Awful 3D fighter that probably felt dated the day it came out.

The idea of a weapon fighter was good, but the controls are too stiff.

Good thing the Warriors franchise went in another direction.

First Dynasty Warriors to stream! I hope to get to the rest in due course, but for the moment, this is the first one to try out and it's very different from the rest.

Unlike the big fighting fun of taking on hundreds of soldiers at once, we instead go for the one-on-one fighter which has the added difference of having weapons and the characters being based on the five-kingdoms much like they are in later games.

Beyond that, there wasn't much else that was pulling me to this game. It was certainly fun, but it did suffer from controls being a bit odd, though the hilarious cut-scenes after each character wins more than make up for it!

Especially the one I got where this woman seduces the lord and then runs around with flowers and such sprouting everywhere.

It's a bit of a weird one, but I much prefer the more recognisable type of Dynasty Warriors games out there.

Gameplay + Stream

So...I'm not a fighting game person. AT ALL. I think I just cannot comprehend memorising and then carrying out perfectly precise button combos that are frame perfect. Everyone else seems to be able to do this no problem, but no matter how many hundreds of hours I try, I just can't do it and instinctively just mash until I die.

So I'm not exactly fit to judge this...thing that is, due to awkward regional naming shenanigans, the first entry in the Dynasty Warriors series...a series that would switch genres immediately after this one, except that's because what we know to be Dynasty Warriors is an entirely separate series in Japan than this game, simply sharing the cast of characters from Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

The fighting is...awkward. It's really hard to do any particularly fancy combos, the super attacks would only procure at random even after following a movelist guide, and the arenas themselves are pretty shoddily put together, even for PS1.

In spite of that, I kinda like the little technical touches added here? The weapon-on-weapon hits, general animations, a decent training mode, there's something cool buried in here, but it'll never rise above neither the technical issues that plagued it, the overbearing shadow of its rival fighting games at the time, and the mockery at how it isn't even a musou game like its successors in the first place.

Again, I'm not qualified to judge this thing, and I didn't like playing it at all...but I think it's secretly a little bit cool.

This is a bad 3D fighting game. The moves feel very stiff and in a sense realistic, but that makes it less fun to play. There are multiple modes but all of them boil down to 1v1 fights between the characters.

The good:
The music and stages are great.
The idea of a fighting game with weapons is cool.
More "realistic" fighting in which some moves are satisfying to pull off.

The bad:
The controls feel very stiff. The game is not responsive enough. I feel like faster characters have an advantage.
The game has no story except for some menu text and ending cutscenes for each character.

Conclusion: I'm not that into fighting games so I can't fully determine the game's quality, but it was not fun to play for me. If you're looking to get into Dynasty Warriors, I suggest to skip this entry, as it's not really relevant to the series and not a good game.

An odd start to a hack and slash series despite a bit of identity being born

I can safely say I've been a musou fan since I was a kid with my initial interest starting with Dynasty Warriors 3 back in the early 2000s. The mindless action based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms has become one of the few gaming comforts for me during my life. Wanting to experience the PlayStation 2 musou games again, I decided to take this chance to play every mainline title and really experience the titles and what went behind these games as a tiny passion project of sorts. Extremely doubt I'll finish all of them this year in a row but I hope to get most of this done this year.

Koei was mostly known for their strategy games at the time and the reveal of Dynasty Warriors as a fighting game was a shock to some people and probably even some of the current fans for this series. The game itself would release in 1997 and unfortunately would almost be forgotten despite being released in the same year as Tekken 3 which was almost a technical marvel for the PlayStation at the time. They would eventually try this formula again in a way with Dynasty Warriors 4 with duels and 3v3 with the Warriors Orochi series later on. The intro is about what you'd expect from a PlayStation title, CGI characters doing cool action movements which isn't nothing to really write home about. Despite that, I can't say I like the game that much as I wasn't much into fighting games myself but there's a few things here I like that the musou series itself would actually take and there's a surprising blueprint here that people wouldn't think actually started with this title. I've managed to finish the game with each character which unlocked all of the characters including some you can only unlock with a cheat code as far as I'm aware so I'm ready to share my thoughts on delving into the origin of Dynasty Warriors.

The game itself provides your standard suite of modes that fighting games had at the time. 1P Battle is essentially your arcade mode, Versus mode lets you fight against a friend, team battle lets you 3v3 against your friend or the computer, tournament mode is an 8 player tournament mode that uses the two controllers that allow you to set up a local tournament with your friends, time trial is a timed mode where the objective is to finish the game as fast as possible, endurance is trying to make the most of out of 1 life bar and seeing how far you can go and the practice mode which lets you practice your moves. You start out with ten characters which are three from each of the kingdoms and Diao Chan that belongs in the other category. Each category has four to a grand total of sixteen with Zhuge Liang for Shu, Cao Cao for Wei, Sun Shang Xiang for Wu and Lu Bu, Nobunaga and Toukichi for the other category with the last two being guest characters of sorts. The standard mode consists of nine stages with Lu Bu being the final stage as he really should be. For those that don't know, Lu Bu has been considering one of the most feared warriors in the series to the point of his existence being super boss tier in a sense. Really cool to see everyone has their iconic weapons that would be prevelant for the first half of the series such as Taishi Ci using those dual rods, Guan Yu using his iconic guandao and so forth. Only time they didn't follow through with this was Sun Shang Xiang not having her iconic chakrams and instead just some short sword.

Your actions in combat consist of slashing with square, thrusting with triangle, redirects with circle and parrying with cross. The "special" meter you see represents your musou or "chi" as it was called then. This meter goes up with how well you play and goes down with poor actions and so forth. The meter becomes full and you can do the iconic musou attack and if your health is also low too you can do a true musou attack which have been staples in the series for as long as I can remember, it actually started here. A really cool touch I didn't expect to see was weapon clashes, you know the action where two weapons clash together in a stalemate and it's anyone call who will come out on top. The animations doing these movements are kinda of surprisingly smooth for a title like this which I legit didn't expect much of. The thing with 3D fighters like this as the time is that they were a bit more methodical and not as responsive as fighters today but I can't speak much on it since I wasn't much of a fighting game to begin with.

I would honestly still say this game is worth taking a look into if you're a huge fan of the Dynasty Warriors series just so you can appreciate the little touches and the introductions of mechanics like musou attacks, weapon clashes and the notion of fighting 1v1 with an officer until later entries would make this its own mode. A very cool look into what would become its own entity with "musou" but as a game itself, I would probably put something else in the PS1 disc tray.

See you for Dynasty Warriors 2 hopefully soon.