Hello everyone, and welcome back as I dive into Dynasty Warriors 9, a hack and slash adventure through ancient Chinese history. This is a franchise I have enjoyed since the PlayStation 2 days, but unfortunately, my first impressions of this much newer version on PlayStation 4 have not been exceptionally positive.
So far, my character Cao Cao, has been engaged in a seemingly endless stream of boring dialogue and sent on a mission to find some herbs for a random foot soldier in his army. Despite the slow start, I was eager to get into the action, as this was my first battle, putting down the Yellow Turban Rebellion, which was spreading chaos throughout the Han Empire.
Not wanting to get pulled into any more boring side missions, I examined the battle map carefully, and found the castle where the enemy Commander, Zhang Jiao was stationed.
As you can see, this is easier said than done, as the map is huge, and full of many names for both generals, locations, and missions. The map is a bit overwhelming at first glance, but I will admit that it can be pretty handy once you get used to navigating it and zooming into specific areas.
I found out how to set my target destination, and began making my way across the map to Zhang Jiao’s castle. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that in this game, every general you play with starts with a horse, which can be summoned to you at any part of the map. In the previous iterations of this game, a horse was something you had to earn through combat. Considering I am playing as a powerful noble, it is in character for me to already have a horse, and I like the added convenience of having one to help me quickly travel to where I need to go.
I even discovered a new feature, which allows you to set your horse to automatically run for you, without needing to hold down the button. This becomes extremely helpful because the open-world-style map is huge, and it takes an annoyingly long time to get to where you want to go. Later, I learned about a fast travel feature, but even this is limited, as not every location on the map is compatible.
As I mentioned in my previous post, one reason I got this game was so I could play co-op with my wife. Because she is playing as Sun Jian and I am playing Cao Cao, who are leaders of separate factions, Wu and Wei respectively, we are separated after every cutscene. This gets pretty annoying pretty fast, however, once we learned about the fast-travel feature, it became much easier to rejoin each other.
As this was the first battle, the two characters were still allied and both fighting to support the emperor, so it wasn’t a big deal now. I knew though that it wouldn’t be long before she would need to change characters when the two leaders would become rivals moving in separate directions.
Before we discovered the fast travel feature, it was actually proving quite frustrating trying to help her meaningfully contribute to the battle. Reading maps has never been her strong suit, and somehow she would always find herself running full speed in the opposite direction of where the battle was taking place.
Growing impatient with how much time it was taking to navigate the vast battlefield map (pre-fast travel realization), and with trying to help my wife find the main fighting, I charged full speed towards the enemy commander. There are seemingly endless numbers of enemies around, but the more I killed the less of an impact it seems to have on the strength of their army and the progression of my allied forces. I give up on trying to kill everyone, and focus on the main general, which I defeat after a few minutes of button smashing. We have defeated the Yellow Turbans, and all before my wife could even find her first enemy general.
That seems like a good place to stop for the day. Join me for part 4 of our Dynasty Warriors 9 playthrough, where my wife finds her rhythm, and the story gets more epic as Cao Cao and his allies deal with the chaotic aftermath that followed the Yellow Turban’s demise.
If you are interested in reading more about our experience playing Dynasty Warriors 4, please consider reading my previous post, which can be found here.
All gameplay photos were taken by me.