Games like these can be a little hard to rate. Should I rate them based on how fun they are to play now, to a modern audience, or how influential they were? I'm being a coward here by going with "a little bit of both", but I do know that despite how barebones DQ1 was, I had a fun time with it. I might have had a different tune if I'd played the original instead of a version with some quality of life added in, but it was a nice little game to zone out to. Sometimes, all you want in a game is Number Goes Up, and this one was short enough that the grind didn't overstay its welcome. It was also really neat to see what did or didn't eventually become a JRPG staple. If I had to make one big complaint, though, it's that the Switch version looks like a cheap RPGmaker port. When I realized the SNES version had great sprite animations instead of static jpegs I felt extremely cheated. What gives, Squeenix!

I have many feelings about mobile games, I really believe in the potential of modern phones to give amazing handheld experiences when paired with a controller, if only developers and the people were to follow suit.
I believe that Apple Arcade is a big push in the right direction for giving this kind of games a market on mobile devices so I was really happy to see Platinum Games playing around with the idea.
Unfortunately this is no doubt a project of way smaller scale than it deserved to be.
It's very limited and simple, effective but nothing more is how I would describe this game overall, it has the DNA of a great game but didn't develop any of it to be on part with what you would get of their console titles in a way that feels very deliberate which made me all the more disappointed.
It's not a game worth going through but to me is still a testament to what mobile games are capable of nowadays and I will be hoping for more from PG and other developers, be it ports of existing games or exclusives

I love this game.
It's terrible.
It's maybe my favourite musou.
I don't think anyone should ever play it.
I wish I could give this game 0 stars and 5 stars at once.
Suzuki should be fired.
Suzuki is a genius.

This game makes me feel like a parent. For decades, I've said that I could never have a child because I'd be terrified that they grow up to be a cunt.

Dynasty Warriors 9 is like looking into a portal to another timeline. In which my child was born, nurtured, grew up, and was terrible. Utterly reprehensible.

This game does so many things wrong that it feels like a made-up game you'd see in a gamedev university course.

For starters, it looks terrible. Just, on a technical level. Yes, the art design on characters is neat, but... Everything is muddy. Blurry. Messy. Even Koei's official screenshots have textures uglier than some of the PS3 models.

The game's lighting is terrible, with the developers seemingly unable to understand the concept of ambient/rim lighting or shadow cascading. The end result of this is that everyone is hyper-reflective during the day and basically invisible at night.

And just... Fucking christ alive, who oversaw this game's visuals? Did it get any QA? Why is there dithering/artifacting even when anti-aliasing off and the resolution at 4k? Why does rain pour indoors? How do characters end up with snow on them in central China during the summer? Why doesn't anisotropic filtering work?

The weather, especially, is bad. When it rains, the world is draped in a thick veneer of vaseline, turning the terrain into the chapped lips of a giantess. Every character's model becomes rubbery and shiny, not unlike someone porting PS2 models into fucking Dark Souls. At night, all of this is reinforced by how shit visibility is - but hey, at least the lube shine makes characters visible in cutscenes.

I could go on forever. This game is appalling to look at. Even the effects are poorly done.

Don't even get me started on the story. It has some redeeming characteristics - like finally writing Liu Shan decently or giving any weight to the Jiang Wei/Zhong Hui rebellion, but fucking HELL the format and cutscene direction is terrible. Field/battle songs will often overlap serious or even sad scenes, resulting in characters tragically dying of illness while a buttrock song blares. Most of the story is told via Persona-esque "stand and emote" conversations, the majority of which are nothing but scheming or rumination. Sometimes, rarely, characters stop and ponder the morality of their violence - before the game slaps you with 5-6 objectives where the goal is to kill 4000 people and plunge China into chaos.

And there's a lot of them. There's so many of them. This is the most dialogue/cutscene heavy DW by far and it's awful for it. Your only reward for doing anything is to be shoved into 2-3 loading screens and sat in front of characters emoting to one another like VR Chat users testing out their model's built in animations. What's worse is that, regardless of dialogue track, the voice acting is terrible. I know weebs will insist the JP or CN tracks are better, but trust me: Everyone involved in voicing this game isn't even trying. The troubles faced by the EN cast are well documented by now, but even the long-running JP VAs sound bored and as if they're phoning it in.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalso you're only shown character specific endings if you play as that character. There are four kingdoms (plus Others) and 94 characters. Good luck with that. What the game does not tell you is that story mode is actually DW4's kingdom mode but with DW5's selection, so to see every ending means repeating an obscene amount of content with your chosen character awkwardly standing there in cutscenes.

Perhaps the worst sin of all is that the gameplay, the core and saving grace of these games, is terrible. Utterly irredeemable. It's an iteration on DW6's system, except with even less attacks. Instead, you merely do normal attacks and hit Y whenever an enemy does something that makes them vulnerable to a hard-hitting no effort counter. The window on these counters is obscene and doesn't get better with difficulty. Alternatively, you can use one of four Flow attacks which frankly feel like cheats. You are far harder to stagger while executing them, they have ludicrous range regardless of weapon, and they lead into Flow combos which basically make enemies into lobotomized invalids.

When musou boomers whinge about the AI in 'modern' games, this is what I imagine they're seeing. There's no threat here, no challenge. Just beating up sandbags without any impact, because the sound design is the worst it's ever been. You, the player, are simply TOO POWERFUL. There's not even any new moves to unlock on leveling!

None of this is helped by the map. Put simply, it's empty. I'm very much an "exploration is its own reward" person - which carried me through a decade of Ubisoft titles, admittedly - but DW9 pushes it. The world has nothing. No character-specific sidequests or secrets or what have you. Just mooks, Ubisoft towers, hideouts, and a hamfisted crafting system that doesn't actually matter because of how stats work.

And, in spite of all this, I kinda love it?

This game is insane. For a company known to be cheap and minimalist, this game is so fucking maximalist. They just threw EVERY idea in here.

Sure, let's radically revamp the combat system. Also add horse levels. And a fishing minigame. Fuck it, empty open world too. Stamina system? Sure why not. Crafting and animal hunting? Wire in. Third person shooter bow mechanics? Top, smash it.

This game is ludicrous, it is a scathing indictment against the very concept of self-indulgence.

It's horrible, and I love it.

I love dicking about in China, in a static world where nothing I do matters yet I alone am God. I love taking legendary warlord Cao Cao and having him fish in silence alongside his sworn enemies. I love putting the invasion of Chengdu on hold for a few IRL weeks because I'm out mining. I unironically love the OST, which is DW's best. I LOVE the designs, which are probably the best DW has ever had and will ever have. I love the shitass English dub, the first game to ever recreate the experience of watching your Drama class peers do Shakespeare in High School.

This game is fucking terrible, don't ever play it.

the mysterious quadrilogy within the atelier series is possibly the closest one could ever experience an identity crisis while playing video games. but at the same time i utterly adored every game before this one for how ambitious they were and for the amazing characters every game brought. so going into this i did expect a lot and i can thoroughly say i was not let down at all.
obviously i have my small gripes like wishing there were more cgs and vocal songs like there were in the previous mysterious games but as a whole, this game is overflowing with passion for not just being apart of the atelier series, but also for being a game in general. even more so than previous entries honestly.
the gameplay mechanics are absolutely on point here with a lot of ideas being taken from previous entries (the tetris-esque alchemy from the mysterious games, a similar quest-reputation system to ryza 2, gathering minigames which apparently were from the mana khemia games, etc.) and the nods to both sophie 1 and firis are really really cute and enjoyable.
i loved the entire cast through and through and the story was great too. obviously, it isn't too deep or anything with what it says but i really do appreciate the messages about dreams a lot and the continued message of showing empathy and happiness that the mysterious games are known for is amazing here too.
one last complaint tho is that playing on the hardest difficulty (when you first start playing the game) can cause a couple fights feeling kinda bs, particularly the final two fights but not only did the final boss slap hard still, a majority of the fights in this game are really really good.
anyways yeah perfect video game, 10/10, the atelier series does it again.

also when the final line had "mysterious journey" in it i popped off.