I didn’t promise a hands-on first impressions on the demo of the newest Dynasty Warriors game, Dynasty Warriors Origins, because i don’t have a next gen console, and usually i play my musou games like that, but i figured out, there’s a Steam demo as well, maybe my relatively ancient rig can run it fine… and it did, actually surprised me that it’s good enough to run it decently.
So here it my opinions on the demo of Dynasty Warriors Origins, which lets you play one of the classic bouts of the series, The Battle Of Sishui Gate, where the Anti-Dong Zhuo Coalitation attacks united and you also get to meet the demon in red, the mightiest among men, the one you do not pursue: Lu Bu.
So, in case you didn’t follow or knew of this new Dynasty Warriors game, the gist is that you play as a lone Wanderer, a skilled yet aimless martial artist that gets involved into the turbolent battles and political machinations of the characters from Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, so you can basically decide around a bit, and interact and fight alongside the many characters fans of the novel and Koei series have learned to know, love and hate.
It’s not quite an OC or a CAW character similar to how you had a self-insert protagonist in the Samurai Warriors Chronicles games, as the Wanderer is a precisely designed character and so you can’t change much about his looks (nor you can choose for a female option, as far as i remember), not that it matters for the portion of game given by the demo.
And while i’m ok with it, let’s be real, it’s a bit fuckin stupid, because who wants to play as the titular Dynasty Warriors in….. Dynasty Warriors? “Yes but you can decide which of the three kingdoms ally with..” which you could already in previous games, i don’t even need to consider the Empires spin-offs, even base DW games had hypothetical routes and separate faction storylines, so the nameless wanderer guy protagonist thing as a “new thing that lets us do things we couldn’t before” is utter bullshit.
But i will reserve judgement for when the full game comes out and how much the roster of playable characters has been slashed/reduced to, the demo lets you pick an ally that comes in battle with you from3 of the series’ classics, as in, Zhao Dun, Guan Yu and Sun Shiangxiang.
and lets you switch to them for a while, but it happens mid-way through the battle and you can’t command them around like in SW 4, for example, you can switch to them and use them for a while, which is fun, useful and stuff, but feels weird it being a temporary enhanced assist thingie more than just letting you switch at will between the Wanderer.
You can customize settings, antialiasing and various stuff you’d expect, but the demo is indeed a tiny morsel, as it just lets you play the aforementioned Shusui Gate battle that was shown at the last Tokyo Game Show, basically. Before the battle you have some talking cutscenes with Cao Cao that lets you pick different answers, but since the demo doesn’t even guarantee to carry over any save data at all to the main game when it release the next mid-January… i literally can’t tell if these choices will have some actual impact in the long run, or are there to feed some basic “affection system” as it’s most likely the case, given the series’ precedents.
I saw the gameplay trailers but after the latest outputs of Omega Force on the main DW series…. i had reservations. Many i’ve aired before, so i won’t repeat myself here.
But thankfully, this demo is already giving me some unexpected hope, as we’re definitely moving in the right direction to properly evolve and improve the formula without fundamentally change it.
No quarter-baked shitty open world with nothing in it, just battles in huge maps with bases to capture, allies to help and defend, and a battle system that uses the classic Charge System at its core, but they did manage to find a balance to the ol’ issue of ramping up enemy aggression to a point where it actually makes things more fun and challenging, without being just plain annoying and frustrating. Without being shit like Spartan Total Warrior.
Even on the standard/medium difficulty setting, the hordes are more pro-active, the medium-tier officers able to put up a fight, as they are more deadly, nimble and not push-overs, have better defenses to crush, and even more the named high tier enemies, making the block and dodge function not a simple suggestion, but a necessity, as the game especially encourages blocking at the right time to start a counter, which is often more useful than simply dodging, even with the right timing, hence making more viable special attacks that trigger a counter of sorts alongside the usual more offensive special moves/attack that can be unleashed via the usual trigger button and a combination of face buttons, well balanced in terms of cooldowns and ability points needed to unleash these attacks in the first place, so you don’t overrely on them or the musou attack alone.
Also, they manage to revise and make sense some ideas from DW 9, like the ability to finish off or start mashing for free extra hits when the “Assault” prompt appaears to have you whail on said enemy, as here even the generic officers can be tough, have more health and put up more a fight than ever before, often leaving themselves open to stun if you use specific special attacks, all without removing the pleasure of moving down the peons.
The demo lets you choose between 4 types of weapons to have the Wanderer equip, being the General Sword, Guandao, Podao, Wheels, each coming with a specific moveset but letting you still equip some special attacks not bound to the weapons, and two variants with specific bonuses for each weapon. And some accessories that will be familiar to series’ long-time players.
This is also enhanced notably by the overall Morale gauge, which also influences how efficient are the Tactics, as in you get a number of body guard soldiers following you, which can be instructed to do a manouver, be it a fire volley, a charge, encirclement, and more, with 3 slots equippable for these tactical manouvers, here quite useful to carve a path among the chaos.
Obviously morale had been important before in DW games, but here it finally becomes relevant again as you’ll notice the difference between an advantage enemy army, and how the morale shifts in either your favor or not makes the battle more tense.
A good think they kept some other ideas from DW 9, even DW 9 Empires, as sometimes you or the enemy will have a Grand Scheme brewing, which can be brought on by meeting the requirements shown, or can be undone by the same meeting of the requirements, helping morale, which here is more influential on the overall challenge and aggressivity of the enemy, even the mooks.
Also, duels are back, and can be useful to shakedown and make the boss enemies a bit easier to take down (or directly let you slay a named officer faster than regular combat), since now they’re not pushovers, at all, and healing items are now dropped by enemies but have to be used as recovery items, mostly, there are some drops/pick ups for health and so on that work “the old way”.
A cool new feature that totally makes sense due to the newfound difficulty is the ability to basically rewind the entire battle, letting you see where you did wrong and restart from a previous moment in the battle’s history, if you so desire.
“Why i would do tha-?” you might be thinking, until you face Lu Bu and boy, it has been in forever since he had been a real utter menace, but here he is again, as he’s tough, has ranged attacks, and it’s basically like a Souls-esque encounter even on Normal/standard difficulty (here called Wayfarer), it’s brutal but it’s a refreshing feel and it seals the very different direction they went for here.
A direction that still feels tainted by Omega Force’s continued obsession with the “realism” bullshit, which can seen in officers still having more “realistic” (and to the point) generic weapons, some are keeping their old classic weapons, some are not, apparently, you can’t really tell much from the demo, but the new character design still ooze of them being obsessed with “realism” and brooding tone, in a series like Dynasty Warriors where a middle aged guy uses a boat to fight, or a strategist can use his fan to summon winds and thunder to slaughter thousand of people himself on the battlefield.
At this point i wonder if Omega Force or TK do actually believe their marketing bullshit excuses they trot out, or know its bullshit but also do not know what the hell to do with the series anymore… until Nintendo or another company forks over the money, then they will come up with 20 new ideas or systems in a month and make the CEO or company logo a playable character.
Mind you, i like pretty much everything about this new gameplay direction, the engine seems strangely well optimized, it runs fairly well even on my old PC rig, the english dub is decent, and this might actually be the first true and sincere effort to evolve the formula in forever, but older fans of the series might disagree as the arcade feel is gone, and one does wonder why every new good things in mainline Warriors games of late has to come with two or three big caveats, as in, there’s no telling if they’re gonna cut corners on the very things fans would love not, maybe they’re gonna do the SW 5 bullshit of having the movesets tied to the weapons and not the characters.
Also, who the fuck knows if there’s gonna be a free mode, the very thing that was stupid not to expect in a Warriors game, but one that’s not even a guaranted feature anymore, while it becomes even more required, especially when the main character you play as in Dynasty Warriors is just gonna be “mystery martial artist dude” and the DW mainstays heroes of The Three Kingdoms are there but become playable sometimes during the battles because they know you wanna play as them as well, or only with them. So here’s this half-baked compromise, instead.
So yes, definitely not gonna pre-order or buy it anywhere near launch, but if you’re even vaguely interested, i do recommend playing this demo to get a feel for Dynasty Warriors Origins, for better or worse it’s worth a punt.
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