I have a long history with these games. they scratch a specific itch for me. when i first discovered dynasty warriors, i delighted in just repeating stages over and over and over. just standing in a sea of enemies and bashing them to death. it's the very definition of catharsis.

The samurai warriors offshoot has always been even better for me. It's faster paced, it covers history i'm more interested in, it's usually been more innovative than dynasty warriors.

so we arrive at this reboot. I was initially unsure. This entry cuts off most of the history covered by past games to focus on one narrow part, throwing out many characters i love, so we can follow the story of two characters who mostly fought in the same battles. didn't sound like a recipe for fun.

here's how it played out. At the onset, it sells the narrow scope pretty well. it covers more content in spaces that were skipped over before. the battle that usually opened previous games was six battles in. the characters are set in place better and you get to know their history somewhat more, and how they relate to each other, instead of just having random people dropped into the next battle leaving you to go who is this, how much time passed?

it works pretty good for about 3/5 of the way, then it starts hurrying and stops making as much sense. it ends making about as much sense as previous games ever did. so..good effort, but you didn't stick the landing.

as is the sin of most warriors games, it drops the variety of weapons it had before in favor of duplicating the 13 different weapons it has across the few dozen characters. they can all switch weapons, but they probably shouldn't and there's no good reason to except temporary novelty. there are skills to unlock that you can use in battle to do a quick flashy move. some of these are duplicated too. now, 13 weapon types is plenty but it's naturally insulting that we had more than this in past games and now we don't. there are more playable characters than necessary but there are still some strange omissions as well as strange inclusions.

We have the required extra mode in addition to the story. this time it's..trying to be a tower defense game? you do an empty battle of randomly distributed officers and it doesn't try to make sense. you can put groups of mook soldiers down of different types but i never found a use for them or understood what they are for. the mode treats it like it's important. you can unlock different types and there's a trophy for using them a lot so it must be important. you can unlock different scenes between officers if you use them together. none are worth it and i recommend not trying to unlock them on purpose.

this mode serves as a place to use the officers you otherwise have little use for in the story but it's otherwise pointless and lazy. you can unlock building upgrades, just to give you some rpg shit to do I guess. you kind of need them to get the tools to succeed at higher levels and difficulties and to be more empowered to have fun.

in the end, it's an ok game if you like this sort of thing. if you like the formula. it is fun. if you don't have another choice of warriors game this is a fine one. if they release content covering further history in the same style as this one, i'll probably buy it though I won't be proud of that. this game isn't so much worth the price it goes for. it's not a full priced game worth of fun. it was worth it enough for me, but if you have any sense that I don't you should wait for a sale.