happening is because of the story implications. This story is WAY too good for a musou game and I have to problems with it. Starting as Masayuki at a younger age and having him progressively get older enjoying his story only to switch to a young Yukimura was soooo good. Each battle flows so well with the story and with the dialogue on the field, during cutscenes, and outside of combat koei was able to produce a level of care no other warriors game has done.

The final battle...Yukimuras final moveset and being in the middle of straight hell was one of the best musou experiences almost ever and the soundtrack on top of it was perfect. If KT wants to push the series even further all they need to do is copy this game and refine it.

It's still based on the SM4 engine which is fun enough but there are too many faults to recommend. Firstly, there are far too many instant loss conditions around the middle of the game which results in something often infuriating to play (I literally got spotted by an enemy that warped in from somewhere else at one point, instantly failing the mission I was on). Secondly, there's too much bumph in there - bits where you walk 15 seconds to another cutscene, short bits of text to bridge cutscenes, having to go back to town to increase your level cap, stuff like that, and that's not even including the fact that about 50% of the battles feel like filler.

Most of all, though, the story and characters just didn't do it for me. I think it's clear it's not written for me as I'm not a Japanese woman; the story of Yukimura Sanada is one which I realise is important to anyone who wishes to understand the Japanese character, it's still not one I enjoy. It isn't helped here by the fact that Yukimura as a character is still incredibly boring and passive in everything he does - which I assume is part of his appeal to the sizeable female audience of the Musou games (the same applies to Zhou Yu in the Three Kingdoms games). Where this game goes even further off-course for me is the way the relationship between Yukimura and Chacha (culminating in the story's end), as well as the way Sasuke is included.

This probably has the best story in a musou game thanks to it's more focused plot surrounding the Sanada clan rather than jumping all over the place. Yukimura is a pretty typical shonen protag but by the end of the game he is plenty cool enough to make up for it. Sasuke's development is nice albeit predictable, and Masayuki is interesting since you get to follow him for pretty much his entire career. I would've liked if the Sanada trio had some fun interaction while they were older to help drive home the family theme. I also quite liked the direction of the ending. It felt like it was trying to be more historically accurate than other musous (putting aside the whole "slaughtering thousands of soldiers with magic special attacks" thing) and I appreciate that. That being said I might still prefer Dynasty Warriors 7's story just because I like the Three Kingdoms more than the warring states period. While the focused approach is great for the story, the gameplay does suffer because of the lack of variety in playable characters. You spend about 70% of the game playing as either Masayuki or Yukimura and another 10% playing as Kunoichi or Sasuke. This is a pretty big problem since moveset and character design/personality variety is important in maintaining the simple fun of a musou game. The stages are generally enjoyable and the Stratagem/Feat system does a good job of giving you objectives to juggle instead of just making you plow through enemies nonstop. The exploration missions and material nonsense are completely boring, unnecessary, and do nothing but drag the game down and there's unfortunately a substantial amount of them. The combat is the same as samurai warriors 4 so there's not really much to go over there except it's still fun. The game can look nice in cutscenes but a little upgrade would be nice. The village tunes were also great.