Archview #63: Dynasty Warriors 4

 It's way better than 2, that's for sure.

 This is like the 5th Warriors game I've covered in this blog. In this year. Which means I will be a bit vaguer on it, sue me. What matters is that this game certainly takes after Dynasty Warriors 2, it's clearly the same engine but much more polished.
 At the outset, individual Musou modes have been taken out, instead, each Kingdom has it's own Musou Mode, and you can switch characters, as long as they are part of the kingdom, whenever you want. Other factions, like Dong Zhuo's or Yuan Shao's get shorter musou modes as well. Interestingly, each kingdom has about 4 different endings, and on Shu, Wu and Wei's Musou Modes you can actually take different routes, which lead to different chapters by fulfilling certain conditions.

 Gameplay is just like Dynasty Warriors 2, which means you get the usless bow weapon, if you so choose to use it. What's new, however, is that you can equip your character with multiple items, found when killing generals or secret bonuses, that grant bonus stats! While you increase your stats by enemy drops, you do level up your character(And his weapon), that grants access to 5 extra costumes, per character. Another new feature is dueling, every now and then, an enemy general will introduce him/herself, and you can challenge them to a duel, which boils down to a 1 on 1 in a cage. As for the rest of the gameplay, it's just like DW2, you kill generals and capture enemy gates. The minimap got enhanced, now you can spot important generals as bigger, shiny red dots.
 As for other modes, you get the Free Mode, in which you can play any stage as any general, Challenge mode that has multiple activities(Like killing 100 soldiers in a certain amount of time, breaking crates, etc) and, lastly, a character creator. The character creator is pretty basic, but it's a neat addition, although he can't be used in Musou Mode.

 Visually, it's pretty decent. The draw distance is on the short side, but stages now have a lot more detail and different structures that make them visually appealing. Generals themselves sport a bigger degree of detail, and even the enemy soldiers look a bit better. The voice acting is terrible for the most part, but it's a Dynasty Warriors game, what were you expecting?. Music is still one of DW's best aspects, although the new pieces from this game are not as good as DW 2's or latter games, the ending theme, however, is a winner. And also very cheesy.
 The game can get a bit challenging, specially if you try to take low level generals on higher difficulty stages, heck, the Nanman Campaign is hard even on Easy with a high level general! There are many endings to unlock, although many are very similar between each other, and a total of 42 generals with a few clones. My issue with the combos "locking in" a certain enemy still remain, but it feels "smarter" this time, usually locking onto the generals themselves. Generals no longer get special bonuses when they drop to their feet, which was my biggest annoyance with 2, truly a godsend that makes this game much less frustrating.
 Not my favorite Warriors game by a longshot, but if you want oldschool Warriors games, this is a good choice with few annoyances, although it can get a bit long in the tooth when you realize just how many stages are repeated on every Musou Mode.
 6 out of 10