Koei Tecmo’s Magnum Opus to Date!
This is probably the best game Koei Tecmo and Omega Force have ever made! As a fan of the Samurai Warriors games, the Dynasty Warriors versions just never seemed to capture my interest or feel as polished as the aforementioned Samurai Warriors series, until now.
Dynasty Warriors: Origins is simply fantastic. It is one of the best examples of a Musou-style game I’ve played in years. (“Musou” being the term for Japanese style hack and slash video games). Finally, Japanese developers are starting to focus on making games solely for the current hardware of consoles, and it shows.
You play as a wandering traveler who has (eye roll) amnesia, and while striving to remember who and what he is, they get caught up in the battles as featured in the famous Romance of the Three Kingdoms story. It’s an interesting and fresh way to re-tell a yarn that has been spun many times, but as tropesie as it sounds with a lead protagonist losing his memory, it works!
Unlike previous games, the narrative doesn’t seem to be in a rush to get you to the end of the game; so much so that this game actually only covers the first half of the overall Romance of the Three Kingdoms story. Added to this is the mystery of your character turning out to be a guardian peacekeeper, which provides this reboot with a new sense of intrigue and freshness that the series desperately needed.
The story is also delivered through excellent cutscenes, but most importantly for a lot of Western players, all voiced in English! No more text reading for us!
The game’s presentation is excellent, and there are many performance and visual options, all the way to 120 fps if you have a monitor or TV to cope. The developers in an interview set themselves a goal of having 10,000 soldiers on the screen at once! I don’t actually remember playing a section of the game with that many, but the game worked superbly with no visual slowdown, despite there at least being around a thousand NPCs on the screen.
The main draw of this game, however, is the power trip it gives the player of the 1 V 1,000 battles. This, at times, was the game’s strength but also occasionally its weakness too.
The huge battles are a strength because the combat is utterly fantastic. There are playable characters to use other than yourself, but the main focus is to stick with your character and use the many different weapons the game has. As each weapon is, for the most part, completely different in its use and strengths, it means you can experiment a lot with the weapons to find a style that suits you. Just when you think you have found your weapon of choice, along comes another one that seems even more fun.
Each weapon has its own input tree, so the same button presses do not do the same thing with a new weapon. For example, when wielding a sword, pressing the heavy attack button has your character perform a powerful sword swing, while pressing the same button for a different weapon plants you solid to the spot, allowing you to input other button presses to unleash a flurry of blows. The fun part of all of this is learning what each weapon type can actually do.
Each weapon has a skill tree to unlock new moves, as well as skill-based attacks and all-out Musou ones. Finally, after building up enough hits on a bar, you have God Mode, which for a short period of time, makes you extremely powerful in both attack and defense. Think Rage Mode from God of War.
Like with most of these games, there are objectives to achieve that normally just involve finding the enemy boss and defeating them. Here, Dynasty Warriors does throw in a few new tricks and variety along the way. You have what is essentially an eagle eye that stops the actions to find certain locations or items that may be influencing the enemy to make them more powerful. You might have to take out enemy towers or pots, for example. On top of this, enemy captains in the field are mini-boss fights in themselves.
Where this game excels in the combat though is that, unlike in previous Musou games where you just mash the attack buttons, here you have a block/parry mechanic that is crucial to your survival. Suddenly, with just this new focus on being as judicious in defense as much as in attack, the game now has a pleasant and rewarding tactical side to it. You can’t just charge in head-first and expect to win. The more enemy NPCs on the screen, the more powerful they are, but take down a captain, and any troops under his command flee to thin the numbers.
Take out the captains, or thin the numbers? Be defensive and counterattack with powerful parries, or aggressively slaughter as many enemies as possible with no regard for your own safety while losing most of your health in the process?
The ONLY fly in this ointment, however, is the game’s balance. I started the game on normal difficulty, and although I didn’t have to worry too much about dying myself, I often found that my allies were falling in battle a lot. If key allies die, then the mission stops, and you have to try again. I found it a little frustrating that for some of the larger battles, rather than going where I wanted to go, I had to babysit my allies because they were dying too quickly.
So, I turned the difficulty down to easy but then found it was all too easy to cruise through levels. It also doesn’t help that allies in trouble shout out that they need help, but the game doesn’t give you any way to indicate where your allies are! In a game that boasts having thousands of NPCs on the screen all at once, trying to find one person in particular in a large map full of NPCs is annoying enough, but trying to get to them before they get killed to avoid an immediate game over was extremely annoying and frustrating.
The in-game soundtrack was brilliant. There is a varied, eclectic mix of tunes ranging from classical to hard rock! Some of the music was Western-sounding, but most were traditional Chinese. The in-game effects during battle were also superb and full of energy and excitement. These details really added to the whole experience and gave the game such a polished feel.
The game also has a very simple-to-use but excellent RPG element. There are items to find on the world map as you traverse it, as well as on the battlefields themselves. Weapons can be upgraded, as can the horses and gems you can attach.
Finally, and it feels like I’ve skipped over everything I could have mentioned, there are skirmish battles to take part in dotted around the world. These are generally short missions that were useful to try out new weapons or just grind XP on the one you liked. The game also has multiple endings that you can easily re-access to try new ones after you have finished the story. This lends the game a lot of replayability.
Summary
Phew, there was a lot to cover here, and it feels like I could have mentioned more. All in all, Dynasty Warriors: Origins is polished and excellent fun. The game is full of vibrant energy and excitement but also calms things down to deliver an interesting story on both personal and world levels. It looks and plays fantastically and has clear instructions and guidance (something a lot of JRPGs don’t) to ease you into a lot of the mechanics. A few minor niggles of the difficulty balancing with the NPC babysitting does drag the overall score down a little bit, but even so, this is still a fantastic and exciting game to play.
Developer: Omega Force
Publisher: Koei Tecmo
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Release Date: 17th January 2025
Gaming Respawn’s copy of Dynasty Warriors: Origins was provided by the publisher.