Game #1043: Dynasty Warriors 8 Xtreme Legends - Complete Edition(Playstation Vita)

 Pursuing Lu Bu on the go!

 Things that aren't secrets but maybe should be.... A) I really like Dynasty Warriors and B) I think 8 is the best in the series and, lastly, C) I really love the Vita. Which means that Dynasty Warriors 8 Xtreme Legends: Complete Edition was something I was bound to buy one day or another, and that day came... and here we are.

 Since I already wrote about my love for DW8, I'll focus on what makes this port different from the PS3 original, and as the name implies, this version contains the base game alongside the XL content. As for what's new... there's quite a lot! Firstly, five new characters, one for Wei, one for Wu, one for Shu(Did they really need ANOTHER character?) and two under Lu Bu. Jin gets nobody, lame! Each characters comes with their own new weapon. 'member how DW8 decloned everyone by not only having as many weapons as it had characters, but also giving every character a unique EX attack with their preferred weapon? This game bumps EX attacks to two, which is, frankly, really great.

 The game also adds an entirely new campaign for Lu Bu, and it too has its own set of cutscenes as well as a Hypothetical alternate route of stages, so it's a fully-fledged campaign. What's more, every kingdom gets about 10 new stages, and they get new in-game dialogue and a few new cutscenes. This means that the content inside this little cart is MASSIVE, there are tons of stages to play through, alongside over 80 different characters and 80 different movesets.

 That said, there are a few caveats when it comes to the Vita port... The audio quality can sometimes be spotty. Some cutscenes sound just fine, but in others the audio sounds super compressed. And, y'know, I could live with that, but the framerate, oh god, the framerate... it goes from tolerable to unacceptable depending on the stage. Using Rage makes the framerate drop down to 10 or so, it's unbelievable, because it never fails to drop so steeply, and the game shipped like that.

 Despite its issues.... it's still Dynasty Warriors 8 and I still love the genre and consider this one the pinnacle of the series, which is something to keep in mind, as I probably enjoyed this port WAY more than your average person, which is why... I think it's good. I can forgive the framerate issues, even though they are pretty much unacceptable, if only because the framerate is quite tolerable most of the time, so I can deal with spikes of bad performance. The fact that the entirety of DW8 is at the palms of my hands is just to good to pass up.

 7.5