Game #1066: Samurai Warriors 5

 The reboot of a reboot.

 There's something perversely funny about calling Samurai Warriors 5 a reboot of a reboot, but considering that these games retell the same story with every iteration... This is exactly that, a more extreme reenvisioning of the series.

 Core gameplay remains the same, you vs thousands, so I'll delve deeper into that a bit later, for now I want to focus on what makes this game different from the previous entries in the series. And you might notice just by looking at the game's cover, but the series' poster boy, Yukimura(Nobushige) Sanada is nowhere to be seen, for this game takes the series to a place before his birth, and focuses on Oda Nobunaga's rise, from the Fool of Owari to the Demon King. As a matter of fact, the brunt of the story has two branches: Oda's chapters and Mitsuhide Akechi's chapters. That said, this is Tecmo Koei, so they went about it in the laziest way possible, so both chapters share a lot of identical stages with identical objectives, sometimes you can even pick both Oda and Akechi as the duo to play as, making you, in a way, having to play some stages twice. Really, Koei? This entry also focuses a lot on its story, featuring more dialogue than previous games, but... I do feel like most of the dialogue is a whole lot of nothing. Oda's transformation into the Demon King feels rushed and undeserved.

 This game also sports a beautiful new look reminiscent of Borderlands, with textures having thick black lines resembling comic book art, while characters are coated with cell-shading. Attack effects borrow from classic Japanese brush-art. All of this makes for a really good looking game. The Warriors series of games always redesign the characters on every new iteration, but they went further with it with this entry, as 90% of the redesigns are unrecognizable. This was also an excuse to make the character roster smaller, as we are down to 37 characters... And only 15 unique movesets. Just like Dynasty Warriors 7 did back in the day, every character can equip any weapon, however, in this game you can only have a single weapon equipped in battle. And sure, characters have favorite weapons, which means they get 2-3 unique attacks with them.... but only 27 characters have favorite weapons. That's right, for whatever reason they couldn't be bothered to give 2-3 unique moves to 10 characters. How lazy can you get? And mind you, I LOVE the game's new look, I like the new emphasis on the narrative, even if I do feel it needs more work, but it feels so lazy. 15 possible movesets for 37 characters. And 27 of them don't have favorite weapons AKA unique attacks. How was making 30, at most, new animations so expensive or time consuming? I am perfectly OK with downsizing the character roster considering that they really tried something different with this game's looks and new focus on the narrative, but they failed really hard when it came to character diversity.

 As for the gameplay, Hyper Attacks return from SW4, which is really cool as they made for an easy and satisfying way to clear open battlefields of enemies. They finally added a lock-on feature, making taking down generals much easier, and they also borrowed elements from Pirate Warriors, namely, the possibility of having four unique attacks that run on cooldown gauges. There's not a lot of variety here, there are four buff moves, every character has his or her own unique skill, and four skills that depend on the weapon you have equipped, but even if there aren't many option, there are enough to play around with to find what works for you or the weapon-moveset of your choice. You can also take two different officers on most battle and swap between them at any time.

 I like most of the changes in this game. The new art-style is glorious, every change done to the gameplay works great and makes the game more fun, and I appreciate the new emphasis on the narrative. That said, it's a shame that Koei had to be lazy. They could've knocked it out of the park if they had had at least 30 unique movesets. It would've been tolerable if at least every character had a favorite weapon. But they went with all these weird choices in order to cut costs. Also, as much as I appreciate the focus on the narrative, I think they could've pulled it off better, and I hope they continue this trend with SW 6. I'd have less boring dialogue scenes, but make each one count, I'd also remove duplicate stages if they plan on having different routes. But I'm getting ahead of myself, as far as Samurai Warriors 5 goes, I think they should maintain this new direction going forward.

 8.0