The sixth installment of Koei’s hack’n’slash re-imagining of the action-packed battles during China’s Three Kingdoms era is the second of the series (not including the oddball Dynasty Warriors: Gundam) to appear on this generation’s consoles. Players are once again able to control a variety of generals from the epic composed by Luo Guanzhong and hack their way through thousands of enemies in the name of uniting China under a single leader. A few new elements are introduced to update the experience for both veterans and newcomers to the series alike, but are they enough to make the game any better than its five predecessors? Read on to find out what I thought.
The Dynasty Warriors series has been accused of many things over its last four installments, not the least among them being a lack of innovation in gameplay, outdated graphics, and in the case of the English language versions, voice acting so bad that most people wouldn’t care if the Japanese language track wasn’t subtitled. Dynasty Warriors 6 attempts to address a few of these issues, but in the end would have been much more aptly named “Dynasty Warriors 5.5.” Koei seems to have been operating under a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality for so long that for every step forward that this game attempts to make, it feels like one or two have been taken backwards.
Storywise, it’s the same old gig - the three kingdoms and their respective generals are all battling to take control of China during a couple of early centuries A.D. If you’re looking for the actual story, which is really very good, I highly recommend you buy the books and read them as opposed to playing this game. Ironically enough, although Koei has provided an “Encyclopedia” with this game which details the generals, battles, and timeline of the Three Kingdoms period, Dynasty Warriors 6 takes more liberties with revisionist history than any of the previous games in the series. Part of this is driven due to the much narrower character selection in this game, which necessitates changing history so that each character will still have six missions even though he/she was supposed to die at a certain point in history.
I have yet to play Dynasty Warriors 5 on the Xbox 360, but the graphics in DW6 are certainly a little bit above what was seen on the PS2 editions of the game. The environments have a nicer, more textured look and all of the character models of the main cast have been given makeovers so that they resemble the designs coming out of most Japanese and Korean animation studios today. You would be hard-pressed to find a Chinese general who is not now either sporting absurdly large and spiky hair or silky flowing locks. Outside of the main characters, though, the palette of enemies is as bland as ever, including hordes of faceless or cloned soldiers in exactly the same kinds of armor. In addition, some of the cutscenes are of a distinctly lower quality than those found on last generation’s console. While the quality is approximately the same at first glance, DW6 on the 360 features terrible pixelization and blurriness at times, particularly when the cutscene involves a relatively close-up shot in an indoor environment. The lighting in the game is also unbalanced, as outside environments are bright and easy to navigate, but any covered location such as a cave or a maze is incredibly difficult to navigate due to a sudden onset of dimmed screen. Pop-in and texture loading are also problems in the game, especially in two-player mode. In single-player mode, the game looks relatively nice and you can see enemies at a fair distance, but as soon as you start two-player split-screen mode the game makes huge sacrifices to keep the framerate running completely smooth. Sprites right next to your character will constantly pop in and out of vision, making it very difficult to hit an opponent who’s suddenly not (but actually is still) in the path of your weapon, and the wonky camera can become caught on walls or other parts of the environment, making it impossible to see anything but either the wall or the top of your character’s head. The soundtrack features the typical hard rock guitar riffs that the series has featured over the last decade, but apparently the composers felt it was time to change things up a bit, so occasionally you’ll also hear some trumpets or other brass and woodwind instruments. To anybody who’s used to the old soundtracks, these additions are almost jarring, but they aren’t particularly bad to listen to and it’s not likely you’ll be noticing the music much while you’re slicing people to ribbons. A Japanese voice track is not included as an option in this game, but surprisingly, the voice acting is slightly more passable than it has been in the past. Somebody in management figured out that the voice actors at least ought to be speaking the characters’ names correctly, so now all the names are pronounced in a reasonable emulation of what they would sound like in Mandarin Chinese as opposed to being phoneticized with varying results.
Gameplay and content is where Dynasty Warriors 6 has made most of its changes, but is also where it loses the most ground for me. Koei introduced a “Renbu” combination attack system that allows you to perform longer and more complex combination attacks as you beat on you opponents, filling up your “Renbu gauge.” In order to allow these combos to continue rolling, however, Koei dismantled the old two-button manual combination system in favor of a one-button mashing festival. A “heavy” secondary attack is still available on the other button, but it no longer plays a part in combination attacks. Building and linking your own combos was one of the few things that gave any sense of satisfaction in the previous games due to certain characters either having grossly overpowered area-of-effect attacks or almost-infinite combos, but by leveling the playing field a lot of the characters’ individual charm has been lost. The characters mostly use a similar collection of swords and polearms, and while the animations and attack styles are somewhat different for each general, playing a lot of the characters feels very much the same. Characters now also receive a type of “Special” that can be activated by collecting dropped “tomes” on the battlefield, but it’s a bit annoying that the characters were pigeonholed into having a certain type of special rather than allowing players to chose one that best fits their playing style. Finally, the generals of ancient China have all learned how to swim at breakneck speeds, but it’s a fairly useless ability because even though you can jump into the water at any time, you must find a gently sloping coast or some stairs to have any hope of ever exiting the water again, which means that you may very well fail one or two missions just because you fell into a canyon/moat/river and can’t find a damn bank to scramble onto while your compatriots are slaughtered.
Characters are now leveled up using skill points earned by gaining experience from killing opponents and completing mission objectives; the points are spent on unlocking power-ups and new abilities in a system very reminiscent of Final Fantasy X’s Sphere Grid system. The system doesn’t work very well because even though players didn’t have control over their level-up stats in previous games, at least they weren’t being forced to choose between choices that they didn’t want in the first place. Also, even though you can level up your characters to level 99, there’s very little point in doing so as you’ll run out of places to spend the points long before hitting the level cap. The difficulty levels are ramped up a bit compared to the older games and spin-offs, as most characters no longer have a free, uber-powerful move (see Speed-class characters in Warriors Orochi) and the enemies no longer operate on the time-honored Asian fighting principle of one attacker at at time. Dynasty Warriors 6 feels free to throw as many as eight generals at you at any given time, and rather than wait in line to hit you, they will come at you from all directions and smack you in the back at every opportunity. Another odd decision was the choice to do away with the “bodyguard” system so painstakingly revised in the last few Dynasty Warriors and Dynasty Warriors: Extreme games. Enemy generals now have lesser generals and nameless “Lieutenants” as body guards, but the option to have any bodyguards of your own has been removed.
If you’ve read this entire review, you’re probably thinking that it’s really negative and that this is a terrible game. Well, yes, this review is negative, but oddly enough, this is NOT a terrible game. As I stated before, Koei has operated for a long time on the premise that the series is not broken, and as it continues to sell millions of copies with each installment, they may have a point. As such, they’ve left in a decent amount of the types of things that kept people coming back to the previous versions, and if you enjoyed any of those or you like anything associated with this period in Chinese history, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy this too. Ultimately, this game is representative of a lot of the caveats of when series first come to a new generation of consoles, such as lack of content or halfhearted upgrades, but if Koei is willing to work a little bit harder on their next installment, it may actually receive something higher than average scores all around.
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