izigame.me

Review written from the perspective of someone whose been playing these games since DW2.
Short version: I do recommend the game, but its a 7.5/8 out of 10. not the 10/10 everyone is making it out to be.
Storytelling/Narrative:
A big effort was made to revamp their approach to storytelling in these games, and if we graded on effort, then yes, this game would be a 10/10. the execution however, shows a lot of flaws that end up hampering the success of their attempts. The decision to frame the entire game around an original made up character is imo the biggest blunder the narrative of this game suffers. having an amnesiac mute, who has to be constantly talked at and over explained to every.single.cutscene really grows tiring super quick. The game already has a lot of padding in the cutscene department, so when you then have to make those scenes take even longer because characters can no longer talk among themselves naturally, they must always talk at the player to explain every single thought/event creates this weird unbalance in storytelling vs gameplay (combat). There is an attempt to give the amnesiac mute a backstory, but its....its bad. if you read a geocities OC character fanfic back in the dark ages, you already know what you're going to get here. The thing that I don't understand is why did they decide this? The 3 Kingdoms novel, and the games are stuffed full of characters with complex story arcs as they each attempt to shape the chaos of the turmoil and bring their vision of a unified china to reality. By having the entire game revolve around this original character, all of their achievements are undermined. no longer are the great deeds of these warriors their own, its all the original character that did everything, everyone as a result is a useless standby.
The game also has a bond system that's just a slog of copy and pasted cutscenes that play over and over. you "meet" an npc in the world map, they give you training scrolls (kill 40 enemies doing a dab, conquer 5 bases wearing a tutu, etc). and when completed you get a cutscene of them expressing how kawaii you are. repeat this process 2-3 times per character, over and over. There is a massive lack of originality or enjoyment from these, there were 3 of these bond cutscenes I chuckled or got some scene of "hey that was worth it" that's 3 out of like 100.
The game features alternate story paths at certain points, which is a staple in their last entries, however here, they are....surprisingly disappointing. You'll have the option to save certain characters that are meant to die in respective battles(usually a battle they actually died in in history). in previous entries saving these characters would often result in wildly different outcomes to the story of a kingdom, saving the would be ruler would result in that kingdom thriving rather than collapsing under the weight of grief, or lack of leadership. here saving them amounts to an extra cutscene of them going "wow you saved me, that's awesome, anyways, I'm gonna just pretend I'm dead and chill" and then the rest of the game plays out as if they had died. maybe instead of doing 100 boring bond cutscenes we could have done a few that meaningfully chance the outcome of a kingdom when these altered fates occur.
All of these narrative issues add up and cause a big unbalance in the amount of playtime spent doing fights vs just watching cutscenes. chapter 1 especially is gruelingly long, its 2 fights with over an hour of cutscene padding it. Previous entries had you spend 2-5 minutes max between fights. You cant just go to the in to look at the encyclopedia quickly, you have to load the cutscene of the character slowly walking in and sitting down, and then oops you forgot to check the weapon store, so now you have to wait for the cutscene of him getting up and walking away, over and over, these little issues impede and pad up the runtime of the game needlessly.
Combat:
OK lets get to the meat of the game. its why we all got into this.
Overall the combat is fantastic, with some minor wrinkles.
The game has battle arts which are special weapon abilities you can equip and "cast" using a resource called Bravery. Bravery is obtained by doing damage, parrying, perfect dodging, countering, slapping, etc. The game now features a parry mechanic, and an evade mechanic with a "perfect evade" mechanic that rewards you with extra bravery.
There are a total of 10 weapons and they each handle quite uniquely and that was pretty cool to see. There is a blueprint here for how to do a proper DW game in the future with an actual roster of characters where they each wield their own weapon and that's very exciting.
My one real complaint about combat is that....there's a shit ton of cutscenes that happen in the middle of fights that don't need to be cutscenes. in previous entries if an enemy unit sprung an ambush you would just hear a voice line and see a dot on the minimap indicating what happened, and the battle summary (text that occasionally appears on your HUD explaining how your allies are doing in different parts of the map while you fight elsewhere) would go over the outcome of said ambush. But not here, if an ambush happens, cutscene, if an ally burns a bridge, cutscene happens, there's 1 fight in specific for the Wu Kingdom where an ally will aim to burn 5 bridges, and each of the 5 times you see the same cutscene. constantly interrupting your combat. whats worst is sometimes the cutscenes will reset the endurance of enemies (deplete their endurance and you can stun them and do extra damage), so the amount of times I used my resources, to deplete their endurance, only to be interrupted by 1 of these cutscenes, and then afterwards they were standing reset was infuriating.
Another frustrating aspect of combat is that when allies of enemies use special tactics (rally their forces to charge, or do river dancing, etc) the game will yank your camera away from what you're targeting to force you to see this. I appreciate this the first few times it happens, but this game desperately needs an option to turn this camera hijack off. its infuriating to be in the middle of a combo and then the game yanks the camera, (you can still get hit when this happens, its...FUN).
If they add an option to turn off these excessive cutscenes in combat and the camera hijacking during tactics, this combat loop would be the golden standard for musou games.
Other, Misc:
Voice acting - I found the voice acting to be underwhelming compared to the previous entries. there's a gradient when it comes to voice acting in games: So bad its fun (old Dynasty Warriors, devil may cry, etc) -> middle of the road meh (this game) -> so good you are moved (Last of Us, God of War, etc) My point here is your voice acting should either be committed enough to be taken seriously, or so wacky that its jut a fun silly time. sadly in this game, while there are some good performances, a lot of it just feels muted and boring. this in turn makes the long cutscene runtime feel even longer. This critique is limited to the English voice acting, I don't speak Japanese nor Chinese so i have no critique on their respective voice actors in this game.
Sound Track - its pretty solid, but I don't feel like there's as many iconic songs as previous entries. Previous entries have the benefit of having 5-10 times the amount of battles as this game though.
Zhang Jiao - I wanted to shout out 1 thing I thought the game successfully improved narratively, and that's with the character of Zhang Jiao who lead the yellow turban rebellion, his upgrade in character from a 1 dimensional whack-job, to a leader that's lost his way is really good.
Closing thoughts:
If you read my grievances and feel like they're things you'd be into, then get it now. if you like DW combat, but the grievances I mentioned seem concerning, wait for a discount sale to occur. I DO recommend the game and think its a 7.5 out of 10.