Dynasty Warriors 4 - PlayStation 2

Ever daydream of striding across a vast battlefield, wielding a weapon of great mystical power, killing hordes of uncultured heathens? Even if you haven’t stooped to quite that levels of geekiness, chances are pretty high that you’ll enjoy playing Dynasty Warriors Four, at least for a while.

Dynasty Warriors Four gives you the opportunity to play as any of a great number of characters derived from Romance of Three Kingdoms, a 600-year-old Chinese novel by Luo Guanzhong. This novel, and Dynasty Warriors Four, recount a historically-based drama of three great families who battle for control of all of China.

Lest that sound plot-heavy, let me assure you—Dynasty Warriors has all the action you could ever want from a game, and probably more. The perspective is third-person; you are thrust into the middle of a raging melee, and it’s up to you to tip the balance.

The battlefield is populated with a large number of mooks (grunt soldiers), and several more powerful officers, on both sides. Generally, missions are won by killing the other army’s general, but if you’re interested in surviving into the later missions, you’ll take the time to hunt down all the officers on each map—killing officers gives you weapon experience, which improves your chosen weapon, adding power and additional attack combinations.

You’ll also want to take the time to kill a significant number of mooks, for two reasons. First, killing mooks levels up your character, adding to your life and mousou, or magic, ratings. Second, slaughtering tons of nearly defenseless soldiers improves your morale, something that becomes very significant in more difficult missions.

This leads to some fairly satisfying scenes in which your character wades through a clump of 50 or 60 guys, sending bodies flying and ending life left and right. Unfortunately, the repetition of having to kill so many people is also one of the game’s weaknesses—the maps are friggin’ huge, and trudging around to every pocket of resistance can get very tedious.

Dynasty Warrior’s graphics are quite good for a PS2 game with such large, fully rendered areas. Special effects are bright and colorful, characters’ costumes are creative and interesting, and everything gets rendered pretty smoothly, with very occasional slowdowns when ridiculous numbers of soldiers crowd onto the screen. However, terrain textures are bland and repetitious, aggravating the monotony of cross-field travel.

Another thing that can get repetitious is the game’s sounds—most mooks scream the same scream on death and most weapon clashes sound exactly the same—the two sounds you’ll hear the most. This can get grating, but luckily there’s a fairly kick-ass soundtrack to keep your mind off the sounds of death—it combines traditional Asian music with American-sounding power chords and guitar riffs, to great effect.

The voice acting, on the other hand, is thoroughly rank. I recognize that this is a problem with the American distributors and not the game’s original designers, but nonetheless it will lead some to insanity. Long pauses in dialogue, out-of-place accents, and flat delivery plague the dialogue. There’s no excuse for this level of bad dialogue - Hollywood has half-decent actors working at every bar and restaurant willing to work for chump-change.

That said, the action is good, the combat system intuitive, and, if you enjoy repetitious action games like Diablo II and Dungeon Seige, there’s a lot of replayability. The game can be played from the perspective of over 40 different characters, each with their unique weapons and combos, and a variety of hidden items can be unlocked to aid you in efficiently dispatching the most people.

Dynasty Warriors is a great game for relieving stress, fulfilling your battle-field fantasies, and generally rocking out with an ¸ber-powerful character. Just don’t expect too much depth of gameplay.
 

Highs: Vast battlefields, tons of units, tons of characters, tons of replayability.

Lows: Repetitious, shallow gameplay, sound and dialogue issues.
 

Overall Rating: 75%