Dynasty Warriors 9  Guide 

 
Dynasty Warriors 9 is, in theory, a completely open-world game where every battle in the story takes place on a single, gigantic map. This is a big departure from prior entries, which took a mission format, where every character’s story simply involved playing through a series of 5-8 sandboxed levels based on one of the books’ historical battles. Character selection has also been reworked to follow the historical timeline of the books. Starting off you can only pick between the three founders of each faction: Sun Jiang, Cao Cao and Liu Bei. From their you’re dropped into the start of the Yellow Turban Rebellion – a key moment in history credited as the beginning of the end for the Han dynasty. The story beats the series presents to loosely following the historical events of 2nd and 3rd century China are all there and all pretty much the same. The battle system, while tweaked and reworked as it has been with just about every new game in the series, remains recognizable to anyone who played Dynasty Warriors 2 nearly two decades ago.

You’re still selecting a hero, battling thousands over the course of their story, and getting stronger along the way. However, the latest game dispenses with the confined levels and invisible barriers of its predecessors, instead unleashing you upon the fully-connected geographic sprawl of the late Han Empire. You can now run, or more likely gallop, from one edge of the map to the other, all while individual battles are occuring depending on where you’re at in the story. If the objective is to storm and retake a castle, you might be encouraged to complete some smaller missions along the way that will help your forces further expand, or you can always try to run in solo and take on everyone all by yourself. Switching characters can be a great change of pace though, as the differences between a dual-wielding, fast-paced hero and a giant, hammer-wielding, slow and powerful hero are pretty dramatic. That said, the novelty wears off fairly quickly, and many of the 90 feel like re-skinned clones of each other.

Playing the game as Lui Bei, the Shu Han warrior of Destiny of an Emperor fame, I often took time away from the battlefield to tend to the new sim elements. For instance, in Dynasty Warriors 9 you can trap animals, cook, and eat them to get special status boosts just like In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The game also has another mainstay of Zelda games now: fishing. It’s not a very fun or interesting diversion. You simply—surprise!—click square a bunch of times to reel your catch in. So far I’ve only gotten rusted kettles, but the fact that at any point I could go fishing gives Dynasty Warriors 9 a dimension past games didn’t have. Whether it’s collecting ore off the ground for better horseshoes or crafting tiger fangs into gems, the non-combat activities are a nice way of breaking up the usual monotony of these games. The first four are power hits that can be charged to break enemy guards and inflict a number of status effects on your foes. The emphasis on using them to chain together combos is a powerful tool that can be used to keep overpowered enemy generals on the back foot. Fighting against Lu Bu, a famous general who was close to unbeatable in his prime, was a particularly fun experience. Though he had the power to kill me in two hits, I managed to avoid disaster when he appeared during a heated siege by using a panicked combo of lift and stun strikes to buy valuable time to retreat.

The main story is presented in five different Kingdom-based arcs, each of which overlaps with the same 13 or so chapters. Each chapter under each Kingdom can be played through as a single character. Once completed you move on to the next chapter, and so on. After an hour or two of story missions, you’ll likely find yourself skipping dialogue just to speed things along a bit. Voice actors recorded thousands of lines of just standing around and talking about battles with a woeful lack of enthusiasm.If you wanted to play through the story from each of the ridiculous 90 characters’ perspectives you could easily spend hundreds of hours doing so. They all share the same control schemes but vary in their speed and execution.

When you start a story mission, the game’s troop movements make straying too far from the beaten path a little tricky as the enemies will become more aggressive and start actively trying to capture your bases. The game also takes still takes all its queues from the Three Kingdoms books and as a result the supposedly open world can feel fairly scripted. Going into one of the later famous battles the only way to achieve victory without heavy losses was to follow the exact same strategy detailed in the game’s source material, making any illusion of strategy and player choice being important fall apart fairly quickly.
 

There are frequent quiet periods where you’re free to explore and take on secondary tasks and delve deeper into the game’s crafting and character development mechanics. In Dynasty Warriors 9 you still can’t change each character’s appearance. All you can do is tweak their weapon and basic equipment. The weapons system is pretty shallow, letting you buy or forge new armaments at settlement’s stores and blacksmiths. The only real variety comes from the gem system, that lets you add special effects to each of your power attacks, or boost their effectiveness and character stat upgrade options. Basic combat is the expected simple button-mashing to cut down enemies along the path to victory, but now there are Trigger Attacks that let you stun, launch, and knock down enemies. You can then follow those moves up with Flow Attacks, which let you chain combos together and go directly into another Trigger Attack, or set them up for a Special or big Musou Attack. Flow Attacks act like the glue that connects all of the pieces of Dynasty Warriors 9’s combat system together, and even though it basically just means mashing square over and over, it keeps the intensity high. 

The open world also backfires when it comes to keeping the momentum of gameplay going. While it’s nice that you don’t see many loading screens between missions, at least as much time is spent doing nothing of interest because you and your horse often have to gallop across vast, empty landscapes for minutes on end to get to your next waypoint. For every dramatic, flourishing step forward, Dynasty Warriors 9 takes a stumbling cascade of two or three steps backward.You can bounce back and forth to see how the wars affect each empire in different ways and play out pivotal battles from different viewpoints, which is interesting, but there’s little incentive to actually do that other than unlocking characters. The main story is presented in five different Kingdom-based arcs, each of which overlaps with the same 13 or so chapters. Each chapter under each Kingdom can be played through as a single character. Once completed you move on to the next chapter, and so on. After an hour or two of story missions, you’ll likely find yourself skipping dialogue just to speed things along a bit. Voice actors recorded thousands of lines of just standing around and talking about battles with a woeful lack of enthusiasm.Switching characters can be a great change of pace though, as the differences between a dual-wielding, fast-paced hero and a giant, hammer-wielding, slow and powerful hero are pretty dramatic.