I've been having some fun with character creation in Dynasty Warriors 8: Empires lately, so much that I've neglected playing the actual game.
Although I have to say that I was rather disappointed that the actual playable character editing portion remained identical to the 7th Empires. All those cool new features from Samurai Warriors 4's character creation, specifically uploading custom photos for your character's portrait and design on your clothing were missing. Rather, custom photos is only exclusively available for flag customization, which is a shame. Also, there weren't even any new hairstyles besides like two, not including certain head pieces that force their own hairstyle upon you.
I do like some of the new costumes. These are some designs I came up with using them:
Regarding the game itself, it has been mostly positive, although I do miss certain things from Dynasty Warriors 7: Empires, including the aesthetic flair when your character executes stratagems and the many more unlockable events.
I liked that they dealt away with the displeasing fame leveling system, which causes your character's stats to be determined by your fame's fluctuating levels. Now it's back to plain old fixed character levels, which makes the leveling process significantly less annoying. Please KOEI, don't you dare ever go back to that fame leveling system again, ya hear?!
Being able to build facilities in your provinces to increase gold, troops and develop more advanced weapons, items and stratagems is a nice touch that helps strengthens the strategic element of the game. No longer can you just gather a mountain of gold, run into the shops and buy the best of everything.
The marriage system allows you and your spouse to have a child that can later partake in battle. It's an interesting feature, but you're going to unfortunately generate a lot of child monstrosities, even if you and your spouse are the most beautiful beings in the universe. Not just the face will be bad, but the clothing too. The last child I had, his clothes were all different colors and none of it matched. He also had a frightening man's body yet a face of a boy. You are damn right I was ashamed of releasing him from the womb.
The one feature I definitely appreciated the most in the game is free mode. It's like a God sent gift for me in an Empires game, because it allows me to play around with movesets and study them for efficiency without going through the lengthily scenarios. Speaking of movesets, out of all the new movesets introduced, I'm liking Wang Yi's the most. That weapon and moveset, aside from a few lousy charges, is AMAZING.
Of course, the biggest downside to this iteration of Empires is the total lack of New Game+, excluding what you can carry over in free mode. Hopefully, KOEI learns of this horrific mistake and adds at least weapon transfer in a future patch.
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