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[ dynasty warriors 7 ] thoughts on xuande and kongming's benevolent adventures 2: electric boogaloo.
Crossposting from LJ, since I like keeping my vidya posts with actual substance over here where they can easily be found. I wouldn't call this a review -- it's a little too informal and unstructured for that, I think -- but it is a pretty thorough dump of My Feelings regarding this game, so I suppose it could stand in as a review if you're willing to put up with the fact that it's disjointed and unedited.
Okay, so I've been putting it off, but I figure it's time for the promised afterthoughts on Dynasty Warriors 7. I've cleared all story modes and conquest mode, I've unlocked everything and gotten the platinum trophy, and I sat down to spend a little time with some old-school DW just for comparison's sake.
In short: I'm out of excuses, man, it's time to DO THIS THING.
I think![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bardiche probably put it best in her own impressions post; whether you'll like DW7 largely depends on what you like about the series -- the story or the gameplay. I do think that DW7 would be a good introduction for someone who's never given the series a spin, but for veterans...well, let's take it point by point.
If you like Dynasty Warriors because you're interested in the story, you're in luck. DW7 has the most coherent and engaging presentation of the story yet, thanks to the revamped mechanics of story mode -- and what's more, it's also the most accurate to the source material. Although some details are changed a bit, as usual, overall DW7 has done an excellent job of taking the novel and presenting it in a way that's easily digestible to newcomers without changing too many details. Characters die when their novel counterparts did, in mostly very similar scenarios. Losing battles are in many cases kept that way even when you play the losers -- Chi Bi stands out here; in previous games, if you happened to be playing as Wei you got to prevent the fire attack and go kick Wu's ass. Not so, this time; you start with the fire attack and the battle objective is to get Cao Cao out of there.
The price was somewhat heavy here, though. Since it's now done by kingdom, rather than by character, there are only the four story modes, and since each battle is keyed in to a particular character, there's not really anything new to do there from a gameplay standpoint, save maybe cranking up the difficulty a bit. By following specific characters, Koei is able to put you in the right place with the right person to participate in a lot of the key moments, without having to bend canon to do it. It's great for storytelling, but it also means that once you've done it, you've done it. And with the lack of free mode, you can't even revisit the story battles with different characters -- which feels incredibly lazy of them.
The other problem I find with story mode is that the selection of characters you play as can be kind of bizarre. On one hand, they make you play as a range of characters, including ones I normally don't use, so you'll get a bit of a workout jumping between them. (In Jin's story mode in particular, if I recall correctly, you'll use everyone in the faction except Xiahou Ba.) But on the other hand, the number of stages is hilariously imbalanced (seven stages as Sima Zhao, really?), with the lion's share of each kingdom's stages going to the same couple of characters, and others having to make do with just one. And plenty of characters still go unused, some of whom have enough story significance that the lack of a stage for them really stands out. Sure, nobody's going to think much of it if you don't play a stage as Cai Wenji, but why on earth aren't you playing Cao Ren at Fan Castle? Xiahou Dun wasn't even there!
(Consider also that in three of the four kingdoms, you spend the majority of story mode playing as a sword user. Oh boy. If you, like me, prefer to keep everybody equipped with their EX weapon and ignore the ability to change, you'll get sick of that pretty quickly.)
Still, it does an effective job of making the story flow well and it keeps things easier to follow -- focusing on a single officer makes it easier to lose the big picture. I do think this take on story mode is a good concept that deserves to stay put -- what it needs, however, is a bit of tweaking. More even distribution of stages to characters; I love Xiahou Dun but this is what we like to call "pandering," Koei. Inclusion of free mode, with cutscenes removed and event scripts tweaked to allow you to replay the battles as any character you like (and preferably with two people). We've got a good start here, but its flaws hold it back.
In lieu of free mode, we got conquest mode, which is also a decent idea in theory, but in execution it really feels like they phoned it in. Conquest mode presents you with a map of China made up of a couple of hundred little hexagons. Each hex represents a battle, and once you clear a battle, you have access to all the hexes that border it. There are cities sprinkled among them, where you can buy new weapons (more are unlocked with each new city), talk to other characters when they appear, or play a trivia mini-game. Each character has a hex devoted to their "legendary battles," two or three stages in which you must play as that character, either based on their exploits in the novel or what-if scenarios -- clearing all of these unlocks them for play. And of the rest of the hexes, there are a number of different kinds of battles you might find -- rescue missions, escort missions, defense missions, conquer-the-bases missions, all out battles, solo missions, and more.
Sounds cool, right?
...well.
The chief problem I have with conquest mode (and actually to a lesser extent with story mode as well) is that stages are too damned short. Most of them are very quick to finish and many of them utilize only a small amount of the map. The solo missions are particularly heinous; they have two enemy officers on the map, and a third waiting in ambush at a particular point. That's it. The joy of playing a Musou game is the sheer scale of the battles, the ability to pull foe-tossing charges and kill hundreds of peons per skirmish. Diminish that and you diminish the fun. The lack of variety in these stages also doesn't help much. To use the solo battles as an example again: each one has the boss, who you must defeat; an enemy base guarded by another officer and with an ally outside, who will challenge you to capture it and reward you if you do; and an officer waiting in ambush, who will always be at a predetermined spot on that map. Varying the numbers, throwing in some kind of other encounters, even just having multiple potential ambush spots and randomizing which one the officer is actually hiding at would've helped a bit. As it stands, most of the battles in conquest mode just aren't that interesting once you've done them once.
The legendary battles are also a lot of wasted opportunity. There are way too many scenarios where they clearly just phoned it in. "Defeat these other officers from your kingdom during a training session!" came up more times than I could count. Now, legendary battles are clearly the spiritual successor of good ol' Legend Mode, introduced back in DW4XL, and I actually really loved a lot about Legend Mode, so once again, I think this is a good idea. But man oh man, it needs a lot of work to be worth its bytes in programming. First, more interesting scenarios -- even things that have already been done in Legend Mode would be completely acceptable to me if they just changed up maps or enemy arrangements or whatever so it's not a clone of an old level. I may have played Gan Ning's night raid on the enemy camp with his hundred men before, but if you give me an entertaining remix of it, I'll take that over "defeat your fellow officers in a training session!" any day.
The other thing that would really improve legendary battles, in my opinion, is a little more actual storytelling. I'm not expecting a story mode level of immersion, but to take Zhong Hui as an example: one of his legendary battle stages is a good example of the kind of scenarios I'd like to see in these stages -- a stage derived from his exploits in the novel, that wouldn't fit into story mode proper, both because of the timing (after the surrender of Chengdu, where story mode ends) and because historically, it failed and he died. So we have this what-if stage as a base: what if Zhong Hui's rebellion against Sima Zhao was done right, and he won?
...but we have absolutely no context on what sparked it, why he's rebelling, or why Jiang Wei is helping him. Zip. I'm not expecting a lengthy series of cutscenes delivering a full bromantic saga about their sworn brotherhood, but at least give me an intro blurb and/or a few lines of dialogue about how Jiang Wei decided to stroke Zhong Hui's ego into cleaning out some Wei officers for him, and how Zhong Hui was enough of an egotistical dick to take the bait. Give me at least a little context; it makes the whole episode much more interesting when we know that there's a rhyme and reason and Koei didn't just pull all this shit out of their collective ass.
(Of course, they'd still be in a bit of a spot to come up with something for characters like Lian Shi, since there are no literary exploits to mine for ideas, but I think Cheng Pu should've been the new character in that slot anyway. Oh snap.)
So the gameplay modes, while not without good ideas in their foundation, are in serious need of some work to bring up their replay value. Or in the case of conquest mode, their play value.
The gameplay itself has more good ideas that need work -- namely, the weapon system. You can equip two weapons, and change out as you like. Though some have complained, I like this in theory, especially in a game where you're forced to play specific characters just to get through the story. I've always hated certain movesets, but now that moves are keyed to weapons, I can swap out the club for twin rods and get the battle done with something that doesn't make me want to flip tables. Cool, right? And if you don't like the ability to change weapons, just leave each character equipped with their EX weapon forever. Nobody's making you change.
The problem I have, though, is that by keying the moves to weapons and not characters, they've abandoned even any pretext of avoiding cloned movesets. And yes, I know there have always been cloned movesets; this just makes it more obvious. But even characters who played very similarly in the past still felt a little more different to me than they do now, where the only differences between two people who use the same weapon will be their EX and Musou attacks. Da Qiao and Xiao Qiao might've shared a weapon type in DW4, but Xiao had this added quirk of her running attack causing her to jump into enemies and fall to the ground, which made me go UGH and use Da instead. Now without that, the only effective difference is their Musou.
I think this could be addressed without removing the weapon change system and going back to locking a moveset to each character. Namely: I think they could fix this by taking a page from Warriors Orochi, wherein every character was classed as power, technique, or speed type, and each of those types had a special attack/attribute. Power types could shrug off attacks without flinching, technique types could do a counter when they took damage, speed types could jump-cancel out of their combos. Zhao Yun, Ma Chao, and Jiang Wei all use the same EX weapon in DW7 -- but by setting each of them as a different type, there would at least be some subtle differences in how one plays them, differences that can be noticed when you're not jamming on the Musou button.
(And some of the removed weapons were pretty cool, and I'd like to have them back. Namely Cao Pi's twin blades and Cao Ren's buckler blade.)
DW7 has a lot of half-baked ideas that just need some polish and tweaking to make them into something a lot more awesome for the sequel. But this is not, actually, why I feel that series veterans won't find it up to the standards of the older games. (Well, this is part of it. But there's another thing.)
DW7...is really freakin' easy.
I'm sure somebody out there is raising an eyebrow here. Or at least, would be if anyone who isn't a Musou fan actually made it this far in this post. (If I somehow haven't managed to scare you off by now: you have my sincere admiration for putting up with me.) "Uh, Sam?" you're thinking. "Aren't all DW games just PUSH SQUARE TO WIN anyway?" Well...no, no they really aren't. You guys who played 3 and 5 know what I'm talking about. I broke out DW5 tonight and played a fresh character on musou mode, easy difficulty, for comparison's sake.
Here's the thing. DW7's enemy AI is extremely passive, when compared to the old days. Put the game on easy and most enemies hang back and don't really try for you. Playable officers rarely use their musous and don't bother to block. Put DW5 on easy, on the other hand, and the AI remains aggressive. Enemies will come at you, hit you, and even the peons can take a good chunk off your lifebar if you aren't careful. Generic officers will block up a storm and use musou attacks. And don't even start me on musou rage.
Using a fresh character in DW5, even playing on easy, there's still a good chance you'll have some tense moments. Even if you play well, one lucky musou rage can really ruin your day. When I did my first story mode in DW7, my only losses (I did have a couple) were commander kills (Wan Castle's a bitch like that). My own life was basically never in question. If Cao Cao would just learn to not walk in front of arbalests, we would've been totally cool.
To a point, I see justification -- since story mode in DW7 forces you to use so many characters, it would be really frustrating if you had to go power them all up a bit in conquest mode to make up for problems you were having. But compared to the older games, DW7 really lacks teeth -- a fact that's only emphasized by the fact that you can obtain absolutely everything the game has to offer while playing on beginner difficulty. You don't have to play on hard to get the top tier weapons or items, and in fact, the stat drops don't seem to increase with difficulty, so there's little incentive to play on hard at all, aside from your own desire to kill things more slowly.
All those complaints aside: I really did love DW7. It's a great telling of a story that the series doesn't always manage to tell very well; it's the first time I've ever cried playing story mode, and I did so on more than one occasion. There are plenty of manly tears to be had, and the Jin kingdom's story mode is a really fantastic follow-up to the pre-Wuzhang pieces of the story that DW games have already been retelling for years. I gained appreciation for characters I hadn't much cared for before, and I found some new favorites (I'm sure most of the fandom is busy cringing at his voice and will judge the hell out of me, but FUCK Y'ALL I freaking adore Zhong Hui). And if I had to recommend a DW game for someone new to the series, this is the one I'd hand them, and then I'd tell them to go back and try 3 or 5 when they're ready to exchange manly tears for frustrated ones. (Rant about archers goes here.)
They took some risks with the changes. They made some serious missteps. But if they can actually learn from the missteps and address the problems in DW8, they could have something really fantastic.
...but who am I kidding. It's Koei. I'd just as soon expect them to keep all the bad parts and bring back Renbu for good measure. :'(
Okay, so I've been putting it off, but I figure it's time for the promised afterthoughts on Dynasty Warriors 7. I've cleared all story modes and conquest mode, I've unlocked everything and gotten the platinum trophy, and I sat down to spend a little time with some old-school DW just for comparison's sake.
In short: I'm out of excuses, man, it's time to DO THIS THING.
I think
bardiche probably put it best in her own impressions post; whether you'll like DW7 largely depends on what you like about the series -- the story or the gameplay. I do think that DW7 would be a good introduction for someone who's never given the series a spin, but for veterans...well, let's take it point by point.If you like Dynasty Warriors because you're interested in the story, you're in luck. DW7 has the most coherent and engaging presentation of the story yet, thanks to the revamped mechanics of story mode -- and what's more, it's also the most accurate to the source material. Although some details are changed a bit, as usual, overall DW7 has done an excellent job of taking the novel and presenting it in a way that's easily digestible to newcomers without changing too many details. Characters die when their novel counterparts did, in mostly very similar scenarios. Losing battles are in many cases kept that way even when you play the losers -- Chi Bi stands out here; in previous games, if you happened to be playing as Wei you got to prevent the fire attack and go kick Wu's ass. Not so, this time; you start with the fire attack and the battle objective is to get Cao Cao out of there.
The price was somewhat heavy here, though. Since it's now done by kingdom, rather than by character, there are only the four story modes, and since each battle is keyed in to a particular character, there's not really anything new to do there from a gameplay standpoint, save maybe cranking up the difficulty a bit. By following specific characters, Koei is able to put you in the right place with the right person to participate in a lot of the key moments, without having to bend canon to do it. It's great for storytelling, but it also means that once you've done it, you've done it. And with the lack of free mode, you can't even revisit the story battles with different characters -- which feels incredibly lazy of them.
The other problem I find with story mode is that the selection of characters you play as can be kind of bizarre. On one hand, they make you play as a range of characters, including ones I normally don't use, so you'll get a bit of a workout jumping between them. (In Jin's story mode in particular, if I recall correctly, you'll use everyone in the faction except Xiahou Ba.) But on the other hand, the number of stages is hilariously imbalanced (seven stages as Sima Zhao, really?), with the lion's share of each kingdom's stages going to the same couple of characters, and others having to make do with just one. And plenty of characters still go unused, some of whom have enough story significance that the lack of a stage for them really stands out. Sure, nobody's going to think much of it if you don't play a stage as Cai Wenji, but why on earth aren't you playing Cao Ren at Fan Castle? Xiahou Dun wasn't even there!
(Consider also that in three of the four kingdoms, you spend the majority of story mode playing as a sword user. Oh boy. If you, like me, prefer to keep everybody equipped with their EX weapon and ignore the ability to change, you'll get sick of that pretty quickly.)
Still, it does an effective job of making the story flow well and it keeps things easier to follow -- focusing on a single officer makes it easier to lose the big picture. I do think this take on story mode is a good concept that deserves to stay put -- what it needs, however, is a bit of tweaking. More even distribution of stages to characters; I love Xiahou Dun but this is what we like to call "pandering," Koei. Inclusion of free mode, with cutscenes removed and event scripts tweaked to allow you to replay the battles as any character you like (and preferably with two people). We've got a good start here, but its flaws hold it back.
In lieu of free mode, we got conquest mode, which is also a decent idea in theory, but in execution it really feels like they phoned it in. Conquest mode presents you with a map of China made up of a couple of hundred little hexagons. Each hex represents a battle, and once you clear a battle, you have access to all the hexes that border it. There are cities sprinkled among them, where you can buy new weapons (more are unlocked with each new city), talk to other characters when they appear, or play a trivia mini-game. Each character has a hex devoted to their "legendary battles," two or three stages in which you must play as that character, either based on their exploits in the novel or what-if scenarios -- clearing all of these unlocks them for play. And of the rest of the hexes, there are a number of different kinds of battles you might find -- rescue missions, escort missions, defense missions, conquer-the-bases missions, all out battles, solo missions, and more.
Sounds cool, right?
...well.
The chief problem I have with conquest mode (and actually to a lesser extent with story mode as well) is that stages are too damned short. Most of them are very quick to finish and many of them utilize only a small amount of the map. The solo missions are particularly heinous; they have two enemy officers on the map, and a third waiting in ambush at a particular point. That's it. The joy of playing a Musou game is the sheer scale of the battles, the ability to pull foe-tossing charges and kill hundreds of peons per skirmish. Diminish that and you diminish the fun. The lack of variety in these stages also doesn't help much. To use the solo battles as an example again: each one has the boss, who you must defeat; an enemy base guarded by another officer and with an ally outside, who will challenge you to capture it and reward you if you do; and an officer waiting in ambush, who will always be at a predetermined spot on that map. Varying the numbers, throwing in some kind of other encounters, even just having multiple potential ambush spots and randomizing which one the officer is actually hiding at would've helped a bit. As it stands, most of the battles in conquest mode just aren't that interesting once you've done them once.
The legendary battles are also a lot of wasted opportunity. There are way too many scenarios where they clearly just phoned it in. "Defeat these other officers from your kingdom during a training session!" came up more times than I could count. Now, legendary battles are clearly the spiritual successor of good ol' Legend Mode, introduced back in DW4XL, and I actually really loved a lot about Legend Mode, so once again, I think this is a good idea. But man oh man, it needs a lot of work to be worth its bytes in programming. First, more interesting scenarios -- even things that have already been done in Legend Mode would be completely acceptable to me if they just changed up maps or enemy arrangements or whatever so it's not a clone of an old level. I may have played Gan Ning's night raid on the enemy camp with his hundred men before, but if you give me an entertaining remix of it, I'll take that over "defeat your fellow officers in a training session!" any day.
The other thing that would really improve legendary battles, in my opinion, is a little more actual storytelling. I'm not expecting a story mode level of immersion, but to take Zhong Hui as an example: one of his legendary battle stages is a good example of the kind of scenarios I'd like to see in these stages -- a stage derived from his exploits in the novel, that wouldn't fit into story mode proper, both because of the timing (after the surrender of Chengdu, where story mode ends) and because historically, it failed and he died. So we have this what-if stage as a base: what if Zhong Hui's rebellion against Sima Zhao was done right, and he won?
...but we have absolutely no context on what sparked it, why he's rebelling, or why Jiang Wei is helping him. Zip. I'm not expecting a lengthy series of cutscenes delivering a full bromantic saga about their sworn brotherhood, but at least give me an intro blurb and/or a few lines of dialogue about how Jiang Wei decided to stroke Zhong Hui's ego into cleaning out some Wei officers for him, and how Zhong Hui was enough of an egotistical dick to take the bait. Give me at least a little context; it makes the whole episode much more interesting when we know that there's a rhyme and reason and Koei didn't just pull all this shit out of their collective ass.
(Of course, they'd still be in a bit of a spot to come up with something for characters like Lian Shi, since there are no literary exploits to mine for ideas, but I think Cheng Pu should've been the new character in that slot anyway. Oh snap.)
So the gameplay modes, while not without good ideas in their foundation, are in serious need of some work to bring up their replay value. Or in the case of conquest mode, their play value.
The gameplay itself has more good ideas that need work -- namely, the weapon system. You can equip two weapons, and change out as you like. Though some have complained, I like this in theory, especially in a game where you're forced to play specific characters just to get through the story. I've always hated certain movesets, but now that moves are keyed to weapons, I can swap out the club for twin rods and get the battle done with something that doesn't make me want to flip tables. Cool, right? And if you don't like the ability to change weapons, just leave each character equipped with their EX weapon forever. Nobody's making you change.
The problem I have, though, is that by keying the moves to weapons and not characters, they've abandoned even any pretext of avoiding cloned movesets. And yes, I know there have always been cloned movesets; this just makes it more obvious. But even characters who played very similarly in the past still felt a little more different to me than they do now, where the only differences between two people who use the same weapon will be their EX and Musou attacks. Da Qiao and Xiao Qiao might've shared a weapon type in DW4, but Xiao had this added quirk of her running attack causing her to jump into enemies and fall to the ground, which made me go UGH and use Da instead. Now without that, the only effective difference is their Musou.
I think this could be addressed without removing the weapon change system and going back to locking a moveset to each character. Namely: I think they could fix this by taking a page from Warriors Orochi, wherein every character was classed as power, technique, or speed type, and each of those types had a special attack/attribute. Power types could shrug off attacks without flinching, technique types could do a counter when they took damage, speed types could jump-cancel out of their combos. Zhao Yun, Ma Chao, and Jiang Wei all use the same EX weapon in DW7 -- but by setting each of them as a different type, there would at least be some subtle differences in how one plays them, differences that can be noticed when you're not jamming on the Musou button.
(And some of the removed weapons were pretty cool, and I'd like to have them back. Namely Cao Pi's twin blades and Cao Ren's buckler blade.)
DW7 has a lot of half-baked ideas that just need some polish and tweaking to make them into something a lot more awesome for the sequel. But this is not, actually, why I feel that series veterans won't find it up to the standards of the older games. (Well, this is part of it. But there's another thing.)
DW7...is really freakin' easy.
I'm sure somebody out there is raising an eyebrow here. Or at least, would be if anyone who isn't a Musou fan actually made it this far in this post. (If I somehow haven't managed to scare you off by now: you have my sincere admiration for putting up with me.) "Uh, Sam?" you're thinking. "Aren't all DW games just PUSH SQUARE TO WIN anyway?" Well...no, no they really aren't. You guys who played 3 and 5 know what I'm talking about. I broke out DW5 tonight and played a fresh character on musou mode, easy difficulty, for comparison's sake.
Here's the thing. DW7's enemy AI is extremely passive, when compared to the old days. Put the game on easy and most enemies hang back and don't really try for you. Playable officers rarely use their musous and don't bother to block. Put DW5 on easy, on the other hand, and the AI remains aggressive. Enemies will come at you, hit you, and even the peons can take a good chunk off your lifebar if you aren't careful. Generic officers will block up a storm and use musou attacks. And don't even start me on musou rage.
Using a fresh character in DW5, even playing on easy, there's still a good chance you'll have some tense moments. Even if you play well, one lucky musou rage can really ruin your day. When I did my first story mode in DW7, my only losses (I did have a couple) were commander kills (Wan Castle's a bitch like that). My own life was basically never in question. If Cao Cao would just learn to not walk in front of arbalests, we would've been totally cool.
To a point, I see justification -- since story mode in DW7 forces you to use so many characters, it would be really frustrating if you had to go power them all up a bit in conquest mode to make up for problems you were having. But compared to the older games, DW7 really lacks teeth -- a fact that's only emphasized by the fact that you can obtain absolutely everything the game has to offer while playing on beginner difficulty. You don't have to play on hard to get the top tier weapons or items, and in fact, the stat drops don't seem to increase with difficulty, so there's little incentive to play on hard at all, aside from your own desire to kill things more slowly.
All those complaints aside: I really did love DW7. It's a great telling of a story that the series doesn't always manage to tell very well; it's the first time I've ever cried playing story mode, and I did so on more than one occasion. There are plenty of manly tears to be had, and the Jin kingdom's story mode is a really fantastic follow-up to the pre-Wuzhang pieces of the story that DW games have already been retelling for years. I gained appreciation for characters I hadn't much cared for before, and I found some new favorites (I'm sure most of the fandom is busy cringing at his voice and will judge the hell out of me, but FUCK Y'ALL I freaking adore Zhong Hui). And if I had to recommend a DW game for someone new to the series, this is the one I'd hand them, and then I'd tell them to go back and try 3 or 5 when they're ready to exchange manly tears for frustrated ones. (Rant about archers goes here.)
They took some risks with the changes. They made some serious missteps. But if they can actually learn from the missteps and address the problems in DW8, they could have something really fantastic.
...but who am I kidding. It's Koei. I'd just as soon expect them to keep all the bad parts and bring back Renbu for good measure. :'(