Dynasty Warriors 4: Xtreme Legends

"When did they start making expansions for console games?"

Old-school beat-em-ups like Streets of Rage and Final Fight seem to have lost their place in this age of more involved and complicated gaming. The relatively simple concept of 'see the enemy, kill the enemy' has been expanded and changed till the point is not to simply kill the enemy, but to remove them in a specialized and, in the developer's eyes, an innovative way. So it's not often a game can get away with such dumbed-down, repetitive, and ultimately simple gameplay. But it works, and pretty darn well.

Dynasty Warriors has always been about you being a single warrior amongst a battlefield of hundreds and thousands of enemy troops. Oh, you've got an army at your back as well, but it's not like they can really do anything. If they could, what would be the point of you, the player? So here's the point: you kill everything that moves and isn't wearing your colors. Simple, isn't it?

This series has always been a throw-back to the beat-em-ups of old, with plenty of enemies and just enough new-school powers, abilities and special attacks to make it worth your while. Though lately the series has been sent additions not in the form of true sequels, but in these Xtreme expansions. While some things change, some remain the same. Meat buns will still bring you back from the brink of death. Ordinary men and women are able to make their spearheads and swords burst into flame and go into an invincible berserker rage. Lu Bu is still a cheap-ass son of a Mongol.

This is not a game in and of itself. If played as a stand-alone, it will provide a good deal of enjoyment and fun, but it's meant to be an expansion of Dynasty Warriors 4. It contains additional weapons, maps and game modes, but if you don't have DW4, you'll miss out on many things that are only available in the original game. Such things as weapons, some items, and the stats for your warriors carry over from the original to Xtreme, so losing out on such things makes for a sad gamer.

So let's say you have DW4, have been playing it to death, acquired all the special items, maxed out every fighter's stats, gotten all their level 10 weapons, and played the game entirely to death. Now you pop in the Xtreme disc, and suddenly you're given a specialized stage for each of the game's fighters, level 11 weapons that are even more powerful, more special items and even more game modes to waste your life playing.

Probably the biggest flaw for DW4 was that the campaign mode was based on the three sides of the Three Kingdoms conflict (Shu, Wei and Wu) and lacked the individual campaign modes for each of the 40+ characters. Xtreme brings back the individual campaigns in the Legend mode, though they're only one stage long. Unfortunate, but it's there, and after a victorious battle you're able to try each character's stage with a different fighter, so it's all good.

Xtreme mode is where the meat of this game lies. It's basically an endurance test, pitting you against...well, everyone else. You select one character with fresh stats (even if you maxed them out in DW4, they start out fresh) and select from three stages. In this mode, generals and other superior officers drop precious meat buns rather than the swords and shields that ordinarily boost your stats. So how do you become more powerful, you may ask? Through the spending of gold at the local merchant of each stage before it begins. Here you can also buy such collectibles as other generals and fighters from the Dynasty Warriors cast (including Lu Bu, should you be so lucky) along with companies of men like archers, sorcerers, elite troops, etc. Special, one-time-use items like spectacles, dragon seal and manacles perform such services as increase your point total, but sometimes for a price beyond its store value. Likewise, you can purchase meat buns in between stages, and often must in order to survive.

Xtreme also tosses at you certain in-game objectives, mostly missions given by fellow Dynasty Warriors to assault a certain base or destroy a supply depot or recover a lost item, or in some cases, to kidnap a person. While that last one nets you a lot of points, it also worsens relationships with the locals in the area where you're fighting, and can have consequences later in the game. Of course, should you refuse to kidnap whatever poor sap is up for grabs, you'll make an enemy of the would-be kidnapper, which sometimes happens anyway, seeing as they're bad people...

Gaining new stores of gold is as simple as beating the stage selected. Your points times the stage's difficulty rating plus any bonuses you may have incurred equals your gold for that stage. Xtreme mode is an endless stream of stages, new challenges, and battles to fight. It gets progressively harder as the stages go on, until well into the 80's you're having half your health bar knocked off by a single swipe from an enemy grunt. Still, it follows the same Dynasty Warriors formula of 'wash the battlefield red with the blood of your enemies' so some people might not have the stamina to reach level 80. Then again, those wimps shouldn't have been trying Xtreme mode in the first place...

Fortunately, the game's formula has remained the same and withstood the test of time. Over 40 warriors with unique weapons performing moves and attacks only those in a video game can do, creating a body count in the hundreds and wiping out all those who stand before them. And Lu Bu is still a cheap bastard. Even more so due to the fact that with the expansion, you're given the Xtreme difficulty mode to select, meaning a great many things can kill you before you realize it. A single spear jab, a rampaging horse or siege engine, a misplaced rock, a sneeze...

What it really comes down to is whether or not you like the type of repetitive gameplay Dynasty Warriors has to offer. Obviously the still-kicking beat-em-up fans have made Dynasty Warriors a series with staying power, but to the mere individual gamer who doesn't know what his next purchase will be, this series might come as something as a surprise. No stealth, no strategy, no complicated mission plan besides "Wipe them out. All of them." If you're just coming away from Dynasty Warriors 4 a happy gamer, prepare yourself to jump into Xtreme Legends. You'll be glad you did.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 10/01/04