Dynasty Warriors 6

"Understandably unable to live up to its predecessors"

Dynasty Warriors 6, otherwise known as Shin Sangoku Musou 5 in Japan, is the sixth installment to Koei's famed hack and slash series and the first installment made for PS3. Here, you control a famous general of the Three Kingdoms era of ancient China and slaughter your way through countless enemies to attain victory and unite the land. Anyone who has played Kingdom Hearts 2 should have a fair idea; It's similar to the battle against a thousand Heartless. Being the first installment on the PS3, Koei's altered the way hardcore fans know Dynasty Warriors. Are these changes for the better or worse?

Graphics: 9/10

it shouldn't come at a surprise when I say that Koei's outdone themselves yet again in this department. Besides, what modern video game doesn't have good graphics? The power of the PS3 allows more characters to be simultaneously rendered on the screen and further minimises the occurrence of of the infamous Dynasty Warriors "fog of war", two problems commonly encountered in this series. As expected, the characters, battlefield and FMV's are all very well done, so no complaints here. Character design seems somewhat repetitive though; Sun Jian, Ma Chao and Gan Ning seem to be visiting the same hairdressing salon, for example. Nonetheless, this didn't affect the score.

Sound: 9/10

Again, Dynasty Warriors 6 scores pretty high in this area also The rock and roll background music, as always, gets you pumped as you roam the battlefield, ready to begin your onslaught. Voice acting is great in the Japanese version; Not sure about the general stance on English voice acting, so I won't say much here. I have heard rumors that Cao Cao is being pronounced as "Tsao Tsao" now though, which is a plus. Sound effects are also well done. The sound of weapons clashing, horses running and arrows sailing through the air all work together to immerse you into the chaotic atmosphere. Due to all this, sound scores a high 9 as well.

Gameplay: 7/10

Koei's added quite a few gimmicks in Dynasty Warriors 6 and the biggest one would probably be the Renbu system. The number of hits you can deal now depends on your Renbu rank, rather than the weapon you wield. While Koei bragged about infinite combos, it's really exaggerated; At max Renbu rank, your S string (Your string of attacks using the square button.) repeats itself over and over. It's kind of annoying to always begin a level at Renbu rank 1 though, so I'm not too fond of this system.

Leveling up is done through activating nodes on a character's skill tree, rather than finding dim sims, killing officers and whatnot. The skill tree is basically a mini FFX Sphere Grid and you gain points as you rank up to activate nodes on the character's skill tree. This system has totally replaced the items system in previous installments. I don't really care about this system; It's not anything particularly interesting, nor is it a huge hassle.

The battle system's gone through a significant number of changes. The most noticeable one is that charge attacks no longer exist; T strings and "hold T" crowd clearing moves have taken over. Grapple moves that ignore guard can now be performed by attacking while holding L1, the guard button. Archery has been taken out for a dodge roll function, which evades attacks. L2 now triggers a character's special skill, which range from fire attacks to rockfalls. You can now adjust the camera using the right analogue stick, but I never found it particularly useful; L1 fixes the camera behind your character, which is all you'll ever need from the camera. There's no major change to the horse riding system, other than being able to make the horse jump with the R1 button. And no, the horses don't die and you take no fall damage from this. It's pretty cool, to be honest; Nothing like sailing over the castle walls to take your enemies by surprise. Overall, I can adapt to the new battle system fairly easily, but I still miss charge attacks.

Interaction with the battlefield is as strong as ever. You can now swim, for those of you who hate having to find bridges. I personally hate swimming; More a nuisance than anything, especially when you get knocked into the ocean at Chi Bi. I've heard rumors that you can launch ambushes by swimming into castles/fortresses, though I've never tried this. Swimming also brings about one of the cheapest ways to take out officers ever. Knock them into a river or something, grab a horse and jump in and hack them to death on the horse while the helplessly try to swim towards the shore. This function's an annoyance in my eyes, but it does make gameplay more realistic.

Speaking of ambushes, you can now ambush your enemies, causing them to lose morale and, from my experience, lower their defence. You can ambush enemies several ways; The most common way I found myself doing is jumping off a wall/cliff and landing in a small fort, successfully ambushing the guard captain inside. Nothing worth noticing, but funny the first few times you do it.

Invading castles is now a pretty fun experience. You now have guys with sexy bodies dressed in nothing more than a loincloth (Lol.) either carry ladders or push battering rams for you. By protecting these guys, they'll smash through the castle gates or set up the ladders. I, for one, very often find myself frustrated because I'm basically doing nothing except be target practise for archers while waiting for the blasted gates of, say, Hu Lao Gate to open, so I like this function. I do wish that the enemies make a better effort in trying to defend the castle though. They take out battering rams OK, but noone tries to stop be from climbing the ladders.

There are quite a few items on the battlefield that you can destroy now. There's the old pots and crates, but you can also smash through wooden gates to speed up the process of invasion. For metal gates, you'll just have to wait for the rams. In certain stages, you also may destroy certain objects to complete an objective on that level. For example, destroying the altars in the Yellow Turbans stage eliminates the gusts of wind that prevent your main army from attacking Zhang Jiao's base, thus completing an objective.

Speaking of objectives, these are mini missions you can accomplish in battle to boost your army's morale, get extra weapons and horses at the end of the stage etc. It makes each level a bit more interesting and gives you a break from the same procedure of "go to x officer, kill said officer, rinse and repeat".

The weapon system sees a few changes too. Weapons can now be categorised into three groups: Power, technique and balance. Power weapons have a higher base attack, attacks slowly and increase T attack damage as your Renbu rank increases. Technique weapons have a lower base attack, attacks quickly and increases attack speed as your Renbu rank increases. Balance weapons have medium base attack, attacks at a moderate pace and increases attack range as your Renbu rank increases. Each weapon may also come with elements or certain abilities, but it's really obvious that x element and abilities are the best.

Horses now level up as well and it's a nice addition to the game for me. As your horse levels up, it will gain elements, abilities and boosts to stats like speed and power. They're basically Koei's way of compensating for the loss of bodyguards, but it's not like you'll need bodyguards in Dynasty Warriors...

The difficulty can now be chosen whenever you choose a level, which is a rather user friendly function in my opinion. In terms of difficulty, Shura difficulty (Purple difficulty.) is pretty fun when you're using "good" characters like Zhao Yun. I've never really fiddled around with difficulties like Easy, so I can't really say how newbie friendly it is for sure.

There's a lot of extra functions when you actually hit the battlefield, but because of the actual battling being somewhat dumbed down, it leaves something to be desired.

Replayability: 3/10

Let's examine the uglier sides of the game now. Although it's hard to live up to the awesome standards set by Dynasty Warriors 3, I still think the game fails miserably in this area.

For starters, certain characters like Jiang Wei have been removed from the game. I don't see any logic behind this whatsoever. You might've expected they add in characters like Ma Dai to complement the addition of Pang De in Dynasty Warriors 5, but no, Koei decided to remove him instead. (Yes, Pang De was also removed.)

Then, you look at the Musou Mode (Story Mode, basically.) and see that less than half the of characters have one at all. Again, this makes absolutely no sense at all and it's a real shame that Koei's decided to do this.

Once you start Musou Mode, you notice a certain trend: Those with Musou Modes have unique movesets and those without one are clones. In fact, of those with Musou Modes, only Sun Shang Xiang is a clone (Yue Ying also shares the same moveset.) and of those without Musou Modes, Xiao Qiao's the lone character with a unique moveset. We haven't seen a single clone since Dynasty Warriors 2, so I'm really befuddled as to why Koei would do such a thing. It's really boring playing as Wei Yan, Xu Zhu, Huang Gai and Dong Zhuo when they do exactly the same thing with their weapons. This is a really poor decision on Koei's half.

While it is a minor loss in comparison the three problems above, I still find the removal of unique weapons rather saddening. Now, the "best" weapon can only be obtained through a matter of luck and patience. Horses are similarly farmed, though you can abuse the time trick to get the horse that you want, but I still am rather disappointed at this idea of farming weapons and horses.

And that's basically it. There's nothing else to do. Once you've unlocked all characters and reached level 50 with them, (Which, I assure you, is a lot faster than previous installments.) there's basically nothing left to do. You can fiddle around in Challenge Mode if you want, (I still haven't figured out how so many people get 3000+ KOs on Endurance...) but that can only last for so long. There's not even an opening edit function, which I found to be one of the most fun gimmicks Koei's ever included.

Extras: 3/5

If you got the Teasure Box edition, in addition to the game, you get the Dynasty Warriors 6 artbook, which includes a portrait (Surprise!) of each character. There's also maps of each level and each character's skill tree included in the book, but you don't really need those. You also get about forty key tags, (Lol.) each with a Dynasty Warriors 6 character on it. If you're a fanatic, go ahead and hang all five key tags of the Shu Tiger Generals with your keys. It'll be freaking heavy though, hehe.

Personally, I prefer the contents of previous Treasure Boxes more, but it doesn't really make a huge difference to the game, so this section didn't affect the overall score.

Overall: 7/10

It's understandable that Koei doesn't want to go all out when the PS3's been doing so badly in the market. However, even with this in mind, I think that Koei's made a poor effort in making this game. There's been some nice additions to the series and if Koei can distinguish the good from the bad, I'd dare say we can expect Dynasty Warriors 7 to be very impressive indeed. Until then however, if you're new to Dynasty Warriors, this game might be worth picking up. For old vets, however, I don't think you'll want to spend your money on this installment.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 01/12/09

Game Release: Shin Sangoku Musou 5 (Treasure Box) (JP, 11/11/07)