In an effort to rekindle everything we loved about Dynasty Warriors, without being redundant, Koei introduced to us a new game utilizing the same fighting engine as the DW series, Samurai Warriors. Much like its predecessor, we are taken to a historical period of weapons and warfare, although it's no longer in Ancient China, but in Feudal Japan now. I was mainly inspired to purchase the game because I'm an enormous fan of the Dynasty Warriors series, and I knew this title would be just as good, if not better.
While not identical to Dynasty Warriors, it's virtually the same concept, although the game has become a bit less of a hack and slash now, and requires you to clear various missions around a map for best performance during a stage. I personally enjoy most of the missions, they give you more of an outline as to what you need to accomplish and where to go, but at the same time, it gives you less opportunity to rack up a nice number of KO's, which the series has always been known for.
And aside from the outdoor maps where you have more freedom, you'll be forced to clear a series of indoor stages now, which are maze like dungeons (You make your own map as you go through) cluttered with traps and enemies. I found it to be a fun, interesting twist that provides something else for the player to do, although some people seem to find them unbearable. The mazes can become a bit tedious at times, since you have set time limit, and the enemies and traps you fail to avoid will chip away at your very limited health, since these areas don't seem to have too many health recovery items available to the player. Samurai Warriors is a very "practice makes perfect" kind of game, and I began enjoying the dungeons more and more when I became more accustomed to the many kinds of traps, and layouts per floor.
Graphically the game hasn't changed much from Dynasty Warriors 4, the character models are nicely detailed and rendered beautifully, however the game is far less colorful, and the environments seem a bit dull and dark sometimes. It makes me miss the beautiful flowering cherry trees detailing the maps in Dynasty Warriors 4. This would be one of the few things I could actually fault the game for. Kudos to Koei, however, for giving each of the 15 characters a unique, totally new alternate costume, rather than a cheapskate color change like we had seen before. On a final note, the FMV's look fantastic, and there's far more of them now, since each of the 15 characters has their own unique FMV ending, along with the several openings some of them share.
When it comes to sound, I'm very thankful that Koei allows us to switch the voice overs back to Japanese. The English voice overs, while not horrible, just don't seem to appropriately fit the characters, and are very over exaggerated. The music is a bit more toned down in this one, unlike some of the more fast pace rock like themes we heard in Dynasty Warriors. The background music is more subtle and fitting to the era the game takes place in. I would also like to thank Koei for giving the masses of peons you'll be slaughtering different voices! The strike ninjas, and fire ninjas (grenade throwers) among others have different voices. Each type of enemy seems to have their own voice now. (Different screams to show which peons you've killed is always a good thing.)
Lastly, who can forget the Create a Warrior system? It's very different this time around, and rather than the whole point of it being whether your character should wear blue or red, you now begin in a training school, starting with one of three weapons, and will customize your character's stats depending on how well you do in the various trials you can select. (Such as melee trials, archery, etc.) It's definitely a major improvement, although far more challenging to achieve a strong, nicely built character. When your character completes their training, they have their own unique story mode to complete, missions and everything.
In conclusion, I would highly recommend this game to anyone, whether they were a fan of Dynasty Warriors or not. It has excellent replay value, and for anyone who finds the game too easy, can easily switch on Chaos mode and see how well they fair, then. The game has countless things to do, whether it's unlocking endings, secret characters, items, weapons, character customizing and building, training your own self created warrior, right down to playing a level with a friend in co-op mode, or vs. mode. Casual gamers could easily pick this game up and have fun with it, and those of us who are die hard gamers who enjoy unlocking and mastering everything a game has to offer will more than adore this title.
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