Dynasty Warriors 9 Reviews

Dynasty Warriors 9 attempts to expand the scope of what a Dynasty Warriors game is with varying effects. The new open world helps to break up the monotony of just playing battles repeatedly, while introducing issues of its own. These are just growing pains though, and Dynasty Warriors fans will appreciate how Koei Tecmo have successfully reinvented their franchise and what the future holds.

Dynasty Warriors 9: Empires is a poor Switch port of a disappointing entry in the long-running spin-off series. This is a hugely downgraded version of the game, with seriously dialled-back visuals failing to put a stop to consistent frame rate issues during the heat of battle. With a lack of gameplay modes, zero multiplayer options, terrible AI and cosmetic customisation options gone AWOL at launch — Koei Tecmo choosing instead to go the DLC route — this is a truly lacklustre package, a bargain bin affair with a premium price tag, and a Dynasty Warriors game you can feel quite comfortable skipping entirely.

Everything about this game seems completely rushed. To jump onto the open world bandwagon three or four years too late and still deliver such a pile of garbage isn’t just embarrassing, it’s insulting.

What happened?

As it is though, Dynasty Warriors 9 is a game that’s just too sparse and too easy for its own good. But what’s worse is that it’s perhaps the worst performing game I’ve played on the Xbox One X. I can cope with janky gameplay and stupid AI during the pursuit of fun, but screen-tearing and troublesome framerate drops are a no-no. So, Dynasty Warriors 9 does take the series into new territory, but in doing so it breaks the tight-knit, smooth, action-packed gameplay that we’ve come to know and love.

An Old Franchise Gets on a New Horse

Dynasty Warriors finally gets the overhaul it’s long been waiting for… and while it addresses a few old problems it creates just as many new ones.

Dynasty Warriors 9 suffers from a lot of issues, most stemming from the terribly implemented open-world. Assets are reused, it’s buggy, repetitive, bloated, empty and bland. These shortcomings are made all the more painful by the obvious potential this game had, and how fun the base combat can be once players waded through all the other nonsense.

After the resounding success of Dynasty Warriors 8, Dynasty Warriors 9 feels like a major step back. What’s lost in the move towards an individually-centered story spread across a massive open world far outweighs the minor benefits that are gained. While the excellent button-mashing gameplay stays intact with great tweaks and additions, it wasn’t enough. The lack of multiplayer, missing alternate game modes, and emptiness of ancient China left me far from satisfied.

The sound work is more of a mixed bag, however. As ever, the soundtrack is sublime, but the voiceovers are notably poor. Having an English dub is great and shows that Tecmo Koei cares about its western audience though many of the existing voice actors have been replaced. Dynasty Warriors isn’t exactly known for its gripping character dialogue, yet the new voice cast are a major step down in quality and most secondary characters sound laughable.

Dynasty Warriors 9 is a fun and fresh take of the series with the familiar 1 vs 1000 action people expect but frame rate issues and no multiplayer component keep it from reaching it's full potential.

Long before Omega Force became a powerhouse of licensed action games built on familiar properties, such as Attack on Titan and The Legend of Zelda, their central focus was on a series based upon the hundred years of Chinese history centered around the Three Kingdoms era. The Dynasty Warriors series has long been known for its massive scale action combat where the one-versus-one thousand mentality is truly put to the test. It’s been four years since the last numbered Dynasty Warriors title reached players’ hands and the latest entry, Dynasty Warriors 9, couldn’t be a bigger shift in the series than ever before.

Dynasty Warriors 9 is so bad it could completely destroy your faith in the series.

The Dynasty Warriors franchise is certainly a divisive one. Starting life in 1997 as a standard fighter that pitted the likes of Ancient Chinese Generals such as Xiahou Dun, Guan Yu and Lu Bu in one on one fighting game—a genre that, at the time, was saturating the market. As such, when Dynasty Warriors 2 arrived three years later the series had completely reinvented itself into the battlefield hack and slash that spawned its own entire genre.

This is a juncture where each player must decide for themselves: Even if overall a decent video game, is this a decent Dynasty Warriors game? Such is the risk of renewal; change that seems necessary to some is not even desired by others. The fans of yesterday won’t always be the fans of tomorrow.

A bland hack 'n' slash with tonnes of content but painfully repetitive and simplistic gameplay that can't sustain itself.

Cards on the table: I enjoyed playing Dynasty Warriors 9 a lot. Yes, it's enormously repetitive and the open-world elements don't really add all that much to the well-worn formula, but there's something appealing about the whole grand historical affair and the simplistic gameplay. You'll hack, slash and stomp your way across feudal China, grinning like a loon. Then again, there's that whole repetitive, lack of depth thing I mentioned before.

For all of its faults, I would still recommend this game for fans of the series. There’s something whimsical about this game that reminds me of why I love this series.  Dynasty Warriors 9 has all the series’ flavoring that makes it fun. The corny dialogue and bravado speeches give the characters personality. The combat is repetitive but it’s still fun to cut through thousands of virtual troops. Dynasty Warriors 9 is a series of skirmishes building up to something grand. Sometimes I was satisfied, but most of time the payoff was dull and forgettable. That’s the story of my relationship with the Dynasty Warriors series. I’ve bounced from game to game hoping each entry would deliver on something impressive. Instead, I’m left feeling somewhat happy but mostly let down by a series I remain loyal to.

Let the bodies hit the floor.

Dynasty Warriors 9 felt more like an experiment than a single, cohesive experience. At times it felt like Dynasty Warriors, sometimes an open world RPG, occasionally neither and sometimes both. But if Omega Force learns from this endeavor and buckles down for the next entry, the result could be spectacular.

We are several generations into this franchise, and Koei Tecmo and Omega Force decided to try something new with Dynasty Warriors 9. In their latest iteration of the Three Kingdoms Epic, the developers opted for an open-world adventure where players can explore ancient China and partake in key battles and lay witness to the era’s pivotal moments. But how does the open-world formula translate to the typical hack and slash adventure? To find out, but also review the game properly, I had to distance myself from previous installments.

No summary available

Dynasty Warriors as a series hasn't changed much over the years. Sure it's had its playable character roster expanded significantly, and it's had the odd combat system overhaul here and there, but the core concept has always remained the same: it's one super overpowered Chinese warrior (you) versus entire armies that flood the screen. To be fair, it's a formula that's given Dynasty Warriors a unique identity – a formula that fans have come to love and a formula that, for the most part, works well.

Feudal Chinese warfare is back and with a whole new look to boot. Gone are the streamlined levels; Omega Force has taken notes from massive AAA series like Assassin’s Creed and The Witcher. There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. However, with Dynasty Warriors 9 changing up the series in such an over-the-top way, will players still find the iconic gameplay they’ve grown to love over the past 21 years? Yes. A resounding yes. The answer’s yes.

The hack-and-slash moment-to-moment action works in its favor even when transitioning to a new style of play, but Dynasty Warriors 9, like some of its predecessors, is clunky and unwieldy; hampered by the aforementioned bugs and performance problems. If you’re into the idea of playing an open world game where its arcadey elements are entwined with therapeutic but sometimes dry exploration, maybe give it a shot.

While combat remains exhilarating and fun in a way that will feel familiar to veterans of the series, Dynasty Warriors 9 isn't just one versus a thousand anymore. We're part of a war that unfolds all around us, with plenty of allies in need of help and enemies begging for a healthy beating. It's a bold step in the right direction, and while Omega Force may have overextended in certain aspects, the fun outweighs the jank and the experience remains one that I am eager to return to and to see improved and further evolved in Dynasty Warriors 10 or Samurai Warriors 5.

At the end of the day, although Dynasty Warriors II is a competent and entertaining game which does well to take advantage of the PlayStation 2's graphical hardware, any game that becomes tedious through repetition deserves more than a raised eyebrow. Although there's some fun to be had here, for what we dole out for PlayStation 2 games it should last beyond a first day's worth of play, and that's why we have to be so harsh on it.