Dynasty Warriors 4

"It is the most complete of the Dynasty Warriors franchise, but it is also the least impressive"

The Dynasty Warriors franchise has been known for their hack-and-slash, history-lesson hybrid, and in truth, it is one of the most accomplished games in that matter. The hack-and-slash series is frankly only 3 installments, as the first one was a one-on-one fighting game. So we have three hack-and-slash games of the same name, three installments to make it famous. With the fourth one, Koei manages to make Dynasty Warriors 4 instantly popular amongst fans, hitting Top 10 spots in game boards, receiving many 10s and 9s from fans and debuting Koei’s fresh new game through commercials. But while the game audience has opened their eyes to the Dynasty Warriors franchise, I am appalled to see very little in terms of flawless improvements. Dynasty Warriors 4 is a perfect example of a game that improves on many of the poor mechanics of its predecessors, but ends up having just as many flaws within.

I’ve been a Three Kingdoms fanatic since back in the day when there was even a poor fighting game called Sango Fighter, based on Three Kingdoms’ characters. So you might be able to guess how pleased I was when I found that Koei managed to input the battle scenes into an interesting hack-and-slash simulation with Dynasty Warriors 2. This game, however, was still fairly shallow and redundant. Dynasty Warriors 3 managed to improve on Dynasty Warriors 2 by implementing deeper gameplay by adding 6 attack combo chains, item equipment and deeper character growth management. Dynasty Warriors 3: Extreme Legends further enhanced this by adding depth to the bodyguard growth. However, the series always had one main issue that loomed over them – artificial intelligence. The AI was always too stupid, and would always have that odd stare, and the minute you attacked, they would stab you in the back... literally!

With that in mind, Dynasty Warriors 4 is released and I bought it the minute it came out to my town. Perhaps it was the fact that I was expecting as much of an evolution as I saw in Dynasty Warriors 3, but I was not truly impressed. They managed to solve four areas of gameplay that faulted or boasted the Dynasty Warriors franchise immensely, but for some reason, problems are returning continuously.

Artificial Intelligence - Koei needs to take a clue that this doesn't mean it has to be blatantly obvious

Koei managed to solve this simply by making the AI far more aggressive than previous games. The AI will now lunge at you with their all and fight you gallantly, bravely and without a thought to consequence. This makes the game far more impressive in terms of difficulty. I found myself grinning when I found that my ally’s AI would actually fight strongly, defeat enemies with quick blows and fight tactically. But because of this sudden enhancement of AI aggression, we come across several faults. For one, your commanding general (the one you must protect at all costs) is far weaker and far more useless than previously.

Why is this? The enemy AI ends up being far more aggressive than those of your allies. In this way, your far more durable enemy instantly slaughters your enemy commander. This is irrefutable by fanboys because it is so blatantly obvious through the battle of Xu Chang and the Nanman Campaign. Millions of enemies can end up eliminating your commanding general as quickly as a single infantry. This is entirely evident when Zhuge Liang particularly takes on the role of the commanding general. You will, no question, encounter the death scene of your commanding general all too many times, and this is due to Koei’s correction of the aggression of your enemy’s AI. The awkwardness is only increased far more than usual due to this, as the AI seems to switch itself on the minute you perform an action such as attacking or mounting a horse. It seems that their aggression level peaks the instant you do anything other than “run” or “standing still

Even enemy officers seem to be affected by this. Their aggression is met only through their overall cheapness. As mentioned before, enemy AI is extremely awkward. They stand still, and then after a few seconds of seeing you standing beside them, they perform one attack and then stand still once more. However, enemy officers will spend that awkwardness by blocking every single attack you perform. The minute your back is turned, the enemy officer will stab you in the back, or spend that time trying to heal themselves. Previously, the enemy officer’s healing could be interrupted by simply attacking them. However, for some odd reason, Koei makes it so you need to have them kiss the ground to stop them from healing themselves. Now, even if you attack, the “LIFE+100” icon will loom over their head immediately. This self-healing ability that the enemy officer has that you don’t makes the game equally unfair and unbelievably cheap in Koei’s newest addition – duels. Throughout each encounter with a general, you have a chance that the enemy officer may ask you to a duel. Should you accept, you will be entered in a ring with only the enemy officer. While this sounds perfect in theory, Koei’s self-healing enemy officers end up being preposterously cheap! Once you get them to red health, and they perform a super musou attack on you, they’ll instantly pop up that good ‘ol “LIFE+100” on themselves while you’re stumbled on the floor. While the self-healing ability of enemy generals was not that big of an issue in battle as you could scrounge around in jars and dead corpses for healing morsels, you have no such means of doing so in a duel, and since death means game over, the dueling option in Koei ends up being an unfair, blatantly one-sided fight.

Redundancy - They mean good, but their remedy ended up having side effects

The second sin in Koei’s Dynasty Warriors franchise is fixed through their newest addition – Kingdom Play. Kingdom Play allows you to play through an entire quest with more than one character, making you decide which character you want to fight which battles. Distributed into four to six acts and several scenarios in each act, Kingdom Play sounds extremely promising. By allowing more characters to play through one quest makes character growth far more easier and the redundancy of using the same character over again a thing of the past. However, this inclusion of Kingdom Play ends up being even more redundant, mainly through Koei’s 50-some scenarios. All of these scenarios are included into seventeen maps. Now that’s just odd: seventeen maps for fifty battles? That’s two to four battles in the same map! Isn’t that revisiting redundancy’s door?

Why is this?The originality in map design that Dynasty Warriors 2 used to boast is now an uninspired all-too-symmetrical map that you may end up reliving literally a hundred times due to the same maps that are used for various different scenarios. Now, epic battles such as Guan Du are later introduced with a loss of enthusiasm due to reasons that you have already played that map in a less-epic, less-grandiose Yellow Turban Fortress. Considering that all of this is put through Kingdom Play, you end up playing through the same quest over and over again with a few inconsequential sidequests although you are using more than one character. In Dynasty Warriors 3, you would be able to make your characters face challenges in different orders, with interesting CG cinemas on the way. Now, players can only be so satisfied to a few CGs, rehashed maps and boring quest structure. Yes, the maps are used to incorporate different battle scenes taken at similar locations, but the detail in these maps and the level of change doesn’t extend past weather conditions and time of day. To add insult to injury, the Other Legend quests aren’t nearly as varied as the ones in Extreme Legends. The Dong Zhuo Quest, the Lu Bu Quest and the Yuan Shao Quests are all virtually the same in terms of battles, except for some changes in troop generals.

New Modes - Always something to fix and improve for the next one

Koei also manages to include an Edit Mode, primarily reserved for your Created Warriors as well as your Created Bodyguards. Yes, it is true, you can create your own warriors as well as name your bodyguards. The newest addition and probably one of the most discussed additions of Koei sounds excellent in concept, and it is definitely high time that Koei included it, the Create-A-Warrior or CAW allows you to create a new warrior, male or female, to fight alongside your favourite historical characters. A variety of options in weapons are offered, but other than the rapier (only for females) and the great sword (only for males), the weapons are rehashed versions of the characters you unlocked. In truth, the choices in the CAW mode of Dynasty Warriors 4 are extremely limited and very disappointing. From the start, the cosmetic changes are what you get, nothing unlocked, nothing added. This makes for extremely uninspired characters that look not at all as interesting as the characters in the actual game. Your created characters will end up looking like the typical fighting generals with nothing that truly sets them apart to the exception of slightly detailed clothes. For a game that manages to include 6 costumes per character, Dynasty Warriors 4’s Create-A-Warrior mode is extremely limited and gets old fast.

The bodyguards have, for some strange reason, taken a step back from Extreme Legends. No more can you mix up your bodyguards in terms of generic or a character from the game. The bodyguard units are terribly uninspired and are not at all as varied as Extreme Legends. Yes, you have different unit types, but they are all virtually the same and yes, the changes are again cosmetic.

Presentation - Do you want the good news or the bad news first?

Koei was never proud of its audio. It always reeked of forgettable music and worst of all, poor voice acting. There were several complaints for Dynasty Warriors that the music was odd due to its hard rock-ish theme in a very east-Asian atmosphere. Koei decided to integrate the hard rock-ish theme with some good ‘ol east-Asian instruments so those gosh-darn critics wouldn’t complain! Well, the end result is a very good one. Let us take the Quest Summary Theme which summarizes the performance of your character. An east-Asian instrument opens up with a very hypnotic melody, barged in by drums and a rocking electric guitar. The music slowly increases into a loud duet between the heating electric guitar and the same hypnotic melody of that Asian instrument. Another exceptional example is the He Fei theme. However, it cannot be denied that there are some really bad pieces, such as the Yellow Turban Rebellion, which almost feels like Koei deliberately tried to make that song intolerable (unfortunately, it is also one of the best places to gain rank points). As well, some songs are remixed for the worse, taking for example the Lu Bu theme. If one could reminisce to the DW2 times when the Lu Bu theme was purely the Lu Bu theme and none of that additional remixing, you would know that DW3 remixed it for worse as did DW4. It’s not that the Lu Bu theme in DW4 is bad, the theme is just forgettable.

However, we come out to the biggest fault of them all – the voice acting. It seems as if Koei decided to put all the character voices to the extreme. For example, Xiao Qiao seems to be sounding even more dense-cheerleader-y, Zhao Yun attempts to sound far more heroic, but ends up falling flat on his face in failure and the two brothers (Zhang Fei and Guan Yu) sound like they’re trying to hit that low, rugged, masculine voice even further. Overall, the crime of poor voice acting has hit a new low. The voice acting is awful to the point that I had to eliminate all sound effects and just leave the music on. While there are some improved actors and actresses, such as Da Qiao, who sounds much more like a sophisticated woman than a brat, the majority of the voices are flat-out awful.

The visuals suffer a similar fate, but to a lesser extent. Koei manages to add in a small amount of detail to the visual presentation, but overall, there is virtually very little difference between Dynasty Warriors 3 and 4. But this mark is only worsened by the boring level design. While Koei managed to incorporate an additional 5 costumes to the inherent default one, the changes are purely cosmetic. The game feels more complete with the 6 costumes per character, each with a colour change or a design change, but I would much rather have eliminated those 5 costume changes for further tweaking in AI and duels as well as a more innovative gameplay concept than the Kingdom Play. The visuals should have been left alone for better performance. In truth, the performance has not truly changed. Koei managed to eliminate as much fog as they could in Dynasty Warriors 4, but the lag becomes a large issue when it comes to infantry packing the screen and 2-player mode. It seems as if the entire game is played through “bullet time” in those sequences.

Thus quoth the historians...

Dynasty Warriors 4 is still an excellent and fun game to play. There are many characters to choose from, including the three additions, Zhou Tai, Cao Ren and Yue Ying. The game excels in terms of replay value and Koei keeps on giving. Fans will definitely not be disappointed as the rewards in this game are infinite. But I can’t help but say that I am somewhat disappointed at the inadequate improvements in Dynasty Warriors 4 in comparison to Dynasty Warriors 3. It’s unquestionable that this game has received the recognition that it deserves simply by looking at its improved advertising funds as well as the impressed fans on the review sections. But perhaps it is time to examine Koei’s lack of growth in this edition. In truth, Dynasty Warriors 4 has not matured as much as Dynasty Warriors 3. If Extreme Legends was not existent, Dynasty Warriors 4 should have been entitled Dynasty Warriors 3.6, as the token improvements in this one make it somewhat disappointing. Nevertheless, I highly recommend newcomers to the franchise to go out and buy this edition as it has much to offer. But as much as I enjoy Dynasty Warriors 4, there is one truth that lingers in me.

It is the most complete of the Dynasty Warriors franchise, but it is also the least charming.

Gameplay Elements: 6 - Good ‘ol Dynasty Warriors fun, but the problems that lie within is the uninspired level design and even cheaper AI due to the supposedly ‘enhanced’ AI in this installment.
Visual Presentation: 7 - It manages to fix some fog. While you are offered 6 costumes per character as well as more detailed character design, slowdown ends up being an issue that makes you want to trade in 3 costumes for improved performance (I liked a few of those alternate costume changes!!!).
Audio Presentation: 6 - The voice acting is piss-poor. I would easily give the voices a 3. But the themes in DW4 are relatively good at times, and while there are some awful remixes and some forgettable rock, I have to say I was pleased by the risky step Koei took in incorporating both rock and Asian instruments.
Additional Add-ons: 10 - To completely unlock, max and finish everything, you’ll be playing this game for the next long while! This is Dynasty Warrior’s most boastful edition in this respect.
Score Bias: 8 - I’m happy with it despite the flaws, but deep inside me, I know I would have wanted further fine-tuning even if it may mean a delay in game release. Hopefully the X-Box version will fulfill this (currently announced to be released in August).

[7.4] ~ GOOD

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/21/03, Updated 04/21/03