Warriors Orochi

As some of you may know, I like to talk about video games. As some of you may know I’m quite enamored with Koei’s Dynasty/Samurai Warriors franchise for the Playstation 2. As some of you may not know, Koei recently released a Warriors game that can only be described as pure liquid fanservice. What am I talking about? Warriors Orochi, the game that does the most improbable thing of crossing over Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors. Sure, the idea of exaggerated characterizations of legendary warriors of 3rd century China’s Three Kingdoms era and exaggerated characterizations of legendary warriors of 16th century Japan’s Warring States era meeting is under a very flimsy pretext, and it makes it hard to keep a coherent plot notwithstanding that and the 70-odd characters you can play, but in the end nobody cares because a crossover of these games is automatically awesome.

I think I’ve played enough so far to get a good handle on the game, so I’m gonna give my thoughts on its ups and downs. As usual, mind the quality of the screenshots, I like to take my own and my equipment is… well, outdated and lacking. And analog. Blech.

So what’s the story with this game. Well mythological Japanese demon guy Yamata no Orochi (or just Orochi in English) decided to come down and fuck up everyone’s shit. He pretty much fuses the time and place SW takes place in with the time and place DW takes place in so he could have some fun fighting all the coolest warriors ever. That’s about it really. The alliances between characters isn’t really fully explained (nor is the fact they can understand each other’s language, but let’s chalk that up to the willful suspension of disbelief) but it seems to be that all the characters, having found themselves in this jumbled mess, are just coping any way they can by forming alliances with whomever they meet (one thing that confused me at first in this game was that armies represented by the color yellow are people you can ally yourself with, rather than a second enemy army like in SW.)

The story mode is separated into Wu, Wei, Shu and Samurai Warriors. Which one you pick decides who you start out playing as and who you unlock as you go along. Pulling the strings throughout the stories is Da Jing, Orochi’s scantily clad demoness strategist. As you may or may not have heard, you actually play as three characters at once in this game, switching between them with the R2 and L2 buttons. When a character is cycled out they sit and recover their health and musou gauges until used again. This may sound like it makes the game easier.. but, it doesn’t. I got killed a few times just playing on Normal, desperately jamming the block and R2 button trying to save myself as a crowd of guys happily flayed me with swords and spears. When you first unlock a new character that you can switch in place of someone in your starting trio they’re unfortunately at level one, but it’s easy enough to be sneaky and let your more powerful guys beat up generals and then let the weaker one finish them off and collect the experience to catch up.

But the switching of characters is for even more useful things than just saving yourself when you’re low on life. Each character is categorized by either Power, Technique or Speed and they get different abilities depending on what they are utilizing the R1 button (a button that’s never been used for attacking before in these games. Except for maybe, well, arrows in DW.) Speed characters are my favorite, not only do some of them seem to have moves that don’t deplete their musou gauge, I just like fast characters. But yes, that’s another thing, the musou gauge is for more than just, well, musou attacks (which so far are actually a little boring.) In this game it’s used to fuel the Technique and Power characters’ special attacks. And once it’s gone… it’s gone. Musou doesn’t fill up as you get hit or as you fight in this game, you either have to find an item that refills it or let the character rest.

The first thing that hit me, however, when I first played Orochi was actually the menu graphics. Compared to past DW games and especially SW games they’re really kind of simple and ugly. It was partly the menu graphics that at first made me think the game had the feel of being just slapped together (and let’s be fair, they did just drop every character from DW and SW into the same old engine and some combined levels), but considering the above and the newly designed demon characters and demon soldiers, not to mention that there are polished FMVs as usual, that may not be entirely true.

Orochi definitely plays more like a DW game than an SW game, however, and I have to admit I prefer SW. But, I’ve not played a DW game in a long while so it does seem a little fresh now. All the items are DW items, the levels are mostly DW-type levels, and there are no missions or anything like that like there are in SW. This does make sense as there are many more DW games than SW games, but it still disappointed me a bit. There are at least some minor aspects from SW, like enemy soldiers fleeing in fright from you if you pull enough combos and what not, and units of various types of ninja, calvary, and all those other really annoying soldier types that tend to knock you down alot.

But the similarities don’t end there. I don’t know if it’s my imagination or not but this game seems a little lower res than SW. It could be just me. I’ve also had the volume low because frankly the English voice acting in Dynasty Warriors has always made my soul bleed. I was spoiled with DW3 as it had a Japanese track, but they stopped that. SW1 also had a Japanese track, but SW2 was English only, however this was alright as many of the voice actors were actually good. However, in Orochi all the SW character voices have been changed to new actors, some decent, some rather abysmal, this also disappointed me a bit as between Samurai Warriors 2 and SW2: Empires I had developed an affection for the voices. Not to mention the dialog is corny as ever, but… ah well. I’ve come to expect that. There are at least some amusing exchanges between characters, finally someone remarked that Nobunaga looks an awful lot like Cao Cao.

All and all if you like the franchise you’ll enjoy this. If you like history-based fantasy and the idea of tearing through entire armies on your own with melee weapons you’ll enjoy this. I admit these games aren’t for everyone, but to me they’re alot of fun and have high replay value. Despite my initial reluctance I of course can’t stop playing, cause I just can’t get enough of these games.

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