Warriors Wrap-Up
Dynasty and Samurai combine for tag-team button mashing.
Published: August 3, 2007
Here's a fun fact for you: the Dynasty Warriors series has sold a mind-boggling 15 million copies. Now granted, that's probably because there's been approximately 2,382,101,912 different versions of the games over the years, but that's still a lot of hacking and slashing -- and it's not going to stop any time soon. In terms of pure fanservice, though, it's hard to beat what Warriors Orochi is offering: 77 different characters from across both Dynasty and Samurai Warriors, independent storyline threads for the Wu, Shu, Wei and Samurai Warriors groups and the ability to mix and match as you see fit.
Gameplay-wise, not much has changed. As we slogged through a couple hundred enemies with the 360 version of the game at a recent KOEI press event, we were still able to pull off the branching combos and Musou attacks, but there have been a few tweaks. Now, you can swap between the three warriors at any time, which is good since the reserve characters constantly build back their health and Musou gauges. If you're quick enough, you can start a Musou Chain, attacking with one character's super attack, then swapping in the other two for a much longer attack string.
To offset the obvious advantage of power, Warriors Orochi seems to have upped the difficulty a little; enemies are more prone to juggling now, but luckily, there's more than enough power in your own stable of characters to offset this unless you just wade into the middle of a sea of generals. To help ease the burden of juggling the lineup, the game breaks all the 77 different characters up in to Power, Speed and Technique categories, each with their own special abilities: arrow-blocking armor to power through crowds, the ability to air-jump or dash to get up, up and away from crowds, and the option to use a little Musou juice to finish a combo with R1 instead of the normal Triangle attack, respectively.
The sheer number of stages is damned impressive, though; initially we just thought it'd be 10 or so per story, but there are branching sub-missions, and we're guessing even more hidden gems to discover with a little more play time. As soon as we notch them hours before the game's release next month, we'll update you with any new goodies, especially because we've got a proper PlayStation 2 version of the game sitting just inches away from our debug. Updates soon!
Gameplay-wise, not much has changed. As we slogged through a couple hundred enemies with the 360 version of the game at a recent KOEI press event, we were still able to pull off the branching combos and Musou attacks, but there have been a few tweaks. Now, you can swap between the three warriors at any time, which is good since the reserve characters constantly build back their health and Musou gauges. If you're quick enough, you can start a Musou Chain, attacking with one character's super attack, then swapping in the other two for a much longer attack string.
To offset the obvious advantage of power, Warriors Orochi seems to have upped the difficulty a little; enemies are more prone to juggling now, but luckily, there's more than enough power in your own stable of characters to offset this unless you just wade into the middle of a sea of generals. To help ease the burden of juggling the lineup, the game breaks all the 77 different characters up in to Power, Speed and Technique categories, each with their own special abilities: arrow-blocking armor to power through crowds, the ability to air-jump or dash to get up, up and away from crowds, and the option to use a little Musou juice to finish a combo with R1 instead of the normal Triangle attack, respectively.
The sheer number of stages is damned impressive, though; initially we just thought it'd be 10 or so per story, but there are branching sub-missions, and we're guessing even more hidden gems to discover with a little more play time. As soon as we notch them hours before the game's release next month, we'll update you with any new goodies, especially because we've got a proper PlayStation 2 version of the game sitting just inches away from our debug. Updates soon!
