Post # 3 – Generic Criticism

Just last week, Dynasty Warriors 9 was released here in the west. This is a video game that is not-so-popular outside of Eastern world and only boasts of a small following over here in the west. The main objective is to fight through the major battles of Ancient China with the more prominent officers and warlords of the time. The Dynasty Warriors series is based loosely on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, with some creative artistic license to represent the events and characters.

Essentially, the genre is hack-and-slash video games, and I have decided to criticize Dynasty Warriors 9 through generic participation – which determines whether or not it fits into this genre based on other artifacts that belong to this genre.

Similar to its predecessors, this 9th installment of the hack-and-slash game still hosts the typical characters and the 5 forces of Wu, Shu, Wei, Jin, and Others.

But, unlike the others that came before it, this is primarily where any of the similarities stop.

This installment of Dynasty Warriors has the game set in an ‘open world’, whereas previous games had a fixed map with mountains, rivers, gorges, and/or castles restricting access to certain areas.
Also, DW9 has only one map which shows all of China, rather than having a new map for each stage/battle the player progressed to.

There are actually no more individual battles; the player goes around the map and fight when they want instead of HAVING to engage in battle like prior games.

Also, in previous games, most of the characters had their own personal weapons without any other character sharing it, along with distinct personalities and a change of outfits without bribe to pay for them. As of right now, a good handful of characters have cloned weapons in DW9 and not many outfits come free – you will have to pay for the DLCs.

This game is drastically different from its predecessors – even taking into account the changes the series has made throughout time in each installment. The changes made detracts so far from the other games that it no longer truly fit into the typical Musou hack-and-slash genre.

Here are some of the organizing principles for this analysis:

  1. Gameplay
  2. Mapping (Open world vs Linear)
  3. Characterization

~ by Abigail Haskins on February 22, 2018.

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