Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Luo Guanzhong's work finally realized in a hack and slash scale
A much needed and extremely special return to form for Omega Force for the highly experimental and dreadful Dynasty Warriors 6. Well there is still an appreciation for changing things up due to appearing stagnant from an outside perspective, I think the former game did too much, too different and too quick. Dynasty Warriors 7 is still different compared to the classic age of musou (Dynasty Warriors 2-5, pretty much the PS2 games) but still bring some integral reintroductions to the series.
The usual flow of playing through the stories of the Three Kingdoms before has you picking a character and going through a few disjointed stages without never getting the full picture or context or why you're even fighting for. I never really minded this since I enjoy the action but something about the new story mode adding context makes this a much more special experience. Romance of the Three Kingdoms is considered one of the greatest literary works and compared to Shakespeare for the english readers for the Chinese. Despite it never coming completely close to examining every detail, it does an amazing job providing context, excellent narrating and moments of pure sadness that for the first time in this series provoked an emotional response in me. The musou mode now dubbed "Story Mode" is easily the best representation of the overall story of the three kingdoms from my experience of the series. I think it might be almost too good since I've always played this series with a disjointed perspective and now that I feel like I have the complete picture on what mostly happens, it changed my perspective of the characters I would play and what they did and how they went out. The commitment goes beyond this as new characters are introduced including a brand new faction called Jin that pretty much feels like the epilogue and true ending for everything that came before. The very final cutscene is something special that I hope fans will get to see for themselves. Playing as Jin themselves feels extremely depressing as well, it goes beyond the original scope of the games after the original lords have come and long gone. You're fighting these battles with brand new names and a few remaining uniques that somehow managed to live this long but everyone is essentially gone at this point. It feels like entering your old high school twenty years later and seeing people you have no idea who they are. Faded memories lost forever to time.
It's gonna be a bit jarring to describe the gameplay because it went back to the old ways and it also didn't completely at all. You have the old charge branching system from the older games but now you can equip any two weapons on your character. There's a compatibility system where they can equip some weapons efficiently and not, a seal system that essentially acts as equipping abilities onto the weapons and so forth. I don't know how I feel about this system since it means the characters themselves don't feel that unique anymore barring them having one ex move from their preferred weapon and two musou attacks. Musou attacks are more like singular special moves now and not a constant combo and I actually like this change. Now I can sort of understand not making everyone unique with the new weapon system for a reason. Mostly being that the story mode does lock you into one person for specific stages and having the option of more weapons sounds more enticing but I think making each person have a unique person is why we pick them in the first place. It just feels like you're picking a skin at some point. The game does a generally better job of reducing clones but there are still clones with shared ex weapons.
Character stat increases has gone back to relying on drops from officers for increases to attack and defense and I'm not a huge fan of this system. I will say it's good that you can get health increases now instead of relying on map spawns but the factor of getting these stats feel a bit too erratic for me especially if you want to grind most of them or all of them. Skill point system lets you grab some important upgrades like another musou segment or the rest of your combo which is a nice addition considering you can save the points up during story mode and always have some upgrades for each new character you play as. I will say the difficulty is the lowest it's been so far as I can one shot officers for most of the story mode on Normal. Despite my complaints, this is still pretty fun for the twenty hours it took to complete all four story lines which I highly recommend you do for this one. The story mode is the true experience for this title.
As I just mentioned the story mode being the true experience is because there really isn't much here (until Xtreme Legends) at all. Free Mode is essentially replaced with a new mode called Conquest Mode and it's an awful substitute. You can only play as officers that were actually there that is and was essentially the huge draw of replayability for me and instead just introduce a lot of scenarios and serves as a method for getting ultimate weapons. That's honestly it apart from a new tutorial mode which is nice to have for newer players at least.
Another graphical jump from 6 and it's just as big this time. Characters look really nice and the amount of soldiers on the screen essentially always fill the entire screen. I know people said Dynasty Warriors 4 has the best soundtrack but I really think 7 has a definite running here. A young star fulfilling a promise on his mentor's final battle, and this track appropriately titled hide emotion.
Overall I feel this title is a "three steps forward, one step back" type of deal. Brought the series back from the brink and finally introduced a proper telling of the story from a video game perspective. It lacks a bit in content that the Xtreme Legends will hopefully fix but I truly think it does enough to be extremely enjoyable and marks itself enough as a unique and fun title in the series.
If you're purely in it for the story, this is the best way to experience it bar none in the whole series.
A much needed and extremely special return to form for Omega Force for the highly experimental and dreadful Dynasty Warriors 6. Well there is still an appreciation for changing things up due to appearing stagnant from an outside perspective, I think the former game did too much, too different and too quick. Dynasty Warriors 7 is still different compared to the classic age of musou (Dynasty Warriors 2-5, pretty much the PS2 games) but still bring some integral reintroductions to the series.
The usual flow of playing through the stories of the Three Kingdoms before has you picking a character and going through a few disjointed stages without never getting the full picture or context or why you're even fighting for. I never really minded this since I enjoy the action but something about the new story mode adding context makes this a much more special experience. Romance of the Three Kingdoms is considered one of the greatest literary works and compared to Shakespeare for the english readers for the Chinese. Despite it never coming completely close to examining every detail, it does an amazing job providing context, excellent narrating and moments of pure sadness that for the first time in this series provoked an emotional response in me. The musou mode now dubbed "Story Mode" is easily the best representation of the overall story of the three kingdoms from my experience of the series. I think it might be almost too good since I've always played this series with a disjointed perspective and now that I feel like I have the complete picture on what mostly happens, it changed my perspective of the characters I would play and what they did and how they went out. The commitment goes beyond this as new characters are introduced including a brand new faction called Jin that pretty much feels like the epilogue and true ending for everything that came before. The very final cutscene is something special that I hope fans will get to see for themselves. Playing as Jin themselves feels extremely depressing as well, it goes beyond the original scope of the games after the original lords have come and long gone. You're fighting these battles with brand new names and a few remaining uniques that somehow managed to live this long but everyone is essentially gone at this point. It feels like entering your old high school twenty years later and seeing people you have no idea who they are. Faded memories lost forever to time.
It's gonna be a bit jarring to describe the gameplay because it went back to the old ways and it also didn't completely at all. You have the old charge branching system from the older games but now you can equip any two weapons on your character. There's a compatibility system where they can equip some weapons efficiently and not, a seal system that essentially acts as equipping abilities onto the weapons and so forth. I don't know how I feel about this system since it means the characters themselves don't feel that unique anymore barring them having one ex move from their preferred weapon and two musou attacks. Musou attacks are more like singular special moves now and not a constant combo and I actually like this change. Now I can sort of understand not making everyone unique with the new weapon system for a reason. Mostly being that the story mode does lock you into one person for specific stages and having the option of more weapons sounds more enticing but I think making each person have a unique person is why we pick them in the first place. It just feels like you're picking a skin at some point. The game does a generally better job of reducing clones but there are still clones with shared ex weapons.
Character stat increases has gone back to relying on drops from officers for increases to attack and defense and I'm not a huge fan of this system. I will say it's good that you can get health increases now instead of relying on map spawns but the factor of getting these stats feel a bit too erratic for me especially if you want to grind most of them or all of them. Skill point system lets you grab some important upgrades like another musou segment or the rest of your combo which is a nice addition considering you can save the points up during story mode and always have some upgrades for each new character you play as. I will say the difficulty is the lowest it's been so far as I can one shot officers for most of the story mode on Normal. Despite my complaints, this is still pretty fun for the twenty hours it took to complete all four story lines which I highly recommend you do for this one. The story mode is the true experience for this title.
As I just mentioned the story mode being the true experience is because there really isn't much here (until Xtreme Legends) at all. Free Mode is essentially replaced with a new mode called Conquest Mode and it's an awful substitute. You can only play as officers that were actually there that is and was essentially the huge draw of replayability for me and instead just introduce a lot of scenarios and serves as a method for getting ultimate weapons. That's honestly it apart from a new tutorial mode which is nice to have for newer players at least.
Another graphical jump from 6 and it's just as big this time. Characters look really nice and the amount of soldiers on the screen essentially always fill the entire screen. I know people said Dynasty Warriors 4 has the best soundtrack but I really think 7 has a definite running here. A young star fulfilling a promise on his mentor's final battle, and this track appropriately titled hide emotion.
Overall I feel this title is a "three steps forward, one step back" type of deal. Brought the series back from the brink and finally introduced a proper telling of the story from a video game perspective. It lacks a bit in content that the Xtreme Legends will hopefully fix but I truly think it does enough to be extremely enjoyable and marks itself enough as a unique and fun title in the series.
If you're purely in it for the story, this is the best way to experience it bar none in the whole series.