Hello, and welcome back to my return to console gaming (PS4), and my search for games my wife and I can enjoy playing together. In my last post, we had just begun playing Dynasty Warriors 9. I had enjoyed earlier iterations of this game many years ago on the PlayStation 2, where my brother and I would play together for hours on splitscreen. Hoping to rekindle this past enjoyment with my wife seemed like a great idea, so we dove right in.
If you are unfamiliar with this game, the storyline is based on the ancient Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. This was the time of great chaos, upheaval, and violence, which followed the fall of the Han Empire. Story mode for this game always starts with the same battle, the Yellow Turban Rebellion.
Essentially, you have a fanatical religious leader riling up the peasants and rebelling against the Han Emperor, spreading chaos across the land. When you start, you can only choose from three characters: Cao Cao, Sun Jian, and Liu Bei. All three are loyal Han nobles who see this rebellion as an opportunity to gain power and prove their loyalty to the emperor …chaos is a ladder ;)
Cao Cao - source: me :)
I chose to play as Cao Cao, and my wife as Sun Jian. When we started the battle, a few things annoyed me right from the beginning. Of course, the story starts with a cutscene, but it isn’t really cinematic at all and instead is just the character talking to other characters in a sort of awkward, unrealistic way. On top of that, you need to keep pushing the square button to skip through it, and even that is not a quick process. After the boring dialogue-heavy cutscene, there is a loading screen, which doesn’t take too long, but long enough to be annoying.
annoying cutscenes - source: me :'(
If the awkward cutscene and loading screen didn’t take you out of the rhythm of the story, don’t worry, the “missions” that follow definitely will. In past DW titles, you were thrust into the energetic chaos of battle right away, allowing you to hack through hordes of low-tier peasant enemies as you figured out the best way to button-smash your way to victory. In this game, you start out in a castle on the other side of the map from where the main battle is taking place. Your screen will have arrows for you to follow, but when you follow them, you are led to random npc characters, including a low-level soldier who hurt his ankle and asks you to find him some herbs.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I know a game where you hack through hundreds of soldiers, often with enchanted weapons, isn’t going to be the most historically accurate. However, when I play historical titles like this with epic storylines, I like to get into the mind of the character and enjoy the roleplay aspect a bit. With that being said, I am playing as Cao Cao, one of the most powerful nobles in China at the time, and my first mission is helping a random peasant soldier heal his sprained ankle. Maybe I am looking into this too much, but at the time, it really took me out of character. The icing on the cake is that there is no obvious way to skip this mission, so the only way you can progress is to run around this massive open world to search for an herb. Most of the world is empty, save for trees, animals, and random herbs, which makes it really easy to forget there is a massive battle going on at the other end of the map.
I apologize that in my ranting, I hadn’t gotten to any exciting gameplay yet, but I promise I will in the next part. Thank you for reading. I hope you have a great day!
If you are interested in reading the first part of my Dynasty Warriors 9 experience, you can find that post here.