Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires – When Ambition Gets the Better of You.
- Developer: Omega Force
- Publisher: Koei Tecmo
- Release date: 15th February 2022
- Genre: Hack and Slash, Strategy, RPG
- Platforms: PS4/5, Xbox One/Series X|S, Switch, Windows PC, Mac App Store
- Reviewed on: PS5
- Game Supplied by: Publisher
Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires Review
On paper, I’m sure the idea behind what the Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires developers were trying to achieve was good, but that vision and what has transferred over into the game doesn’t quite meet up. It’s not that the game is broken, far from it. It’s just that Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires sufferers from the expectation that you have played previous games in the series.
You can begin this journey in many ways, with eight campaigns spanning several periods in Chinese history where you can launch your effort to unify China, the most famous of which is the Yellow Turban Rebellion.
Once you have chosen the campaign you want to play, you then have the choice of playing as either an officer of that campaign’s period, any officer of your choosing from any of the other periods, a custom character of your design or as the ruler. The ruler has complete autonomy over everyday comings and going of the political spectrum, whereas the officer starts with just a scant few political and economic responsibilities. As the officers rank up within their chosen army or join an alliance with an established lord, their level of responsibility grows.
The wealth and breadth of playable options are staggering and to be lauded. Each playable character, of which there are nearly 800, plus any customisable characters you create, each have their own weapons, move sets and idiosyncrasies to understand. For someone deeply invested in this series, you can appreciate the depth of enjoyment this can bring to the game. You could, if you wanted, replay the same campaign nearly 800 times with a new character each time!
Politics
If you start the game as a ruler, before you do any combat you will have to broach the political side of the game. This whole portion of the game perplexed me greatly. Even if the systems were laid out in a clear manner and you fully understood the consequences and rewards for making decisions, there was very little feedback, if any, of a job well done, other than an increase in troops, officers, secret plans or other effects for the upcoming battle. These rewards felt like minimal gains for the time and effort put into achieving them, so even in the best of circumstances, the tactical aspect of the game simply wasn’t that fun or rewarding.
One of my biggest bugbears of RPGs is the incessant use of tutorials needlessly holding your hand for every step you take. Here though, just when you really need a plethora of tutorials to explain the nuances of the political systems, you literally get none. In fact, the only tutorials openly presented to you are for combat. Hidden deep in the menu systems there are tutorials for the strategy side of the game, and these took me twenty minutes of reading to go through them.
Even after reading these, though, it still didn’t explain or give examples of the benefits of becoming a benevolent leader or not, or why you should invest time and money into crop growing and the benefits of doing so. Every system just said what you could do with no tactical reason as to why this would be better than something else. You are simply dropped into it, and frankly, it was overwhelming. The only sense of reward that was felt was by seeing the numbers alongside icons grow, with no real reason to be happy about it other than that the numbers were getting bigger.
I could list out the details of all the different choices in direction a ruler can make, but as it took me twenty minutes just to read what was available I’ll summarise the experience in that you have bi-yearly meetings that give you six turns to complete tasks before the next meeting. Achieving those tasks, such as creating a gold reserve of 15,000, will give you bonus points as a reward. Once your six turns are over either a battle ensues (Without wanting to sound like a broken record there was again no explanation of the benefits of choosing to go into battle or not) or you choose to do nothing and spend another six months trying to build up your kingdom’s statistics. During this time you can also wander around your kingdom (a huge portion of a map, not just your castle) and speak to officers to either increase your bond with them or recruit new officers to join your ranks. Increasing both will either increase their effectiveness on the battlefield or grant you additional troops.
Another example of how the game doesn’t explain itself is that one of the mechanics you can use is to bribe an officer of another region. Although it explains that you can do this, it doesn’t explain for what benefit or how to use this tactically. Bribe them to make the enemy weaker or to gain more political power? How do I know who to target or why I should do so? Nothing is explained, so this whole portion of the game, frustratingly, comes down to nothing more than trial and error.
Combat.
So the end of the bi-yearly meetings have finished, and you decided to invade a nearby territory. This will place you on the battlefield with your army and task you to storm an enemy castle to defeat the ruler inside. To do so you will have to either destroy all of the enemies outside the walls and/or protect your siege weapons to gain access to the castle interior. If you are attacking, you must ensure that your battering rams are protected long enough to break down castle gates or that the siege towers can reach the castle walls. This is done by capturing areas on the battlefield; Each area on the field has a central point that will require you to defeat a number of enemies and their captain, then this area will become your base. The enemy can and will attempt to re-take these bases, so whilst you have captured it, you can assign one of your captains to defend it while you go off to take another base. This obviously gives you less firepower for the next base but was a nice tactical element to include.
A nice touch is that combat has a basic rock-paper-scissors system in place, involving infantry, archers and cavalry. Each unit is either strong or weak to a particular type, so knowing your enemy beforehand is helpful in making the battle a little easier. What was frustrating, though, was that you can only play as one type of character, despite having characters of other types, and you can’t change on the fly. This could have been circumnavigated by allowing the character you use to be able to change his/her own weapons as you go but you can’t do that either. This feels like a big gameplay oversight, and it’s even more frustrating when you know that other Omega Force games in the Samurai Warrior series do allow you to change characters quickly mid-battle.
When you have expanded your kingdoms, you can be invaded by an enemy where the goal of the combat is quite obviously the complete opposite of storming the castle in that you have to defend it. So this will task you with destroying enemy siege weapons before they reach your walls for example.
Issues aside, when either attacking or defending, the Musou 1 v 1000 action is still, as always, a lot of fun. Each character has a unique move, with power moves to boot on top, and learning how to use them effectively in battle with their superb animations and flamboyant, sweeping, visually exciting finishers never gets old – The thrill of the game is building the combo meter up until you can deliver knockout blows to multiple enemies or Captains with ease. Because of the tactical nature of the game, you also have to keep an eye on where to go, so it’s gripping and exciting combat that moves with pace, keeping you on your toes.
Graphics and Audio
To assist in building excitement during combat there is an excellent, adrenaline-fuelled soundtrack that pulsates along with the action, while for the political side of the game, it provides the backing as you cruise along with grandeur. The sound effects of weapons hitting enemies and their cries are intoxicating too, and each weapon also has a different sound set, which again adds to the variety.
Graphically, the Dynasty Warriors series has never been known to be a powerhouse of technological marvel, and it seems that very few improvements have been made for the latest generation of consoles. The game runs smoothly, but that was already the case with previous technology. There are options to play in Action Mode, which prioritises frame rates, and Movie Mode, which prioritises resolution, however, neither graphical option seemed to make much of an impact on the screen.
Other aspects included (and not).
One of the best additions to the game is the customizable playable character you can create. As the game already has nearly 800 playable characters, you can tell there will be a depth of creatable options for the look and playstyle of your character when creating your own. To be able to create and then use these characters in-game is a wonderful experience as it really excels at making the gamer feel like this is their own unique story
But, a unique experience is all it will be as, for some perplexing unknown reason, there are no online co-op options for gamers to share their creations or story with at all. It’s a curious decision not to include this as these have also been included in previous games.
Summary
It’s difficult to understand what type of gamer Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires is made for. As a tactical game, it’s far too shallow, not particularly rewarding and slow. For a gamer who likes their Musou combat, there are long periods of tedium before the battle, and even when battles start they feel a little too shallow as well. The game never really nails it for either experience. There is fun to be had, especially if you have experience of the political systems, but newcomers joining the series here will be overwhelmed with the content and underwhelmed with the result.
