When I was younger, I fell in the bathroom. The left side of my head collided with the base of the sink, and I was told by an incredible amount of people that, had I fallen a little further to the left, I would have collided with the sink and suffered severe brain damage.

This game makes me wish I did. Perhaps, if I had brain damage, I could enjoy it.

Anyone who sincerely believes DW9 to be the worst DW should be locked in a room with nothing but this game and a LeMat Revolver, loaded with a single round. It is horrible. Beyond horrible. This game is more devoid of redeeming traits than most war criminals.

I'd heard so many bad things about the Renbu system. For years, years I'd heard them. None of them prepared me for reality. What the fuck is this combat system? In lieu of a charge attack system (wherein you hit with light attacks and then press charge to do a heavy hitter), this game merely has entirely independent light and heavy strings. There are no transitory moves, not even any imitators of the old system. Simply these, a command grab, and jump attacks.

This is bad on its own, but the actual Renbu system is salting the wound. No, you can't use your entire combo strings immediately, no matter how high a level you are. You have to hit enemies to build up the Renbu Gauge, and upon rising in level you are granted extra combo strings. In practice, this turns the game into what most journalists think musou is; aimless, uninteresting button mashing until the stage ends and you are free from the gameplay for a moment. It's awful. It sucks. If you tweet 'there is no such thing as bad game design' there should be a legal requirement to play this game first.

The game's utterly atrocious camera doesn't help either, with the low FOV and forced perspective changes often obscuring where your target is. For some mind-boggling reason, the camera often tilts to the left or right at an angle, usually leaving the player character uncentered and making you blind to the enemies behind you who're hungry for your supple little bo- er, Renbu.

And no, before you ask, the gameplay isn't the only bad thing. Aesthetically, this game was made in a cauldron that was still crusty from brewing TES IV: Oblivion in it. Everything is... soupy, lathered in poorly distributed high contrast colours and the kind of bloom that made Oblivion a migraine-inducer on consoles. Character designs are a gaudy mix between feudal plate armor and the chinese armor endemic to the PS2 titles, with the idea of 'design coherence' being kicked into a river like Liu Shan. Designs range from 'competent' (Like Zhou Yu or Xiahou Dun) to looking like a horrible Xenoverse 2 OC with mods (I.e, everyone in Shu and Zhang Liao).

The maps suck too. I don't know whether the actual design or the geriatric movement speed is to blame, but they at once feel too large and claustrophobic, making navigating them a pain. If you modded DW8 to have the speed of DW3 I imagine this is what it'd feel like.

So it looks like shit, plays like shit, handles like shit and is designed like shit. Does this game have any redeeming aspects?

No.

It sucks. The End. Goodbye. I'm going back to my DW8 replay.

Rapaz, eu simplismente não consigo gostar desse jogo.
Um fato com certeza é que ele é um jogo bem bonito, as cores, o cenário e tudo é bem mais vivo, os gráficos realmente firacam melhores, algumas mecânicas foram adicionadas, alguns detalhes a mais também, o modo história também ficou bem interessante, com uma cinematic antes de cada fase que é bem construída e tudo, com certeza são pontos positivos.
Porém, tentaram mudar muitas coisas que não necessitava mexer, alguns personagem que tinham armas únicas, agora tem armas super genéricas, alguns designs de personagem não combinaram nem um pouco, mudando drasticamente para pior muitos deles, não que não tiveram mudanças boas, mas a maioria ficou muito ruim. A gameplay também caiu muito de nível, não podendo fazer mais uma sequência de combos que você quiser, com os botões de ataque, você simplismente spama o botão de ataque fraco e ele faz as coisas sozinho, tirando e MUITO o impacto dos golpes, deixando tudo muito mais chato do que era, além de que mesmo no LvMax, você não tenha acesso a todos os golpes no inicio da partida, tendo que carregar seu Tenbu para ter esses golpes. O sistema de defesas, esquiva e de agarrão até que são interessantes, mas com certeza não compensam os pontos negativos.
Falando por minha experiência, tive a sorte de jogar a versão que corrigiram boa parte das armas dos personagens, além de adicionar mais história, porém como não se trata do jogo em si, mas mais uma """DLC""", não ajuda na nota final

The absolute low point of this series.

I don't think any other entry is worse. DW1 is a respectable fighting game, and even DW2 had different move sets for many characters.

This one has the awful Renbu system, the cloned movesets, less characters, less story, no new characters.

But i think the biggest damage done, was to the enemies. And this is a problem that's still plaguing the series. Pre DW6, enemies in musou games were effectively using the same tools you had, but they had worse stats/health etc. They could use the same branching combos, and behaved the same no matter if you were fighting a no-named private or a big named general. They actually could score hits on you, and try to block.

DW6 turned enemy troops into essentially just filler. They are basically useless, and are just there to populate the screen. DW games now are just a series of fights with officers, and some travel in-between. The actual soldiers may as well not be there.

Regression and experimentation that went too far

To say I've been dreading to playing this game for a bit since I've started my personal bender into musou titles would be a huge understatement. My original experience playing the untranslated PSP version as a kid wasn't great not due to the fact I had no idea what was being said but just how boring the game was and during the years I kind of attributed it to being just the PSP version. Trying to reinvent the wheel in a series mostly known for one thing has to be one of the biggest gambles you can do as a developer, you can either garner new fans and the current fans can be happy with what's created or you fail to garner new attention and alienated your existing fans in the process. Sadly it's not hard to see where this entry went.

The general storytelling takes an overall downgrade as you only get seventeen musou modes in total with only a few characters of each force getting their own story that sadly aren't that long either. To make matters worse is that in this entry, characters were actually removed and there were no new additions to the roster which really stings in a series that was constantly improving upon itself at this point. There really isn't much to say in the general story and character front since there isn't much here shockingly. Also can't say I'm fond of the new designs other barring Zhao Yun's design with all the silver which I think is pretty cool.

If you've been a fan of this series at this point and played this game, you already know why people don't like this entry at all: Renbu. A quick explanation would be that the branching system the series has been known for at this point gone and replaced with one button infinite combos that only have one branch. This means you rarely press a button with another button anymore and the game just promotes you to spam one button endlessly now. I know the genre is extremely notorious for the extreme amounts of button spamming but I assure you this system makes it way worse. The traditional weapon system is essentially gone as well with only three weapons that are essentially just different types more than an upgrade path. Each of these types change how hard you attack and how renbu functions for you. To add more insult to injury with the the roster removal, you'd think they would keep unique move sets to the game? Hell no. The people that didn't get musou modes this time around are clones. It sounds surreal that there's less characters in the game and cloned move sets within the roster now. There's a skill tree system I do sort of like since I don't like farming for drops and prefer natural level progression which is something. Probably a lot more intricate changes like the addition of swimming and climbing ladders, changing how you invade bases, horses leveling up which I can go into but for the sake of my own sanity I don't want to get that in depth with it.

There are very few positives here at least. The soundtrack is decent with the obvious standout being WELCOME TO CHINA. A very loud statement with the flutes going off pretty hard. The visual bump going to the PlayStation 3 is extremely appreciated, I will definitely say the game looks way better but that is kind of a given with the generational lap. An extremely odd fact: This title did end up getting a PS2 version with more content and removed a few of the clones too which kinda spat on the faces of those that bought the next gen versions at the time since they never got this content either. No Xtreme Legends for this one too which probably might've helped a bit but I think the writing was on the wall at this point.

I've probably glossed over a lot of things on this title but this is the first time I'm starting to feel the burnout from my personal musou marathon and thinking about this game or talking about it anymore is giving me a headache at the time of typing this. If you enjoyed this title then more power to you, honestly. I can understand why they wanted to change things up, these games essentially got abysmal scores critically and probably wanted to make something that felt different enough to change their perspective of them. Sadly it failed on every front and Omega Force probably found themselves back on the drawing board.

It goes without saying but if you have a faint interest in this series then please do not play this as your first one, it's completely different from the rest of the series for the worse and only should be played for a diehard fan's curiosity or for the sake of completion.

Before I would have said this is the weakest in the Dynasty warriors series, but after 9 came out i can safely say that dw6 isn't the problem child anymore.

The game itself is prettier than most of the games in the series, the character designs are vibrant , the music is fantastic, and the fighting animations are very fluid and satisfying... HOWEVER..

The renbu system exists. Taking the joy from its previous games chaining multiple combos together to slaughter... I mean knock out your foes, you are reduced to spamming the hell out of one button with occasionally pressing another to break the opponents guard. With a maxed renbu gauge your combo gets longer and yes the animation looks great, but chances are the enemy will be already blocking your fanciful combo causing you to break it with a tap or (gasp) even two of a heavy attack. And thus the chain repeats over and over again.

I can’t say I hate this game, nor did I ever really. But when it came out I knew it was the weakest in the series. Koei needs to learn that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it... But they didn’t and DW9 came out.. *sigh

This was the game that introduced me to the Dynasty Warriors franchise as a kid and I'm glad to say it still holds up years later. Apparently, this is something of a black sheep among DW games but for me its practically perfect. It nails the balance of speed & strength for both the player character and overall battle compared to later games, and has systems like bases and the renbu system which made combat much more engaging even against the fodder. And the freedom these levels grant you is really nice so the way you can experience every level is varied. You can be a one man army, or advance with your allies, or strategically take down bases and officers for whatever outcome you want.

The story structure of DW6 interests me because every cutscene feels so sparse at first but they build up and flesh out each kingdom's stories and the ideals that push them forward. I wish there was more inter kingdom interactions to add even more complexity to the ideas presented here but I'll take being amazed with what they did and how little they did it with.

Ah. The Dark Sheep of the Dynasty Warriors franchise (well... it was until 9 showed up but shhh). I understand why Koei did some of what they did here. Now many games in and now onto a new generation of consoles, this did feel like it would be a good time to really mix things up and reboot many elements from the series.

On the plus side, the game feels even more cinematic than before. While in some ways its sad to see less story modes than in 5, the smaller amount of story modes feel a hell of a lot more individual and personal and thanks to a bump up in both the graphics and voice department, it mostly succeeds in this area.

Less successful is the complete butchering of the gameplay itself. The series has never been the most complex of gameplay styles but to dumb everything down so hard feels insulting. The difficult is almost non-existent and plowing through everything by hammering just the one button with little variance feels hollow and cheap. Its a real slog sometimes to make it through to the end and thats really bad because while the new story modes feel more special, there isnt enough of it to really go around, leaving a general feeling like half the game was left on the cutting room floor.

This especially comes into play with the characters as a whole. While the redesigns are very much a mixed bag. Some work great (Zhao Yun, Lu Bu and Diao Chan all look amazing), some others flat out suck (Sun Shang Xiang, Ma Chao and Gan Ning), the bigger problem is the weapon movesets. There's a good chunk of characters that share very generic movesets (Sword/Spear) meaning there's very little reason to play as almost half the cast. Its a bit of a clunky mess. The Ps2 version tried to amend this by adding a few more story modes and weapons but the severe graphical downgrade doesn't feel worth it.

Overall its just a bit of a stumble than a complete failure. Still doesnt make it any more fun to play though.