Dynasty Warriors Six, Plus a Little Chatter

Available now for Xbox 360, PS3, PC

This being my first time with the Dynasty Warriors series, I was excited to get a look at the kind of gameplay that enables a sixth installment.  After you insert a game, a wallpaper picture usually comes up giving you the first peak at what kind of visual experience you can expect.  As you know first impressions are important, and my reaction to seeing the terrible wallpaper that pops up when the cursor is over the Blu-ray disc was to give a little disappointed “Ugh.” I flopped down to read a book instead (I know, what gamer does that right?).  Later that week I was in a more optimistic mood and decided to give Dynasty Warriors 6 a go, despite the first impression that left me believing this game was going to be just an uninspired sequel.

If you don’t know about this series it has a lot to do with hacking and slashing whole armies with your war hardened hero.  The third person view gives you a good look at the character you’re playing, which can only be changed when at the begging of the story, or “Musou” mode.  There are plenty of choices between styles of hacking and slashing including heroes who use swords, spears, bows, staffs, claws and more.  Over the levels your characters gain experience giving them points to use on a grid that is similar to the sphere grid of Final Fantasy X.  This aspect of the game is pretty shallow in the view of an RPG fan because leveling up doesn’t do a whole lot for your character, however it does give you a warm fuzzy feeling when that LEVEL UP icon flashes on the screen.  Other features of the game include a free mode, allowing as much hacking and slashing as your thumbs can physically take, as well as a challenge mode and couple of places where you can see how your characters and equipment are progressing.  As for the options they are basic but what is really needed like personalized button schemes and vertical and horizontal axis inversion are included. 

Pros:
It’s a great way to blow off some steam, just set the difficulty to easy then hack and slash away.
The characters are beautifully done and have a mystical glow compared to the NPC’s.
There are some different options if you get tired of playing story mode for hours, which make for a nice interlude.
It’s not an easy game to get through, (unless the difficulty is on easy) so there should be plenty of dieing and cursing before you beat this title.  Some may see this as a bad thing, but not me.

Cons:
Although the camera may be in close to see the beauty in the characters, it ultimately makes protecting yourself much harder because you often have enemies attacking from off screen.
There aren’t too many different attacks or combos you can string together which can boil gameplay down to primitive button mashing. 
Even though the characters are well done, it doesn’t seem like the developer put the same amount of effort into the environments surrounding such beauty.

Overall:
This game is fun.  Nothing extraordinary and yet it’s not ordinary, it’s just fun.  It is interesting to see some of the artifacts from ancient china that were thrown into the story mode for a little authenticity, and worth while to listen to some of the ideas and values portrayed through interaction between characters.  These little bits make the story mode bearable, but bearable at best so if you’re looking for an adventure story to sink your fangs on you should keep looking.  This genre is more in tune with gamers that want to cut their way through enemy laden cities, chaining together kill after kill to make your character into an war hero, all while collecting some pretty cool weapons of course! 

Rent or Buy?
With new games costing 60 dollars, and used not too far below that I cannot recommend purchasing this game.....so just rent it!

Grade:
C+

Happy gaming,

-Stu

Posted by on 01/20 at 10:21 PM