Dynasty Warriors: Origins
A very well made game and a massive improvement over the disappointing DW9. Similar to SW5 the game is a "reboot" that focuses on the early parts of the Three Kingdoms storyline and ends at Chibi, but unlike SW5 instead of completely changing the artstyle and the characters they kept the DW8 artstyle and characterization (outside of a few like Zhang Jiao and Dong Zhuo, who were made more serious and interesting, especially ZhanG Jiao, what a glow up). Battles have never felt so good and the player really needs to be careful at all times (at least on the 2 harder difficulty levels). Unfortunately this all came with the game having a single playable character which is absolutely an issue, but all the weapon movesets are varied and unique (and greatly expanded) at least
The game stars an unnamed protagonist (let's call it Ziluan as other characters refer to him in the game) that starts as a mercenary during the Yellow Turban Rebellion but eventually joins one of the warlords of the era. Ziluan is kinda like a Persona protagonist: one expression for the entire game, never speaks a word, has "social links" with the various officers of the era which amount to nothing, and can occasionally pick a choice that ranges from "Yes" to "Sarcastic yes". So without beating around the bush Ziluan is a big disappointment and the first clear negative of the game. The worst part is how everyone, and I mean everyone just loves sucking him off: he is always the bestest, greatest, most impressivest and the sole reason every game battle is won. The series has always been famous for the 1vs1000 gameplay but at least past games pretended the character you were using wasn't the only reason a faction won. The only positive I can think about Ziluan is that it has extremely good animations during battle no matter what weapon type he uses. For the rest Ziluan is a total and complete failure, and let's not even talk about his "OC story" which amounts to nothing at all by the end of the game
On the story side, the early part of the RotTK story has been greatly expanded. Like the Yellow Turban Rebellion which in most games is solved in a single battle is now a whole chapter which includes 5 battles and multiple cutscenes, and the following chapter focusing on Dong Zhuo is even longer. The voice acting is the right balance of good and "hammy" which is exactly what DW should be, and this focus also allows the DW cast to be better developed (although all are not equal on this side). Too bad the actual cutscenes suck. Every one is the same "a few dudes standing still or sitting still while they look at the camera and talk". Nothing happens during these cutscenes, almost zero animations. The only true cutscenes are the CG ones but those are few and very sparse. Past DW games had cutscenes where people at least moved, or fought, or just did something. But here they're just... standing there doing nothing
The actual gameplay is amazing, but a particular focus should be given to the new "large armies" mechanic. A large army is a big clump of enemy and allied officers clumped together and behaving like a single unit. The player needs to continue stop the enemy army from using tactics (which change depending on the battle) while protecting their own strategists until the enemy army breaks, causing a massive morale loss to the enemy (and morale is probably one of the most important mechanic in this game). Even if you play good (and there are many ways to play good, like parrying, perfect dodges, counterattacks) having the morale advantage greatly decreases the time it takes to win and there is a certain satisfaction in seeing how all the efforts during a battle pay off in the end
Returning to the story, I picked the Wei side for the first run and I have to say the DWO Wei story is one of the best I ever saw in a DW game. Not only it's the most realized, but it somehow manages to give all the in-game Wei officers their time to shine. There is a great focus of explaining every battle and how it's supposed to go before even starting the prebattle war council. Every step of Cao Cao's plan is discussed and analyzed, every important RotTK event is adapted. It also doesn't forget to integrates in the later parts of the story the 2 officers which can be saved from their canonical death. It's also the only story where Ziluan's bond to the rest of the Wei officers feels like it has an actual significance, expecially in the normal end which has probably one of the best battles in the series where after the canonical defeat at Chibi Ziluan (and the player specifically) manages to regroup and reinvigorate the fleeing Wei troops in turning a battle for their survival in a massive curbstomp victory where every officers you met in the route has it's own unique dialogue and role to ensure victory. It's almost a shame the Wei True end skips this battle because, well it just ends with a victory at Chibi. Truly incredible
And the illusion shattered when playing the other 2 routes. Now now, I think the Wu normal route is still very good and it's also very unique since it has almost no battles in common with the 2 other routes. But for the Wu True route the writers basically didn't even try in doing someting with the 2 officers you can save (both just end up the same way: they got hurt badly so let's pretend they died for no reason at all). Yeah I know their death is really hard to write away but it's such a cop out, and the "True" end is barely different to the normal one (you even fight the same final battle with 0 changes). And Shu's route, oh boy. This game made me realize why most DW skip all these early parts to quickly get to the post Chibi events. The entire route is just Liu Bei and its 2 sworn brothers just casually getting involved in random things, made even worse by Liu Bei being such a crybaby with zero willingness to do anything at all. The last chapter at leasts adds a few more characters but it's too little too late. And because the game ends at Chibi there is literally nothing the writers could do to have a separate "True" route so the Shu true route is literally the same as the normal route with zero changes. It truly feels like the game originally only had a Wei route and the devs had to scramble to add 2 other routes in a year or something
Oh yeah, let's talk about the "affinity scenes" a bit more. Honestly they're not bad but they're also not that good. The real problem is how to get them: the officer you want to bond gives you some "tasks" which in 80% of the time amount to insanely boring grind like "kill 300 enemies using this weapon and this specific attack" which are on the level of random daily quests from a gacha. These only exist to waste the player time, and there are like 300 of them to do if you want to max all the affinity levels (or get all the achievements). DW games have been pretty bad with random things to grind for for the past games but this system beats them all. This grind is terrible, awful. And even with the map being a small "JRPG-style" world map there are still moments where the player has to waste time by walking from one tip of the map to the other. It's insane how good this game is during battles and how bad it's outside of battles
For the final part, despite the high parts this game ultimately feels incomplete. Ending at Chibi simply doesn't work in RotTK, especially for non-Wei factions. But the worst part is that even accepting Chibi as an end the game still feels "incomplete". Remember what I said about affinity scenes with the cast? Even "villains" or simply characters you can't join get them. And most of those are some variation of "oh Ziluan, I really want to recruit you, you're so strong and I want you all for me. Too bad the developers didn't add a route for my faction" and then it dawned on me: the game is basically set up to have some sort of Xtreme Legends expansion which will obviously add more routes to the story (because it would take much less time than writing the game up to Wuzhang Plains). And hey, nothing bad with expanding a game, but the problem is this game is 80€. And for this price you get underwhelming cutscenes, massive unnecessary grind, various stories that go nowhere, a terrible protagonist, and maybe even a 40 bucks or more "expansion"being sold in a year that will make this costly package slightly less incomplete. And this shit is unacceptable
Make no mistake, this game is good, but what started as a 9/10 eventually ended up at a 8, 7.5 out of ten. I have no problem with giving this game a thumbs up, but in no way is this game worth 80 euros. Do not buy it at this price. KT needs to understand if they want their games to cost so much they also need to put an 80 bucks level of effort in them
