Thank you, next.
This game uses Dynasty Warriors 7 as a base, which should've been good news as that game took a lot of steps in the right direction, but they managed to break it by turning it into a showcase of the Vita's features. This means an aggravating amount of unskippable touch minigames. At any point in the game you might be making your way towards someplace only to be 'AMBUSHED' and now you must waste time touching stuff on the screen coming at you. And they have the gall to unmount you from your horse afterwards. It's as dumb as touching arrows or boulders or soldiers. Before some stages you might have to aim with a 'crossbow' and shoot by tapping the backscreen, or touch the backscreen to reveal a symbol you must then paint and all sort of boring, asinine minigames. Man, and the duels, they are AWFUL, you must touch the screen to block and swipe to attack but it never made much sense, so just do what feels right and pray you win the fight. At least the game lets you restart the duel if you lose. And there's no way to turn all this crap off.
The rest of the game plays like your average Dynasty Warriors game, slash thousands of enemies using weak and strong attacks, as well as as super move. Remember how in Dynasty Warriors 7 you could bring two weapons with you? Characters are stuck with their default weapon type, for whatever reason. There's a new 'Chase' attack by pressing R that is like a cancel that allows you to extend your combos which is admittedly a neat addition. There's also a secondary super move performed by touching the screen and uses a separate gauge from your main super move. And, by the by, there's no life bar. Instead, the edges of the screen get progressively redder and then you die. What the....? No, really, what the hell where they thinking? I think your life regenerates over time, making healing items pretty much useless. I don't understand why they did this, it makes no sense, it's so stupid.
Anyways, there are two main modes: Campaign and Conquest. There's also Coalition, but it's online only. Campaign follows the basic story of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and every chapter has you fighting as a different Kingdom. And then in one chapter you are Wei, and you kill Guan Yu, as per usual, and then... you conquer Shu and then Wu. Eventually the game just turns hypothetical on you, and after that chapter you unlock Shu and Wu's hypothetical campaigns, and afterwards you unlock the more slightly more faithful, but still hypothetical, chapter of Jin. Y'know, I liked the initial structure of this game since it followed the actual story from the novel, I've never been too fond of the hypothetical routes these games love to resort to.
Conquest is sort of a micro-campaign. You select from different variations(Two Kingdoms, Three kingdoms, etc) and then you and the AI take turns competing for lands. Here's the thing, you can only invade areas that are next to yours and are of a lower level. You raise levels by using Stratagems, conquering and you get a free, random, level up per turn. After you select a land to conquer you play a proper stage. Thing is... the AI just conquers your lands outright, there's no stage to defend you stuff, so it could turn into a dumb back and forth until either of you are outleveled and can't do anything. And this means that you could find yourself in a situation in which you can't invade anywhere and must helplessly watch as the AI just conquers your lands. For free. This mode is needlessly tedious.
The game has some strategic elements that aren't totally unwelcome. There's money gained after each stage which you can then spend on Stratagems during your turn. This is true for the Campaign mode, as you select areas to attack, the main difference between Campaign and Conquest is that in Campaign there's no AI enemy, you just pick stages from the map. Stages themselves also have strategic elements, as you must capture bases, and every base offers a different boon to the owner. Not gonna lie, I really liked that, as it's a very decent incentive to capture bases instead of just rushing in towards the enemy commander. Plus, you win by capturing the main base, not by slaying the commander. Capturing bases is done by defeating X amount of enemies inside it.
Here's a curious thing... a stage could be rendered unwinnable. This happened to me one, but so many of my troops arrived inside the enemy base that, since the Vita was showing all my units at their base... there wasn't room for the enemy units. So the base was regenerating 'health points' but enemies weren't respawning fast enough. I spent 20 minutes hoping enough enemies would respawn fast enough, but it was a losing battle, so I just exited the game. And the game crashed on me one time, that wasn't very fun, as it was a hard crash so I couldn't go back to the Vita's dashboard.
I'll give the game this, the loading times are super brief and the framerate is pretty good, very little slowdown. Plus, the game looks really nice with very detailed character models.
And those two lines are the only praise I'll give the game, because unlocking characters is based on luck. After you're done with Campaign Mode you'll notice that you are missing quite a few characters. How do you get them? Conquest Mode. If you are lucky enough for the character you want to unlock to appear AND you are lucky enough for him or her to drop their card once defeated. Who... who came up with some of the design choices for this game? No, really, everything is so dumb, who were they appealing to? Clearly not fan of the series.
They should've just released a port of Dynasty Warriors 7, now THAT would've been a good little game. Dynasty Warriors 7 is dumb at best and a chore at worst, and why would anyone even want to get it when the Vita has a port of DW 8? It's sad, because it's not like the game is completely horrible, whenever it plays like a real Warriors game it's really fun, and then you trigger an 'AMBUSH' and you're reminded why you dislike the game so much.
3.0
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