With a new open world take on the series, Dynasty Warriors 9 sets itself apart from the others with a new style and flow. Combat has evolved in a few ways, but it may not make up for some drawbacks.
The most immediately apparent change compared to any other Warriors game to date is the open world. Missions are no longer bound to menu selections or simple, linear progression. Missions are instead acquired by NPCs and actions in the world. The main story missions have you journey long distances while along the way you may find captains that offer side quests in exchange for money and materials that can be used in crafting. There are also many bases scattered around which can be taken over by defeating the captains there and will act as fast travel locations.
Main story missions ultimately amount to defeating someone in a fight, but also include additional objectives to reach them such as sneaking through a base or defeating specific officers to open gates. These objectives vary and are generally different with each chapter, making it just a little better than monotonous.
The side quests along the way are almost always a mission to defeat a group of nearby enemies. Going through the game in this way does make this a Warriors game at the core, always fighting hoards of enemies. There are some differences worth noting. One-hit-kill peons are fewer with more officers to take on.
This is a good compliment to the revised combat system. Combat is, as always, a button mash combination of normal and strong attacks, but now added on are “trigger attacks.” Trigger attacks are executed by holding a shoulder button and then pressing a face buttons. These can stun enemies, launch them in the air, knock them down, or use a special attack that’s unique to each character adds elemental damage.
Utilizing these against officers and bosses properly can keep them incapacitated and if it’s an especially tough boss, this can be the difference between success and failure. These trigger attacks also improve the flow of combat, supplementing them between regular combos when there would normally be a pause keeps your barrage going. Also, in many instances, a prompt for a finishing move will appear mid-combo if the enemy is close enough to 0 HP. It really helps speed fights along with many officers.
There is a downside to all of this, however. Without isolated instances for each mission, it’s becomes a relatively empty world with simple batches of enemies that don’t offer any need of strategy or sense of urgency. Typical of a Warriors game, one would expect enemy officers to be taking actions and bases that need capturing, sometimes in a timely manner. Of course, not everthing is, or should, transfer over, but there is a real lack of things going on. It is, for the most part, just traveling and fighting.
In addition to just enemies and bases, there’s a number of crafting materials that can be collected in the world. These can generally be found laying on pathways and in clusters off trail. There are also materials that can be acquired via hunting and fishing. All of these materials can be used to create better weapons, accessories, and gems to improve your character.
Even still, this doesn’t do a whole lot to alleviate the empty feeling of the world. Very much time is spent just traveling with nothing to do. Crafting is not a big insentive to go out of your way to collect materials nor is it particularly fun. The hunting aspect is about as shallow as it gets. Occasionally an animal will appear which can then be shot with arrows. It doesn’t appear very much effort was put into the hunting system. Prey such as deer will not flee very far and predators such as bears and tigers hardly put up a fight. They can be very easily stun locked with repeated arrow shots until they fall. This may be somewhat convenient, but defeats the purpose of having hunting at all.
The empty and dull feelings extend into much of the rest of the game as well. Characters are devoid of personality and star in some of the most lifeless cutscenes possessing voice acting anywhere from wooden to just plain bad.
Each character has their own story shown from their perspective. Initially, this would seem to be a commendable accomplishment—so many characters with their own unique stories, and does have its merit, but scrimps on fleshing them out. For the first few chapters, every character in the main three dynasties have nearly identical tasks and go through virtually the same motions with little to change things up.
Forget switching out to a character you’d like to play as while progressing through the story to suit you along the way. Characters are bound to their path, start to finish. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it weren’t for the hours upon hours of repetition that comes with playing each character. Stories do begin to take on individuality after the third chapter when the three kingdoms split. That’s nearly a quarter of the game that is repeated for a large portion of the characters. Many other characters don’t begin their story until later chapters which is both a blessing and a curse. They at least don’t have to go through the same boring repetition, but still don’t get as much play time.
There are a few other odd caveats as well, such as trigger attacks not changing its display if you change your button configuration, leaving you to figure it out yourself. No barriers in many places where there should be such as near bodies of water or over some walls that enemies can get flung behind and stuck. Fighting near water often means hitting them into the water and waiting for them to swim back to shore so you can hit them again. Then there’s the new grappling hook which allows you to scale any wall. Convenient most of the time, but also completely trivializes many walls and gates, easily letting you just barge into places you’re not supposed to be yet.
Dynasty Warriors 9 isn’t exactly a mess and does have a great combat system that introduces a very nice flow in fighting. However, the sheer lack of everything else bogs the entire experience down. A lackluster world, deadpan characterization, boring cutscenes, boss fights that drag on, and half-assed crafting implementation are really going to make you wonder why you bothered to show up in the first place. This one is hard to recommend even to diehard Warriors fans. The most fun one can get out of this is to mindlessly follow the auto-path and beat up everyone along the way. There’s nothing inherently frustrating to ruin your time, there’s just not much there to make it a great time.
