Warriors Orochi (2007)

This is a hard review to write because holy hell, this game is such a trash fire.

Back when I was a teenager, the Dynasty Warriors games were such a step forward in to my videogame experience. The ginormous maps full of enemies, the large roster of characters and moves, the flashy graphics, and the fact that the game didn't require much technical introduction to start being fun: just mash the combos, 1 2 3 and press O and your cute Chinese princess goes BOOM! Recipe for success if I have ever seen one.

It was a breakthrough, taking into account that by that time Diablo II was a technical marvel. I think this was back in 2001 more or less, so by 2010 (when I first played this game) this formula was... a little bit tired, already. Hell, we were already well into the PS3 era and only one year away from Dark Souls. The ethos of the Dynasty Warriors Musou already felt like old news.

Warriors Orochi is such a mindless time dump. The missions are repetitive and uninteresting. After the third or fourth mission you are pretty much prepared to clear the rest of the game. The Weapon-Fusing mechanic is put together with boggers and pre-chewed gum and the characters don't even have any customizable options. I actually read that the Warriors Orochi franchise started pretty much as a pre-Online game cash grab: Just re use a bunch of assets with minimal additional effort, add the tiniest, most flimsy excuse of a story and voilá: this trash dump, ready to be packaged and off to the store front.

But it is MY TRASH DUMP, and I LOVE IT.

I don't know what to tell you, man. It just feels so good to mash through thousands of enemies using an oversized Katana. This game makes me question my neuronormativity in major ways. Why I spent more than eighty hours getting all the stupid special objects? Especially the Lu Bu one which is so, so stupidly annoying to get. It is not even an intuitive 100% because, unlike games like Spider-Man or Far Cry, you pretty much need to get a walkthrough for those special shits unless you want to spend thousands of hours brute forcing your way to get them, which would be even MORE of a waste of time. Still even with walkthroughs getting all the things in this game will take you at least 50 or so hours and then... nothing. No special accomplishment, not fulfilling sensation, nothing. Is not even like I didn't see this coming. This game does not feel fun or enthralling or anything, it doesn't CAPTURES your attention or anything like that.

And you know what? That is fine, sometimes you just need to maggot-brain your way through a game like this to regain your bearings. More power to you, Koei. Thank you for making time wasting a mild enjoyment.

Beat all of the campaigns on loan from my coworker. I played a mix of Normal and Easy. I found Normal to be a decent challenge for the early to mid game but it eventually became too difficult. Easy was just plain way too easy. This was the second Warriors game I played, after the PSP one. I am not really a fan of the series and fundamentally dislike nonsensical crossovers, so this game was not doing itself any favors with me. Even more so considering the lack of ordering characters around as part of battle tactics, which was the part I liked the most about the PSP game. I have no idea which characters I played as and overall found the game boring.

Reversed camera controls for a camera that pans far too slowly and is too zoomed in. Braindead regular enemies that might as well not even be there. Getting gibbed by the enemies that are actual threats and having to hope you have enough health to survive the juggling until their combo ends. The clusterfuck of things on the screen, people yammering away in the middle of combat, similar names and new objectives popping up. I was confused much of the time. Like you want me to do what? Sorry I was too busy FIGHTING to listen to your crap. Or who am I suppose to not let die again? Technically that is not the fault of the game but of me not being Asian, but if a game had John, Jon, Jonn, Joan and John J I would still have trouble telling them apart. And the obnoxiousness of having to manually discard weapons after every battle because your inventory is full and the lack of shared xp between the characters. There is plenty of "content" to play but I barely enjoyed doing the story mode once. And now I have this free from xbox gold. Might as well delete my PS2 save. Whether I will bother to play it again is a different story though.

5.8/10.