Dynasty Warriors 6 Review
Posted on March 4, 2008 - Filed Under Gaming, Review
The first review of a game I spent $60 on, enjoy!
Okay, this is a hard game for me to review. If it were the first in the series it would get an 8, however that isn’t the case. This is the 6th full version, not counting all the Xtreme legends and Empires versions that have been released. As a result it doesn’t hold up compared to the prior versions.
So that’s what I’ll start off with, looking at on its own, ignoring the other installments.
The bulk of Dynasty Warriors 6 is the Musou Mode…okay maybe not the bulk as only 17 of 41 available playable characters have a Musou Mode. Even with that, unless you make the effort, it’s going to be the main area of the game. During Musou mode you’ll play as a warrior from the Romance of the three kingdom story. The story in and of it self is fairly interesting. It revolves around the fall of the Han Dynasty and then what followed it. The story will differ slightly from person to person, though if you aren’t familiar with the story you may not notice that the person your playing should be dead by time the battle your doing took place. Personally I like the small changes that were made that made the story a little more enjoyable, and give them better endings.
The flow of Musou mode is fairly consistent from person to person. You select the hero you want to be, watch a cut scene, prepare for battle, fight, and watch a pair of cut scenes broken up with the option to save, prepare, fight, rinse and repeat. While playing you’ll pick up weapons and horses of which you’ll decide which ones to keep, and use when you prepare for a battle. The horse can level up to level 5 and gain various abilities in the process. Ranging from 2-4 skills and an element affinity.
Weapons on the other hand do not level, so what you have until a better drop occurs. Weapons come in three types, Standard, Strength, and Skill. Each one determines what effect you’ll get as your Renbu rank goes up (more on the renbu system later). Standard means a higher attack range so you’ll be able to hit more things in one try. Strength is fairly straightforward; you’ll get an attack boost as your rank increases. Skill increases attack speed, which can be pretty fun with the “infinite combo” system. For the most part they each are effective in their own right, and can either help with a weak point of a hero, or further strengthen what they do well. Weapons also like horses can have various abilities attached to them and an element. Which if you’re interested there are only 3 elements this time around, Fire, Lighting, and Ice. Again each works fairly well, lighting looks really neat and setting people on fire is always fun.
So after you’ve decided what weapon to use and which horse to bring, you start the actual battle. This is where you start to notice some of the changes from the previous versions. The most notable one is the Renbu System. The renbu system is the new way of doing combos, It does some neat things, and though I won’t say I prefer it to the old way, I certainly do like and feel both ways work well for the game. So what is this renbu system you ask?
It’s the new combat system that allows you to have ‘infinite combos’, pushing square creates an attack sequence that will repeat into it’s self with out any interruption. Which makes Crowd control fairly good even with low range chars. As a result of this they added the ability to roll out of the way to avoid being stuck in an endless chain, which of course means enemy officers, will do the same. The next aspect of it is how they changed charged attacks to work. Your triangle is still your charged attack and hits for a little more and perhaps more importantly, it breaks block. Charged attacks are much more noticeably tied to the Renbu system. As you chain together long combos your Renbu meter goes up, once it fills all the way up you get to the next renbu rank. With charged attacks this means you get more attacks before the attack chain ends and there is a brief pause before you can attack again.
Musou attacks are the same as always. Fill up your Musou attack and then hold O to unleash your attack. These tend to be very powerful attacks that are great for getting you out of sticky situations. When you’re low on health (or with the correct weapon) you will use “true musou” which increases damage and adds elemental damage to the attack.
Perhaps my favorite new addition is special attacks. Every now and then an enemy will drop a special power up. Once you have one of these you can use your char’s special attack. There are five attacks True Speed, Swift Attack, Fire, Boulders, and my personal favorite Volley. True Speed allows your char to run faster and inflict more damage with his running attacks, some chars have a skill they can get that makes the person ’split’ into multiple versions of him self all running around to inflict even more damage, and make it look quite cool. Swift Attack is your standard power boost, the lower your health the greater your power boost. Fire allows you to set off explosions around you, and when used in a base sets the base on fire. Boulders (it might be called rock slide I’m not 100% certain), will drop a series of boulders in an area around you. If you’re on a hill the boulders will proceed to roll down the hill and hit more people. Lastly, Volley, this will make it rain arrows around your char. With various upgrades you can add elemental arrows (very cool seeing lighting bolts with your arrows) or ballista shots with your normal arrows. All of these abilities will greatly help you in battle, and also allow you to get increased experience for killing things while using your special attack. A very nice addition.
So now you’ve slaughtered everything and are done with the battle. You’ll be award experience points based on missions objectives completed, kills, and time to complete. Those points will work towards leveling you up in a traditional RPG sense. Once you level up you’ll be taken to a skill tree which then allows you to pick various abilities to learn. Some will be simple + attributes, others will be to make your special better. This is another feature I do like, it’s something I enjoyed from Samurai Warriors and they have improved on the idea for DW6. My only gripe is that ultimately the path you take doesn’t matter as if you take the char to level 50(max level) you’ll have all the abilities. It would be nice if they forced you into making a decision between skills, you know like talents in WoW.
That is the basic of combat flow in the game. Beyond Musou mode there is also free play. Allowing you to do any mission with any character, this will be how the chars that aren’t lucky enough to have their own musou mode will be getting played. It plays the same as Musou mode, just without the storyline cut scenes in between battles. Meaning you’ll need to take a trip to the Encyclopedia (in the game not a real one) to read about the heroes and find out their story.
The final mode of play is Challenge mode. In here there are various challenges you undertake such as how many enemies you can kill in 10 minutes, how long you can survive, how fast you can do things. Normally these are things I skip, but this year they added my favorite thing in video games. Online Leader boards! So you can see how you stack up against others, it will even allow you to see how you do on a per char basis, so if your not using SSX you still can compete with scores set by people playing the same char as you.
All in all this adds up to a fairly enjoyable game, yes it’s a little repetitive, but it remains fun. After the Musou modes though it does drop. This is why as a DW vet, the game doesn’t hold up as well. Traditionally in DW there are three things you can keep doing after you beat a person’s storyline. Max out their level, Get their max weapon, or farm for high level items. This version of DW takes out 2 of those 3 things. There is no “max weapon” in this game; simply random weapons may turn up better then others. Then there are no items at all, items have been replaced with horse/sword abilities and the skill tree. Which means you can’t start a new char on hard mode and make it a little more interesting unless you want to be 2 shotted by a peon. However, if you hadn’t played other DW you wouldn’t know that, and the game would still result in being fun, there just isn’t the incentive to keep playing outside of the desire to max out everyone.
So there you have the review, on to the numbers!
Graphics: 8/10 it’s not going to take your breath away like some other ps3 games. However it is still a very pretty game, the water effects are quite nice and the char models are fairly detailed. The environments are looking great, but it doesn’t hold up to other games like a Heavenly Sword for example.
Sound: 6/10 for the first few hours it’s pretty good. It’s got a nice blend of Rock and traditional Chinese sound as is DW tradition. However there just isn’t enough variety and sooner then later your going to turn on an alternate source of music. Each officer only has one saying for when they kill an officer and one saying for when they take over a base. The voice acting is a little better in this version as they are pronouncing the names more accurately, but it’s again nothing special. It’s a little to over serious, but never bad enough to make you laugh at it.
Game play 8/10 this is a series you love, or you don’t pretty much. If look at is just pushing square and triangle, you won’t like it. If you look at it as doing this attack and this attack, you will. The variety between the chars makes it fairly enjoyable, though there are a few cloned move sets that makes me upset. Without the items and max weapons, it’s missing out on some of the addicting nature of the game.
Mike Factor 6/10 as I said at the start, as someone who has played the previous versions it’s just not as addicting. Thing I expected to be in the game aren’t there. No musou mode for Ma Chao or Zhou Tai makes me a sad panda; these are two of my favorite chars from the previous games. They also removed the naman campaign which in turn shortens the musou mode of those lucky enough to have one. Then lastly it’s a shame they took out both weapons and items. Unlocking rare items and the max weapon were always fun things to do, and goals to set to work towards. The goal of maxing for the sake of maxing just isn’t fun to me. That said, this game has still held my attention since it launched, and only will no longer be doing so because the Show 08 comes out today.
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5 Responses to “Dynasty Warriors 6 Review”
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I reviewed this review and give it a 8/10
I would like to make a suggestion though. Reading the article on such a narrow theme was a bit difficult for me… Maybe its just me. But, If you found a theme that was around 1000 wide instead I think it would look much better. And then you would have room for screenshots and other pics!
More width and pics please!
There new theme…ne1 want to make me a header image thats neat and cool :p…i’ll look into taking some screenshots…but the best I could do is Camera Phone pictures until I buy my own compy and get an hdmi vid card…I might still peek around some more themes to see if something else comes up.
*edit*
bah u suck jason…and now i’ve been up flipping through themes all night :p
I think i’ll stick with this one, but will look for a new background and maybe make a few other changes >_>
Now I think it’s too wide. Heh. I lose which line I’m on when I get to the end.
shrinking is easier then growing >< well actually with this theme it’s about the same the other one had to many things to keep track of -.-
i’ll fiddle with css tonight, or maybe just increase the font a bit
Just come and let … Classroom art - thanks!