Dynasty Warriors: Origins
Released: January 17th, 2024
Developer: Omega Force
Publisher: Tecmo Koei
Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Xbox X/S
I don’t think I ever gave Sengoku Basara enough credit. Despite looking outwardly more shallow than Dynasty Warriors, Capcom’s take on the Musou-style formula was full of surprises, with synergistic abilities and potentially complex combo chains. More importantly, however, it was silly melodramatic nonsense.
Sengoku Basara wasn’t just fun, it was funny. It leaned so hard into its exaggerated concept that even the serious stuff was hilarious in its screaming man-drama. It was anachronistic, full of absurd characters with implausible weapons, yet it carried itself with enough confidence to get away with utter nonsense in awesome style.
I miss when Dynasty Warriors was equally comfortable with itself and didn’t act so creatively insecure.
Playing Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes at the same time as Dynasty Warriors: Origins has thrown into sharp relief just how po-faced Tecmo Koei’s signature series has become. With its boring story, charmless atmosphere, and complete cipher of a protagonist, Origins’ promising gameplay is offset by the overwhelming sense that Dynasty Warriors wants to be “taken seriously” at the expense of being entertaining.
The game certainly isn’t bad to play, in fact it’s rather good - certainly a step up from the miserable Dynasty Warriors 9. Huge battles and frantic combat create an experience littered with exhilarating moments. If gameplay mechanics are all that mattered, then I’d say we’re definitely looking at one of the better entries in the series.
Unfortunately, the mechanics make for one part of a sum, the other components ranging from decent to contemptible. Most sad of all is that, when the game’s at its best and battles feel their most exciting, I can’t help but continually lament that I’m experiencing it in the shoes of the most uninteresting character the entire genre has ever seen rather than the colorful heroes I’ve spent decades enjoying.
Dynasty Warriors: Origins is essentially Omega Force’s equivalent of fanfic, written entirely to show how awesome their original character is. Their OC (Do Not Steal) is portrayed as the bestest boy, instrumental in every historical event, instantly beloved by everybody, and simply better than the established cast. Basically, he’s Milla Jovovich in a Paul Anderson movie - he’s a perfect paragon in every way.
It’s the kind of “I’m so awesome” power fantasy that would make total sense if the protagonist was a stand-in for the player, but we don’t get to create our own character to insert ourselves with. Hell, we can’t even dress the guy - he spends much of the game in a drab robe that later gets replaced by a different drab robe.
With no customization, no persona, and no meaningful ties to the Dynasty Warriors series, he can’t even fairly be called a protagonist. He’s just a tool players use to interact with the game. He is, in essence, a mouse cursor with extra steps.
Then again, it’s not like the other characters are any more charismatic. One of Origins’ most egregious travesties is just how boring it’s made what used to be an entertainingly eccentric cast. Zhang He is a great example - not only did they take his claws away again, they took his entire personality too, sucking out his wondrous campness and replacing it with nothing.
It’s like this across the board. Those who once had strong character traits are plain, indistinct, and flatly performed. After a while I took to skipping cutscenes because I couldn’t bear to sit through conversations better described as functional than fun. Every warrior is a serious person with a serious face and serious goals in a serious world.
I’ve lost count of how many of them have “loyalty to my lord” as their lone motivation.
You know it’s sad when not even Zhang Jiao is allowed to chew the scenery, going from zealous preacher to another bland plot device in a story full of bland plot devices. From over-the-top to under-the-whelm, Dynasty Warriors has finally achieved the “realism” its producers are obsessed with by being just as depressing as real life.
Robbed of all charm, what does Origins offer? Well, in fairness it delivers some impressive action, with attempts at mechanical depth that succeed far better than I thought they would.
While still a hack n’ slash game in spirit, mindless button mashing is deemphasized in favor of something more considered. Defensive actions and counterattacks are the core around which everything else is built.
I’m not the biggest fan of parrying, and at first found the idea counterintuitive in a Dynasty Warriors game, but thanks to visual indicators that (mostly) show clearly through all the onscreen chaos, as well as a generous response window, I’ve actually come to enjoy how it’s been done. It’s a good thing I have, because the game is all about them.
Even the most generic officers will be able to power through your attacks when they decide they want to hit you, so fighting them becomes a case of timing your blocks to parry their blows and attacking as fiercely as possible while they recover. Doing this enough will drain their fortitude until they stagger, opening them up for a powerful - often lethal - assault move.
Tremendous satisfaction can be had with this system of back and forth, helped by the audiovisual spectacle that accompanies your deflections. Being able to defend against attacks from any angle is also great, making you feel very much like a badass as you slaughter a group of mooks before dramatically repelling an attack from behind. It turns out that a Warriors game with Spider Sense is a pretty good time.
That said, the sheer reliance on parries can have a dominating effect on combat to the point where anything not related to them feels ancillary.
Since every officer is dealt with the same way, just having fun beating fodder around can’t be done anywhere near them. They’ll go out of their way to ruin your good time, jealously harassing you with knockdowns that send you flying if you take your eyes off them and try to enjoy anything else. They will not stop until you play the game their way.
This insistent railroading is outright antithetical to other parts of the game, which is all too obvious when you realize how much of your weaponry is undermined by it.
Many weapons have charged attacks, with some built entirely around them. Others require specific timings or encourage lengthy attack chains. It’s frustrating to try and use these weapons as intended when you’re forced to drop everything and deflect incessant attacks that refuse to give you the breathing room you need.
The fancier the weapon, the less likely it is you’ll be allowed to get the most out of them.
Wheels suffer particularly here - they’re thrown like boomerangs and you can pull off powerful moves if you attack again the second they return, but concentrating on this routine takes your focus off a bunch of dickheads who will shove themselves into any openings you get.
Of course, while enemies can shrug you off at will, you’re never afforded the same kind of poise. The only exception is if their attack glows orange - at which point you can break the move with a specific counter - or if you juggle them, though the former is just another flavor of parry and they’ll escape the latter after a few seconds. Oh, and even basic mooks can use orange attacks, just in case you didn’t appreciate exactly how weighted toward counters this game is.
Having mentioned weapons, let’s get to them. In exchange for no longer having dozens of characters with their own movesets, Mr. Jovovich can equip one of several weapons with bespoke gimmicks and a moderately expansive range of attacks.
Every option behaves uniquely and alters how combat’s approached. The sword plays more like a traditional Dynasty Warriors game with strong attacks defined by how many normal ones are strung together first. Staves will perform strong attacks indefinitely so long as the button’s held down, while Twin Pikes do powerful combos with repeated presses. Attacks also change depending on if you do them out of a dodge or from blocking.
Weapons unlock new Battle Arts when you gain proficiency in them. These abilities require Bravery to use - a resource accrued while dealing damage - and can take the form of powerful attacks or buffs. There are also Special Battle Arts that counteract those unblockable orange attacks. Every weapon can equip four of these abilities, many (but not all) of which are exclusive to them.
One non-exclusive Special Art, Palm Strike, is so utilitarian you’ll likely want it on every weapon. It’s incredibly quick, costs one point of Bravery, and is by far the most effective counter. It’s also the most boring move in the game, but them’s the breaks with combat that demands to be played so strictly.
It’s like the dialog - function over fun.
Despite my earlier hyperbole, it has to be said that you can play as some of the existing Dynasty Warriors… kinda. On select levels only, Mr. OC-Do-Not-Steal might be accompanied by one of nine real characters who act as a bodyguard. You may very briefly play as this companion during a stage, but doing so dramatically exposes one of the series’ biggest flaws of the past dozen years - it’s such a fucking cheapskate.
Any player with experience in the series will have noticed how their available weapons pertain to an existing character, such as Xiahou Dun’s Podao or Guan Yu’s spear. Well, how convenient it is that the original owners of these weapons are the only playable ones. In true DW fashion, ally characters just do exactly the same shit you can do, rendering their playability thoroughly pointless. Only their Musou attacks feature a few seconds of unique animation, but they’re glorified cutscenes at this point.
Your companions aren’t playable characters, they’re temporary reskins.
Almost any other game by any other developer would make special characters feel, y’know, special. Not Dynasty Warriors. Not Omega Force. Not these days. The reliance on cloned movesets was simply too irresistible, and while they’ve tried extra hard to hide it this time, the corner cutting is blatant to anybody with mild observation skills.
Allies and enemies both have access to an extremely limited pool of weapons that you’ll see on the battlefield time and time and time again. Like Dynasty Warriors 9, the lack of variety across the board is stark. Those fucking throwing knives are back, and dozens of officers use Zhuge Liang’s feathered fan. Naturally, you’ll be fighting droves of guys with big balls on the ends of sticks, because heaven forbid they don’t get cloned to hell and back once more.
Hilariously, the aforementioned weapons aren’t even accessible to the player, so the NPCs actually have more weapons to choose from than you. Then again, it looks like unusable ones have just had their moves copied over from Dynasty Warriors 9, so they probably don’t even work as player weapons. I’m pretty sure the generic officers’ voice lines are also lifted from Dynasty Warriors 8 - they sound the same, at any rate.
To this game’s credit, the recycling is nowhere near as bad as previous entries, but the regurgitated elements are constant enough to grow tiresome. It’s also exactly what I expected when I saw that we’d be playing as some total nobody - he’s just another way in which the series has tried to justify the extreme walking back of its playable roster. A pretense of addition to mask the subtraction.
Maybe that’s why they’re desperate to convince us he’s so cool and likeable, a hope that we’ll love him so much we’ll accept the compromises. He can neither be loved nor hated though, for he doesn’t do a damn thing to inspire feelings either way.
It’s a shame, because there really is some great new stuff in this production. While I may have many complaints as a picky fangirl, I cannot say I haven’t found a solid amount of things to like.
Origins offers more spectacle than any other in the series. Larger battles are truly impressive in their scale with hundreds of bodies onscreen during the biggest encounters. It’s hard not to get a thrill when you charge toward the opposition’s main force alongside an entire army of allies, and there are so many enemies in even a moderate scrum that you could kill several hundred of the bastards within two or three strikes.
The maps these fights take place on are some of the best designed in terms of making sure players aren’t too far from the action. A balance has been found between the open but barren battlefields of earlier Warriors games and the snaking maze layouts that made newer ones feel restrictive. The size of every map is moderate for how big they appear, the flow of battle matches intuitive routes through a stage, and your horse moves quick enough that you’ll get from one hostile area to another with very little downtime at all.
While it’s far, far, from a strategy game, Origins does its best to lace stages with a tactical flavor, some of which is pure smoke and mirrors but contributes nonetheless to an effective illusion of armies acting strategically. Your minimap shows not just where units are, but where they’re going and if they’re actively fighting, allowing you to react accordingly. Capturing bases and protecting siege weapons feels more meaningful than it ever has before, and sometimes you really will make a stage easier on yourself by following your army’s plan.
A tactical mode called Eagle’s Vision slows time and pulls the camera wide to show where units are fighting and how those fights are going. You’ll also get to command your own troops, ordering a group of soldiers to charge, defend, or fire arrows. In practice, these commands are little more than three cooldown abilities in a trench coat, but they’re thematically fun and require nearby soldiers to obey them.
During the biggest encounters, Grand Strategies will occur, where an enemy or allied officer will perform a devastating attack after a time limit’s passed. To stop an enemy, you’ll need to complete a simple side objective that usually involves killing a set number of things, while for allies you’ve just got to keep the relevant officer alive. Again, it’s mostly performative content but it all helps make the battlefield come alive more.
In between story battles, there’s a bunch of fluff to partake in. You’ll navigate ancient China via a 3D map that you walk around as a comparatively gigantic figure, as if exploring an adorable model village. This map constantly repopulates with disposable skirmishes to grind in, collectibles to find, and cities where you can buy weapons or read love letters from NPCs - they come off like love letters anyway, fawning over Original Character(™) with a consistently romantic tone.
Equally giant characters stand on this map, offering basic challenges in exchange for experience points or bonding opportunities that take the form of cutscenes. There’s not much of a friendship mechanic to speak of here - just keep talking to NPCs when they’re available and you’ll quickly max out your relationship - and the conversation cutscenes are as tiresome as the rest of the script. It’s there if you want it, I guess.
Some features during downtime feel unfinished or barely developed at all. You can equip one of a handful of gems with unimpressive bonuses like dealing a little more parry damage, or hurting airborne enemies more. Gems are “crafted” by spending a single collectible to upgrade them, and that’s all there is to the entire system. Similarly, finding hidden NPCs or coins on the map is something you can do, but they’re a total afterthought.
Despite a ton of what we could call “content” and some really thrilling stages, Origins can become exhausting after a while. With NPCs having the same weapons as you, story stages only being playable once, and a narrative so dryly presented it makes a saltine look soaking, the genuinely great moments are spread out more thinly than they should be. Even when skipping interminable dialog, I still felt like it was taking too long to slog my way to the good stuff.
And there is good stuff. Plenty of it, even, deeply seeded among some really pedestrian guff. There’s just not enough variety to keep it fresh, an issue made worse by the static nature of a protagonist who looks boring, says almost nothing, and can’t even be given cute hats.
Dynasty Warriors: Origins is one of the best disappointments I’ve ever played. The groundwork it lays could’ve been the basis of a genuinely amazing Dynasty Warriors game, but this one is so obvious about its corner cutting, and conflates “realism” with a lack of personality. The huge battles are impressive, general combat’s rather fun, and the parrying system works way better than I thought it would, so there’s a good wad of stuff to enjoy. I just wish Origins was an actual Dynasty Warriors game and not something so flavorless.
I don’t play this series to watch boring people discuss mundane politics with all the enthusiasm of tree bark.
6.5/10
