Dynasty Warriors: Origins Review – The best Musuo game ever

thesixthaxis.com:

For a moment there we were genuinely worried about what the future had in store for Dynasty Warriors. Despite being a flagship franchise for Koei over the years, it began to feel starved of innovation, rehashing the same core mechanics and retreading the same old story. Dynasty Warriors 9 tried to do something drastically different with its open-world setup but this was poorly executed, leaving players to explore barren landscapes populated by braindead enemy warbands. The fact that Nioh developer Team Ninja recently did their own spin on the Three Kingdoms story with Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty also hinted at DW’s uncertain future. However, it appears that Omega Force had been biding its time, going back to the drawing board, and rebuilding its beloved hack n’ slash epic from scratch instead of tacking a few new shiny features on a much-fatigued formula.

As the name implies, Origins is a reboot, and an ideal entry point for both new and lapsed fans. At the same time, this latest Dynasty Warriors game feels like it was made for series diehards, revising and reworking just about every core aspect while layering on intriguing new gameplay systems.

For the uninitiated, Dynasty Warriors is a historical action game set in Ancient China and based on Luo Guanzhong’s epic novel, “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”. While there have been 9 mainline entries in the series, each one has retold the same story over and over albeit with shinier graphics and incremental changes to the frenzied, hack n’ slash gameplay. DW has always been about “1 versus 1,000” battles where players obliterate entire armies by hammering out button combos and special “Musou” attacks.

Despite the many changes Omega Force has made in Dynasty Warriors: Origins, that concept is still at the very centre of the experience. If anything it has become more galvanised thanks to smartly evolved combat mechanics and the enhanced cinematic atmosphere of large-scale battles.

Hearing that Dynasty Warriors: Origins would only