Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires

"I have taken their stronghold! And their kingdom!"

Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires is one of the great dynasty warriors series. In this game you have to take over everyone's territory and rule all of ancient China. The basis of the game is that you pick a territory to start out with, and attack, defend, form alliances and such and rule China. This is like all of the dynasty warriors games-hack and slash. The controls are very simple. Square is to attack, triangle to charge attack, circle to use your "musou", and X to jump. R1 is to block, R2 is to change the map, L1 is to shoot an arrow, and L2 is to toggle your enemies health.

Once you start the game, you have multiple options. You can go to empire mode, which you have to conquer the land. Vs. mode which you can play against a friend. Archives to look at pictures and characters and such. Edit mode to make a character yourself. And options to well, change the options.

In empire mode, you have to pick settings. The settings are historical mode or fictional mode, and easy, medium, and hard difficulty. Historical mode is where all of the territories are like what really sort of happened. You first just take a territory. Some could be occupied and you can play with whoever occupies that land. Or you can pick a vacant land and pick a character you created in edit mode. Once doing so, you will notice the yellow turbans(if you didn't start out as Zhang Jiao) have a lot of land. Your first turn you attack a land and then you will be called up by the emperor and fight the turbans. If you reject it, the turbans will stay as they are. But if you accept it and win, their territories become others. Then after a while Dong Zhuo will stir up danger and you will have a coalition against him. Just like in the other dynasty warriors games! Then you are on your own afterwards. Before you chose to attack or defend, your officers will tell you an idea. They could be enforce trading, find an officer, trade an item, or give troops to your officers.

The way officers work is this: You start out with three generals, one being your grand general(emperor). Once you fight battles and capture officers, they can be lieutenants if they are officers you can't normally play as in dynasty warriors. Generals are people you can play as in dynasty warriors and the people you can't play as. All you have to do is promote them from lieutenant. You can have a total of 10 generals and lieutenants. You can only put in three generals and lieutenants in battle, though. They can level up and get better weapons.

In fictional mode, you just pick a territory and play. Everyone has random places and random grand generals. There is really nothing confusing about it!

In battle, the way you basically fight is by taking over the enemy strongholds. A stronghold is just like a mini-base. You take them by just taking out all of the enemy soldiers surrounding. By taking these over, you get one step closer to defeating the enemy. You can defeat the enemies. When you are attacking the enemy's main base, you have to take out their grand general and take over all of their land. If you are just attacking one of their other territories, you have to take out the enemies main base(which is just another stronghold). When defending, you defeat the enemy leader of that battle, or let the fifteen minutes they have run out. When you attack another officer, they are hard to kill. If you defeat them, they will most likely go through a series of retreating and then coming back to battle. It is uncommon that you defeat the enemy and they don't come back. Although it seems like a lot, they come back with less troops. Troops are very important in battle. They show what side has more people to fight with. It doesn't exactly change the difficulty, but it is smart to have a lot of troops.

In edit mode, you have the ability to create a character. First thing you have to do is name the person. You may not have a lot of room to name the person, though. Then you choose the model type. You have types like hero, warrior, princess, amazon, ect. Then you choose the voice. You have things like fiery, like Lu Bu, and calm, like some officers are. Then you choose its model type, or weapon. You can choose any officers weapon, and you can get Fu Xi's and Nu Wa's swords. Then you can choose their color their clothes are, whats on their head, chest, and waist. Then you can choose strategy. You can choose things like rally, ambush, charge, shield and others.

Strategies are a significant part of the game. You have things like charge, where you charge to the enemies stronghold. Then you have ambush where you can ambush the enemies, shield where you can defend your stronghold, and you have many many more. They help you in the battle and make a great difference.

This game is so good, but since it is repetitive, I can only give this a 9/10

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 10/22/07

Game Release: Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires (US, 08/31/04)