Wow. Okay, this should have been up a long time ago, as the game's been out for a
while now, but...I've been too busy playing it to actually review it. :-) Actual screenshots for this one, since the PS3 actually has that capability!
Dynasty Warriors 7: Empires is the latest in the
Empires spinoffs of the
Dynasty Warriors series. Where the main series focuses on objective-based hack-and-slash action gameplay, setting up story-based missions where you have to properly prioritize your objectives and fight fast enough to save as many officers as you can or ensure the various tasks succeed, the
Empires spinoffs tend to focus more on overall kingdom strategy, empire-building, and custom battlefield strategy against an opponent who mixes things up a bit. Playing one still feels like playing the main series, but with notable differences in the form of more variable battles that have some more things to adapt to, but less of a feeling of engineered competing deadlines. I'm a fan of both variants, but the
Empires spinoffs have one more notable difference from the main series: a character creation mode.
DW7:E is similar to other games in the
Dynasty Warriors: Empires series. You're still beating the absolute heck out of thousands of enemy soldiers. You're still taking bases on the way to taking the enemy main camp. You're still building up your kingdom outside of combat and getting the upgrades you need to stay competitive. Not much has changed in the overall concept...what has changed, though, is the
way you do just about everything.
DW7:E is much,
much deeper than its predecessors.
So, first, a primer, for those who might not be familiar with this series.
Dynasty Warriors is an action game series in which you play a single officer on the battlefields of ancient China. Your abilities are tremendously over-the-top and you face off against thousands of enemy soldiers. In general, only the other officers pose a one-on-one threat, though as the difficulty gets higher the minor enemies can chip away at you pretty effectively if you aren't careful. Combat is fairly simple, but you do end up with enough moves to feel like you have some choices and use some variety. There are tons of characters to choose from, each of which will use one of several different weapons. They all control similarly, but there are important differences in effectiveness of various moves, so you'll find ones you like and ones you dislike. The missions, meanwhile, are set up so that various objectives pop up on the map--such as officers in trouble, a fire attack to aid, or a fleeing enemy to track down--and oftentimes pop up at the same time on two opposite ends, so you need to get good at prioritizing and fighting quickly. Overall, it's a fun action series that some find easier to play in small doses...while others, like me, find it really easy to just kind of slip into the DW zone and find that it's suddenly midnight. Your mileage may vary.
The
Empires spinoffs add kingdom building to the mix, and dumps the preset objectives for missions in favor of an enemy that actually uses abilities in more freeform manner to some degree. The combat tends to be a little less interesting just because the missions lack that inherent drama that the main series is set up for, but at the same time, the battles tend to have more variety since you don't know how one will go once you've played it a few times. The added depth of kingdom play certainly helps the game's longevity, as well.
So, how about
DW7:E? Well, take all the good things I said about
Dynasty Warriors above. Now take all the good things I said about the
Empires spinoffs above. Now those things that I said that might be taken as bad things? Dump those.
Dynasty Warriors 7: Empires is the most perfect
Dynasty Warriors game ever. It exemplifies everything that makes the series awesome, and tosses pretty much everything that doesn't work. Now, it's still a
Dynasty Warriors game, so if you aren't inclined to like those you probably won't change your mind with this...but if you do like the series, this one is absolutely incredible.
Why? Basically, it very effectively manages to merge the feeling of the main series with the open and freeform play of the
Empires spinoffs. This is one heck of an accomplishment, and it is accomplished mostly through two major adjustments: Strategems, and Useful Allies.
Let's talk Strategems first, because these are awesome. Strategems are the latest twist to the
Empires spinoffs. Characters gain the ability to use various strategems in battle: various boosts, special tactics or traps, ally summons, or other abilities that can really change the course of the battle. Each strategem can be used once by a given character in a battle, and each character gets to take 4-5 with them to each battle. They can do things like boost your abilities, trigger a flood or fire attack, drop a rockslide to cut off a path, summon a poisonous fog, drop enemies into a pit trap or lay an ambush, instantly revive an ally and put him near you, and a whole host of other cool tricks. You get these...so do your allies, and so do your enemies.
Where earlier
Empires games thus focused mostly on troop movements for strategy,
DW7:E focuses on both troop movements and the use of strategems. Your battle experience will wildly vary based on your own use of strategems and those of your allies and enemies. If you have a lot of "Orderly"-type officers, for instance, your side is going to be summoning a lot of elite troops and archer volleys to wear down the enemy. Meanwhile, if your enemy has a lot of "Wise"-type officers, you're probably going to run into some nasty ambushes or fire attacks, or find your supply routes cut off by a rockslide. There are several different Fame types in the game, and most battles will involve a mix of them on both sides (yourself included), so there's quite a variety of strategems that will be thrown around in every battle.
What this means is that the battles in the
Empires series finally sometimes manage to capture the sense of urgency that the battles from the main series always had. You will frequently find that one base is under attack from a terribly fast and strong Brave-type officer using the "Raid" strategy to beat everyone up, while across the field, several of your bases just got hit with an Inferno attack by a Wise-type officer. It doesn't always happen, of course, but when it does...you get the open, free-form
Empires gameplay but the tension that the main series tends to bring. It suddenly isn't just about making sure you can fight well personally and avoiding leaving obvious openings in your defenses...it's about, "Oh, heck! I'd better get over there right now, and by 'there' I mean two different places at the same time and did that guy just open up a pitfall on my troops at a third spot? Where do I go first? Which can my allies handle?"
Again...this isn't constant. If it was, it'd be annoying. But it happens often enough that you really get a much better feeling of tension from this than any other
Empires game. I cannot stress enough how much better this is than the previous game, especially. The previous game was plagued by low variance in battles and barely any importance to strategy...this raises the bar by an incredible degree.
One caveat: There
are cases in which your buddies or enemies will use tactics in a less-than-intelligent fashion. It isn't frequent, but I have had cases where my buddies accidentally locked me in a base for a bit (or out of a base when I could have saved it), or set up an ambush where it would never come into play...and I'm sure things like that happen on the enemy side too. When it happens, it can take you out of things a little, but it's rare for it to happen in any meaningful fashion in my experience.
The other major difference? For the first time in any non-scripted event in a
Dynasty Warriors game of any kind, you have
useful allies. They can't handle everything...but you can actually trust your allies to take care of a lot of things on their own, if directed or supported reasonably well. Heck, you can even let
them take the enemy main camp! That blew my
mind the first time it happened...especially since it happened
quickly. That never, ever happened in previous
Dynasty Warriors games--you had to do everything important yourself. Now...I'm not going to go so far as to say I think you could regularly just direct a battle and avoid actually fighting, but you will find your allies can manage quite a bit, especially if you're actually able to direct them via the strategy screen (as with the previous
Empires, you only have the ability to command battlefield movements if you're of certain ranks). Even if you can't, though, they're not utter pushovers like in previous games.
The kingdom experience has been drastically improved as well. There's now several different ways to proceed both as an officer and a ruler. You can build up your kingdom in different ways, focusing on building your economy, or your army size, or your weaponry level, or even focusing on diplomatic relations and getting other people to help you fight. Obviously in general you're going to want to mix them, but it's not hard to develop a focus on what you're most interested in. As before, you can play at the officer level and at the ruler level, and both are quite a bit deeper than before. As an officer, you'll get missions from the ruler to fulfill, and as you rank up in your empire you'll gain more and more responsibilities and even authority over a territory...or perhaps the entire army. You can even choose to rebel and take over from your ruler if you want. As a ruler, you have a lot of options each turn, but you also get to lay down a kingdom policy that affects the things your officers will sometimes decide to accomplish. Between all the different choices in how to build your kingdom, the kingdom policies and ruler choices, and the officer types you can choose to bring in, you'll honestly end up with a pretty varied experience on different playthroughs both in and out of combat. The little cinematics you sometimes get also help with this, emphasizing different events that occur as things go along, and while there aren't
many of these, they also add to the feeling that this kingdom is different than earlier ones.
The only major complaint about the overall game is that much like most other
Empires games, there
tends to be a point at which it is 100% obvious that you're going to win and the last few battles are just a formality. It would be nice to see an
Empires game that let you win by owning some
majority of China rather than
literally all of China, so that games didn't have to go down to the last battle when one kingdom owned all but
one territory. However, there have been improvements in this regard: now, when you take a territory that a kingdom's ruler is in, you take all adjacent connected territories as well as a special bonus, so it becomes easier to make rapid progress by targeting the right territories. Still, it can feel like a bit of a slog getting through the last battle or two when there's no way the enemy can turn things around. It'd be nice if the win condition didn't require you to own very last province. Actually, it'd be cool to see them take another approach and go for variable win conditions like
Civilization V (not the same ones, but that could be an inspiration). It'd be cool to be able to win by diplomacy or economy or benevolent reputation or some such, and that's just not an option here. Still, this handles the overall conquest better than any
Empires game before it, and that's a good thing.
So, let's talk about the actual
focus of this blog: character creation and customization. It's terrific.
Honestly, this game is right up there with
Dragon's Dogma for the level of appearance customization. It functions similarly: it uses a mix of part selection and morphing, starting at the easy--part selection--and allowing the morphing if you want to get into more customization. It doesn't have as many parts as
Dragon's Dogma does for some sections of the face or body, but it handles quite well and allows a wide variety of appearances. Furthermore, the menu system is clean and easy to understand, and you'll never find yourself at a loss to create a good character. The parts+morphing approach is quickly becoming my favorite appearance design style, and it works terrifically here.
With this easy system, you can design a wide variety of characters. They're always going to be human, but you can make kids, adults, hulking warriors, thin and wizened figures...you can really accomplish quite a variety of appearances, and it's
easy to do. If you have a good idea in mind, going from start to finish can take as little as 5 minutes or even less, even if you're doing a good amount of morphing. And since the game allows for 200 character slots, you've got plenty of space for your creations...or ones you download from other players (that's right, you can share them--you can even see them at random in your game if you've allowed that option).
On color selection, the view is a little less rosy. There's actually a variety of eye and hair colors, but they still aren't using color sliders, unfortunately, so you don't have quite the ability to go freeform that you might like. (You do, however, get to use heterochromia for the eyes, which always gets a cheer from me.) You do get a few unnatural eye and hair colors, which is nice. For skin tones, you only have pretty much natural ones--tans, whites, browns, reddish tones, etc. There's no unnatural options like greens or blues, so if you're looking to make actual fantasy orcs or aliens or something, you're going to have to be content with standard human colors. Really, it's odd that the
Empires series hasn't moved to using color sliders yet, especially since the
Samurai Warriors 3 character creation mode allowed them (and the
Samurai Warriors 3 character creation mode was in all other ways
barely even a character creation mode--so very few options!). It's really time for the series to allow a full palette! I do understand that a patch that Japan has received (not us as yet) has added more color options for hair, but that still leaves eyes, skin, and clothes with limited selection.
As far as clothes, speaking of that, you have quite a variety of outfits to select from. As before, you can choose different outfit parts for the head, chest/arms, hands, legs, and feet. You start with a pretty nice selection, and there are plenty more to unlock, plus even more in DLC. In a nice touch, every single outfit from the previous game is available for unlock in this one. With the ability to mix and match pieces, you actually have a huge selection of possible outfits--not as many as, say, your average wrestling game or
Soul Calibur V (either of which adds the ability to put on a variety of textures, which expands selection significantly), but still, an impressive selection. It helps that almost everything in there is worth using for some character or another, too! Unfortunately, color selection is very, very limited...you basically have one color for each of the main series' kingdoms (Wu: Red, Wei: Blue, Shu: Green, Jin: Light Blue, Dong Zhuo: Purple, Yellow Turbans: Yellow, I believe). Fortunately, you can mix and match colors for the parts as well, so you're not stuck with just one color for the outfit. You can still get some good variety, and it works fine...it would just, again, be nice to see them add the use of a full color palette (especially as, again, this
was an option in the otherwise unsatisfactory
Samurai Warriors 3 mode).
Frankly, if you mixed the appearance/body creation from this game with the clothing selection, coloration options, and texture options from
Soul Calibur V, and made sure heterochromia was an option, I think you'd have my favorite character creation system of all time. That would be amazing.
Once you've picked your appearance, you'll want to pick a voice, and this game does a pretty nice job with that. It's worth noting at this point that all the voice acting for the game is in Japanese. Your mileage may vary on whether that's good, bad, or neutral. For me, it's neutral. In any case, you have about ten or so voices to choose from per gender, and pitch modification is back and helps to get more mileage out of the voices. I understand Japan has also received DLC that adds alternate performances of each of the voice types, too, so hopefully that will come here to expand the selection a bit, but even if it doesn't, the selection is fairly good. Unfortunately, pitch modification only works so far, so some voices will always sound wrong for certain character designs--thus, you
may sometimes get stuck with quotes that don't suit the character personality you're going for because you had to go with the voice that sounded right, or vice-versa. Still, you get a decent variety. I still long for the day when we get to record our own--that'd be goofy, but fun.
So, that's appearance and general identity. Let's talk abilities. This is an area where
DW7:E shines, actually. You get to choose a few major things to set your character's abilities: primary weapon, EX attack (a more powerful common power attack that you trigger at a certain part in your combo chain--available list determined by your primary weapon), Musou attacks (super-attacks usable when you fill up your musou bar, which happens several times a battle--
not limited by your primary weapon, though animations will often show a particular weapon), statistic growth type, and starting fame type (which determines available strategems and some other effects). This is quite a bit more than you've ever gotten to set in previous
Empires games, and it allows you to create quite a varied character set. Variance of any one of these parts can differentiate characters to some degree, though the largest differences result from statistic growth types and fame types. An attack-focused character plays differently than a defense-focuses one, and a "Brave" fame type plays very differently than an "Affluent" one.
As one note--you choose a weapon
type (such as Sword, Greatsword, Axe, Greataxe, Bow, Rapier, etc.), not a specific weapon model within that type. Weapon models are determined by the specific weapons you buy in play. Honestly, I would have liked it better if you got to choose the appearance of your weapon too, and then just...upgraded it in play or something. It would be nice to have two guys with greatswords that didn't end up using the same one all the time. But that's a minor complaint.
Customization doesn't end there, though, as even during play you'll get to modify your fame based on your actions. What's cool is that you actually get to have multiple fame types as you go through the campaign, and thus while your primary fame type determines your particular fame-based bonuses and your effective character level, you get to use strategems from multiple types. Don't worry--it's generally very easy to pick the fame types you want. First of all, your initial fame type gets points in it from every battle you fight, so it's very hard to switch it unless you specifically mean to. Second, while each kingdom action is associated with a particular fame type and gets you points for it, it's generally really easy to build up the fames you
want by choosing supporters or using strategems related to those fames.
Furthermore, like the base version of
Dynasty Warriors 7, characters get to use two weapons and can switch between them, so you can further customize your character based on your secondary weapon choice. One character might have a primary sword and secondary bow, while another might have a primary sword and a secondary greataxe--leading to two very different fighting styles as you do weapon switches. (You can also--as I honestly often do--just pick the secondary for its elemental effect, for use with the elemental items you can buy).
Speaking of items...those are another area of at least some customization. You can purchase items as you go through the game that modify your character's attributes and add some special modifications (such as the ability to use two different elemental effects with one weapon). Now, if the game goes long enough you'll actually oftentimes end up with the entire list, but in shorter games you may not, and even in longer ones the
order in which you buy them can differentiate characters for a while. Regardless, they provide a handy way of bolstering the abilities you find most important, and add a little more variety to the game.
Finally, if you're playing as a ruler or one of the high-ranking officers who gets to actually decide who comes to the battles, you can really customize your playing style based on which officers you pick. Since Fame Type determines available strategies, you can look at the Fames of your kingdom's officers and decide who should come along based on what strategies you want to be more likely to appear. You don't have full control over this--you can't tell an officer to use Ambush here, or Elite Troops there--but you can make things more likely just by choosing the proper makeup.
There are other little options here and there as well...you can either have a horse or purchase a constant animal companion...you can select the appearance of your "war room" from various types...and you get to make little choices here and there from text-based "encounters" that happen from time to time that can give you fame points and sometimes other bonuses. All of it comes together to actually make for a notably customizable experience.
In another nice touch, though one of variable impact, once you've played through the game as a character, you can save the play history to that character. Then, on subsequent playthroughs, an AI version of that character will develop its fame along similar lines to how you did, and will tend to use the strategems you prioritized as that character. It's a nice touch and can help you make characters that behave in particular ways if you want to emphasize their personalities, helping your created characters feel more "real."
I really can't say enough good about this game.
Dynasty Warriors 7 Empires is the ultimate
Warriors-series game, providing an excellent mix of tension and variability and making for a fun experience in and out of battle. It
does still have the feel of the series--if you aren't into hack-and-slash games, no amount of kingdom-building and strategems will fix that. But if you've ever considered trying a
Dynasty Warriors game, or you like the series but really want an entry that you can play over and over and that has a lot of customization, this is the one for you. It nails just about everything, provides a great character creation mode (despite the lacking color choices), and lets you have a lot of fun with a ton of variety. Highly recommended.
