Dynasty Warriors 4

"Suffering from some flaws, it still comes out on top as the superior game."

Set in the wartorn Chinese Era of The Three Kingdoms, ultimately the age that would bring the Han Dynasty to the ground, this game turns this little known time into a fun action/strategy game. Developed by KOEI and distributed by W-Omega Force, we find a game with roughly 40+ characters to choose from, many to unlock, and some to get you into the game.

Gameplay:
It's a step up from Dynasty Warriors 3. Many of the things the fans hated about DW3 was how the archers were vicious and generally a pain in the ass, even on Easy mode. The arrows shot out as fast as a bullet and did little more than small portions of damage.
In Dynasty Warriors 4, the arrows fire at a believable speed and archers are so damn unbelievably hard.
Introduction of a better weapons system has been put in also. In DW3, you would start off with a very crappy little weapon and you would rely on killing enemies and breaking random pots and boxes to find a weapon box that you would PRAY has something the least bit special. Often you wouldn't be able to find weapon boxes and you'd go through three plus games with the same crappy little weapon. Here, your weapon gains experience points depending on how many soldiers killed and how powerful the generals you defeated were. At the beginning of musou mode (the story mode), you would get smaller experience points from enemies, and eventually you would earn 1000+ experience from defeating the head general.
These experience points add on to your weapon and eventually cause them to upgrade to bigger and better weapons, whether capable of hitting better attacks or being capable of higher attack points.
What was called the "Fourth Weapon" in DW3 is now called the "Level 10 Weapon", these cannot be attained by means of killing generals alone. One must go through a special event of the sorts to do that. In DW3, "Fourth Weapons" were a pain in ass to get and only Zhao Yun's proved to be a cinche for myself. In DW4, they give you more of a chance, and even so, I have half the characters' Level Ten Weapons.
There are more levels also, with certain objectives for each. Most are the simple "defeat the enemy commander", but some go into greater detail than that, such as finding a special item (The Imperial Seal), or escaping from the enemy's clutches (The Battle of Chang Ban, Guan Yu's Escape), and this continues from Dynasty Warriors 3, which first introduced the Escaping condition.
Unfortunately, Dynasty Warriors 4 brought back in the feature that let down Dynasty Warriors 2, Kingdom Specific Musou Modes, in other words, each kingdom has their own levels to complete, in the same order and same levels for every character of that specific Kingdom. Dynasty Warriors 3 had it better with their Character specific musou modes.

Story:
The Musou Mode takes place from roughly 189AD all the way to 234AD. From the fall of the Han to the climax of the Three Kingdoms era. It unfortunately does not head right through the Three Kingdoms, rather just the more famous battles.
At the beginning, Zhang Jiao, leader of the Yellow Turban Rebellion, has rebelled against the Han Dynasty, their corruption helped the crumbling of the Han Dynasty, Cao Cao, Liu Bei and Sun Jian all took part in the battle against the Yellow Turbans, and those three would later on split apart to make up the main story, they would form their own Dynasties, Cao Cao would reign over Wei, Liu Bei over Shu (or Shu-Han to be exact) and Sun Jian over Wu.
As levels progress, the story does also, while Dynasty Warriors 4 does not follow the story well like Dynasty Warriors 3 did, it still provides a compressed version of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" in the ROTK Encyclopedia that came with the game to help straighten things out.

Graphics:
This is definitely a HUGE step up from Dynasty Warriors 3. The graphics have taken a huge step forward, with a higher poly count and a much greater feeling of battle. While you still get the odd (and uncommon, I must add) lag from many people on the screen at once (mostly happens in Two Player mode), you still get a good battle feeling, with the right body movements and weapon details also. Each character is a lot more detailed than they were in Dynasty Warriors 3 and sometimes even provides emotion, such as when hit into the air by a powerful attack and you get a glimpse of their face screwing up in pain.

Sound:
Easily the best Dynasty Warriors game when it comes to sound. The voice acting is the most brilliant, and the battle sounds and war cries aren't so compact and artifical sounding like the previous DW games. However there are some changes for the worst.
Zhao Yun's voice in DW3 was very youthful, brave and courageous. In Dynasty Warriors 4, he sounds completely up himself and utterly idiotic.
Xu Zhu sounds stupid, while he is a fat pile of donkey turd anyway, he still doesn't deserve to sound so piss faced.
And my biggest gripe is Sun Ce, who has that "fun-loving" voice with him. With that voice, Sun Ce sounds like an inexperienced puppy dog, inferior mentally and physically to his best friend Zhou Yu.
However, overall, Dynasty Warriors 4 does do some good when it comes to sounds, there are more characters' whose voices have changed for the better, including, but not limited to, Zhou Yu, Zhuge Liang, Liu Bei, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei (whom I swear has had that voice in DW3 also) and Sun Quan, who sounded like a panicking pom in DW3.

Replayability:
After unlocking all the characters and levels, you'll want to come back every now and then just to try out different strategies to certain levels, especially since there are so many secrets to this game. With Two Player mode, replayability shines out most, with you and your friend wanting to try different duos of characters to run the battle field.
Overall, I'd say the replayability is okay, nothing to write home about though.

My Recommendation:
If you like action games, Hire. Now.
If you like strategy games, Hire. Now.
If you like action/strategy games, BUY! NOW!
Hire it and if you like it, buy it. If you're new to the DW series, you liked this game, and you want more, go out and buy it's expansion, Xtreme Legends. If you played THAT and want more, go out and buy Dynasty Warriors 3 and it's expansion, and if you are SERIOUSLY desperate for more, spare ten bucks or less for a copy of Dynasty Warriors 2. And after that wave of serious DW-gaming, or if you're a serious strategy fan, pick up a copy of Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires.

Overall: 8/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/11/04