Samurai Warriors 2 literally made me spend hours looking up sengoku jidai stuff online to see how the historical versions of the characters compare to the ones from the game. I had no idea those characters and battles actually existed in real life, so it was pretty fascinating.

There is a pretty obvious bias towards the Toyotomi side here, given how a lot of the more developed characters (Mitsunari, Yukimura, Sakon, Ginchiyo) are in it during the Sekigahara campaign, while the Tokugawa side is mostly composed of boring one-note characters aside from Ieyasu himself. Still, I think SW2 (Xtreme Legends expansion included) does a pretty decent job at covering the general story of the Sengoku Jidai and presenting it as a complex war story with multiple perspectives. While the first game was mostly focused on Oda Nobunaga's conquest, this one goes from that all the way to the Siege of Osaka, with a bigger emphasis being put in the Sekigahara campaign, which is understandable since it was the most climactic part of the period.

That's not to say other characters and parts of the period don't get to shine, the way Koei handled the tragedy surrounding Azai Nagamasa and Oichi, Shibata Katsuie's relationship with Maeda Toshiie and the theme of passing the torch their story tackled, the build up to Akechi Mitsuhide's rebellion against Nobunaga... And many other stories, it's all pretty fantastic. There are just some liberties taken with the characters and historical events that felt weird, like Saika Magoichi being the one who kills Nobunaga, and Fuuma Kotaro being this cartoony-as-fuck villain who's evil because he likes chaos and randomly appears in battles that have nothing to do with him saying "PEACE BAD, CHAOS GOOD" for no reason, and Date Masamune is portrayed as an unlikeable spoiled brat, these two characters would thankfully see a lot of improvement in future SW games, at least.

As for the gameplay... Well, it's a musou game, you know what you're getting into if you played even one of them. This one does shake things up a little by having characters with different styles of combos, but ultimately it's still very much a musou game where you fight hordes of enemies, most of them don't present much of a challenge besides some officers and other main characters.

That being said, this is probably the musou game with the best use of the morale system, as it really seems to make a big difference when you complete the objectives in the battles that make it unfold in your army's favor. When your army's morale outweights the enemies' morale, your soldiers and officers actually start to fight better, I've seen multiple instances of allied officers and main characters holding themselves pretty well during the battle and defeating enemy officers/main characters without me having to come in and do all the work for them. I swear to God, when I played the Battle of Sekigahara in the Western Army's side and managed to thwart the Eastern Army's plan of getting Kobayakawa Hideaki to betray me, as well as completing all the previous missions, my allies were able to defeat Honda Tadakatsu by themselves. Honda Motherfucking Tadakatsu, basically the Lu Bu of this series, and they kicked his ass on their own! This would never happen in any modern musou game, or even some of the older Dynsaty Warriors titles, your allies always have to rely on you to do everything in these games and it can be annoying sometimes. In Samurai Warriors 2, though? Your army can hold their own against the enemy just fine, provided that you complete the missions in order to raise their morale, which feels a lot more like participating in a war, I love this.

What else is there to talk about? The graphics won't blow anyone away, but they look good enough, especially for a late PS2 game. The soundtrack is fucking fire, but that's a given with most musou games, even the shittier ones have some great music at the very least, so no surprises here.

So... Yeah, Samurai Warriors 2 is one of my favorite PS2 games of all time, I spent hundreds of hours playing, experiencing all the different character stories and the ways battles can unfold depending on what missions I complete or fail to complete. It was a great time by itself, but it also led me to have an equally amazing time reading about the Sengoku Jidai as it was historically. Game journalists don't like this or musou games in general, but they can all go suck a big fat wiener because my opinion is superior to theirs.