izigame.me

Tenchi wo Kurau is a manga series composed of seven volumes, released between 1983 and 1984 by the extremely prolific (but largely unknown in the West) mangaka Hiroshi Motomiya. It's one of the many mangas based on the Records of the Three Kingdoms, but as far as I could find was not a particularly remarkable work. Despite this, somehow Capcom made FOUR (!!!) tie-ins about it, with Dynasty Wars being the first in 1989.
This curiosity aside, Dynasty Wars is basically a beat 'em up on horseback. You proceed through stages while battling constant hordes of enemies, mini bosses and actual bosses. It's pretty much the definition of "alright". As far as moves go, you have a button for attacking left, one for attacking right and one to unleash a special attack which drains your health. You can also charge up a powerful strike or ludicrously mashing the buttons to unleash a rapid flurry of attacks (awkward as hell, but works fine with the autofire button). The special attacks (or "tactics") are different and seem to change on their own depending on the situations (for example, during boss fights you always get the archer squad, when passing down a cliff you get the rock-slide and so on), so they don't allow for much strategy. There are a handful of enemy types and bosses who have different attacks in theory, but are often recycled and behave very similarly anyway when not. It's decent fun, but it's extremely repetitive, also because it's not a really short game.
The presentation is also very competent, capturing the manga style with finesse, especially in the character portraits and in the "cut scenes" (if you can call them that) between levels. The pixel art is very detailed, but levels get samey really fast and have little visual variety, which compounds the repetitiveness issue.
Overall, it's a neat game worth a shot, if only to experience an early and quite accomplished example of tie-in, but it's little more than a one-and-done deal.