Orochi A-Go-Go Gone Portable
Warriors Orochi 2 takes the best of KOEI's Dynasty and Samurai Warriors games, mashes 'em together and gives it to you on the go with few compromises.
Published: August 30, 2009
The fact that you can swap out your characters at any time (well, save for when you're being juggled, which can be frustrating in a way only the Warriors games can make it), you can now chain attacks together. On the PS2, this was done with the shoulder buttons, making it a fairly simple process, but on the PSP, it's accomplished by pressing left/right on the d-pad, which can be a little cumbersome. Still it allows for just enough time to chain together Musou attacks for massive displays of crowd control or boss life-chopping aggression. Any characters that are waiting in the wings will have their Life and Musou Gauges refilled slowly, so it makes strategic sense to keep swapping them in and out -- to say nothing of the advantages of having a super-powerful character thinning out the hordes vs. a faster character that can keep a boss pinned down.
At the heart of the game, though, is still the classic system of taking over bases, capturing bits of territory and offing major, named mini- and major bosses that zip in and out of battles. Suffice it to say if you're not already a fan of the series, this probably isn't going to convert you. It will however, provide a stupid amount of content for those that can't get enough of their hacky, slashy fun.
I'll admit, though, that I didn't quite expect the game to look this decent on the PSP. It's more a framerate thing than anything else, as you'll regularly see soldiers fading in right in front of you (nothing new there), and apparently the draw distance has been upped a bit, but given the games' simple terrain and even simpler character models on the PSP, it's not surprising that things look fairly simple, though not worse than most PSP games. The detail in characters and overall polish that was in the decidedly Monster Hunter-esque Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce isn't present here, but I have the sneaking suspicion they're running on different engines -- or at the very least different versions of the same one.
The audio, lifted straight from the PS2 version, is rife with the usual combination of lilting classic instruments and more modern wailing guitar and despite it all being quite familiar (one tends to memorize the tunes when one plays a game for three dozen hours), they still don't really grate. The part that usually did get on my nerves, though, the combination of constant repetition in voice, was not only cut down (likely to save on accessing the UMD, though you can install a portion of the game to improve load times), but with the Japanese voices implemented, I could just flick 'em over and never have to worry about knowing what the hell they were saying (not that it mattered much anyway). As a result, the roaring armies, clashing swords and sounding trumpets all fill in the audio quite nicely and this may actually be the best-sounding Warriors game out there. Kudos to KOEI for finally including the toggle option for the voices, and for getting it all to fit on a UMD to boot.
With all the stuff packed onto the UMD, this really is the definitive version of the Warriors series. That I'm even saying that about a PSP version of the game is remarkable -- particularly given how hacked-together the early versions of things were. No, it doesn't run at the same resolution or framerate of the console versions, but anyone who plays these games looking for whiz-bang visuals is doing it all wrong. For what's here -- a massive amount of content that's on par with the console versions -- there's more than enough to justify the purchase price. Now if only they could release one of these every couple years instead of the other way around...
