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| Lu Bu. He's really hard. Except when he isn't. |
The game play is classic Dynasty Warriors: Slash your way
through hordes of soldiers who haven’t got a hope of beating you, and then kill
the enemy commanders whose prospects aren’t much better. This involves much
hammering of the X button. Similarly, the plot is the story KOEI have been
telling since the 80s, based around The Romance of the Three Kingdoms – rich,
but nothing new. The background music, while pleasing to hear in a generation
where it is not that common, is the same shreddy techno-metal with familiar
themes that has always accompanied the franchise.
The main difference from the previous iterations[2] is in
the way the Story mode works. In the past, you would pick a character, play
through a number of battles while the plot unfolded around them and that would
be it. You’d get endings, but as they weren’t substantially different from the
cut-scenes between battles, it wasn’t much of a reward.
In Dynasty Warriors 7, you pick one of the Factions: Wei,
Wu, Shu and later Jin, and play through the story using characters from that
faction. You play as the character most relevant to that part of the story. In
my play-through, I’m playing as Shu, and started as Guan Yu. I later got to
play Liu Bei, and Zhang Fei. I didn’t get to play Zhao Yun – the poster boy for
the series – until much later. The plot is filled by explanations over a map of
China
The character design is more camp, hammy and androgynous than
ever before, but the only other difference is the way the characters develop. You
increase your stats by defeating an officer then taking the items they drop, and
you also get skill points for taking out officers. You then spend them on
upgrades: extra hits to the combo, extra Musou attacks, extra speed etc. You
also upgrade your weapons bought with gold.
Now, I’m not one to complain about similar game play across the
different editions. As any Call of Duty player would say, if you’re going to
buy a game that’s functionally identical to its previous iteration, you can’t
complain that it’s functionally identical to its previous iteration. But,
joyous experience though the power-fantasy-style game play is; it is starting
to show its age now. The different characters and weapons differentiate things
for a while, but you can still win most battles by hammering X. The strategy of
the game was never comprehensive, but they’ve almost completely removed it from
story mode; you travel from one place to another as directed, take everybody
out and repeat until you beat the level. The fire, water and catapult attacks
that you at least felt you had a hand in instigating in Dynasty Warriors 5 are
set pieces in this game. You don’t affect it, you watch as it happens around
you. You can’t avoid the set pieces in order to beat the level, as you could before.
It feels like a game of Simon Says,[3] and
as you rarely have an objective beyond ‘kill everything in sight,’ it makes the
repetitive game play monotonous.
Oh, and turret sections? Really, KOEI? That’s how you were
going to vary the game play? They function and are thankfully rare, but even
for Dynasty Warriors are anachronistic and rubbish. I doubt anybody in third
century China
The game also has a Conquest mode. I haven’t tried this yet
but I think it’s going to work like a light version of Romance of the Three
Kingdoms, a game I’ve enjoyed on the PS2. I’ll give this a go eventually but
I’m looking to finish story mode first.
I can’t be far from finishing the game now; the next battle
is Wu Zhang Plains which approaches the end of the story. While there are still
three other factions and an entirely different mode to beat, for the purpose of
NGNY, I’ll probably put Dynasty Warriors 7 to bed when I beat the game with Shu.
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