Note: This review is based upon the Japanese version of the game (Shin Sangoku Musou 7: Moushouden) and uses translated names. English names of certain things may be different in the English release.
INTRODUCTION
Dynasty Warriors marks its 8th iteration almost one year ago and certainly, it's no astonishment that this upcoming year marks another Xtreme Legends expansion for the game.
The Xtreme Legends series have always been considered the true expansions to the original games, whereas the Empires series are deemed more as spin-offs. Therefore, if you have arrived expecting more of the same, then there's not a whole lick that's going to disappoint.
Please remember my fellow readers—this is a review for Dynasty Warriors 8: Xtreme Legends and its new contents and gameplay differences alone, not factoring in the original. Like my Musou Orochi 2 Ultimate review, since I'm essentially reviewing an expansion pack, I will have the predetermined mind set that you have already played or at least know details about the original game, plus Dynasty Warriors in general. If I were to go all out to please even the newbies, this review wouldn't be called xtremely long version, it would be called xtremely unreadable version due to its length.
With that boring guff out of the way, let's get into the good stuff then!
GAME MODES
Customary to any Xtreme Legends, new game modes and features to existing ones are obligatory. It's also no surprise that KOEI TECMO went again with their safe, perpetual formula to include more story mode content, a challenge mode and a few features to ambition and free mode. So how good are they, exactly?
STORY MODE has been expanded upon from the original, including a brand new story of the Lü Kingdom (Lü Bu's forces) and supplementary hypothetical scenarios for Wei, Shu, Wu and Jin. Lü Bu's story mode follows the vein of the original four kingdom story modes, featuring full length historical and hypothetical paths. Wei, Shu, Wu and Jin on the other hand receives short, segmented stories that are usually one to two stages long, encompassing various playable characters.
I'm sure many fans were storming KOEI TECMO's headquarters in hopes that their favorite character finally gets sufficient share time and love in one of the games. I mean, this is Lü Bu we're talking about after all—the only character in Dynasty Warriors to have a diminutive chance in winning a video game character popularity poll. Fear not fellow Lü Bu fans, as Lü Bu is indeed the protagonist here in his dominant story mode, and it follows him all the way soundly, grunt to grunt, until his untimely end. That is, unless you choose to cheat history and potentially destroy China, of course.
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| Yes, this is a real screenshot. Lü Bu actually has his own, full length story mode! |
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| The most touching part of Lü Bu's story mode. When you see it, you'll know why. |
Overall, if you're expecting more story mode content, you'll be getting quite a good amount of it here that will last you anywhere from five to ten hours. Then again, this is something we were already expecting in a Xtreme Legends, so I can't be exactly too glee about it.
CHALLENGE MODE is a new, recurring mode added in many past Xtreme Legends games that pits and hones your gaming skills to a variety of objective based challenges, focusing on obtaining the highest score both offline and online. Five total challenges await you in this mode. Prior to entering into a challenge, you are allowed complete freedom to select any characters and customize their weapons to your heart's content. To ensure overall equality and balance, character levels are capped at level 30, and skills cannot be equipped.
What will you find in these five challenges?
Storm transports you inside a small, enclosed arena with thousands of enemies, tasking you as the player to rack up as many K.Os as possible in a given time limit. When a certain amount of time and army fodder are annihilated, the beast known as Lü Bu emerges, hoping to both put a halt to your insane killing spree and dwindling down your inner morale. Get used to him appearing abruptly by the way; he's going to be there in most challenges to put your efforts to ruins. After he's taken care of, more army fodder pops up. The process is then repeated until the timer runs out.
Comet puts you on top of a series of connected narrow platforms with peon swarms, ballistas and occasionally enemy officers. Enemies are invulnerable to damage, so your goal here isn't to rack up direct kills, but K.Os that involves shoving them off the platforms. Yes, enemies will meet their demise apparently when they fall into the abyss below. Not only can you die due to regular damage, but falling off yourself results in the same fate. Comet isn't so much skill and luck based, but more about weapon and moveset choice that works best to shove enemies off.
Thunderclap is like running the Chinese Olympics solo in hell. There is one long, twisting path chocked full of the absolute worst possible living and non-living things you can face in the game—tigers, ballistas, flame throwers, sorcerers, horsemen, tanks, spiked walls, giant wind blowing fans, the list goes on. Even Lü Bu starts chasing you like an insane psychopath from Clock Tower. The goal here is as you guessed, to get to the end of the path in one piece in the fastest time possible. Regrettably, this challenge is about as annoying to play as it is to enjoy, as you're likely going to get constantly knocked around by all the junk on the screen.
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| Leave me the #*@$ alone! |
Inferno is like storm mixed with thunderclap. You are inside this weird maze littered with enemies, strange obstacles you have to destroy to open up paths, and platforms you have to jump over. The objective here is to eliminate all enemies in the map before the timer runs out, ingenious eh? Be prepared to be very annoyed if you missed even a sole peon, as if you did, you'll be likely having to backtrack across the empty map devoid of enemies to get to that pesky little rodent.
It's nice to know that in this iteration of Xtreme Legends, playing and winning challenges aren't all about showing off coupled with smack talk. Successfully completing each challenge will award you with a random weapon prize, regardless of how well you did in the challenge. A new weapon element is also incorporated for each challenge, resulting in five new weapon elements total that are exclusively obtainable in this mode.
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| Winning 6th place yet receiving a level four weapon. Looks like I other things to brag about! |
AMBITION MODE receives a new game feature/mode in itself called "Territory Suppression", additional to the primary one where you are charged with construction of the Tongquetai Palace. This one takes place after all that home improvement jazz, and this time it's actually serious, because these Chinese men and women now directs your action to unite Han China as something troubling is brewing.
So here's the synopsis in territory suppression: You are to recruit officers, build your relations with them and conquer five territories of Han China through repeated battles, then finally defeat the emperor (who is a naughty, fake one) in the final sixth territory. The unification occurs when all regions have been conquered, obviously. But there's an enormous catch though—friendly officers defeated by the enemy during battles will depart your forces and return to the other side, as somehow seemingly provoked by the fake emperor.
The first thing right off the bat that will likely induce angst and rage is the actual starting process of territory suppression. You can only initiate by talking to an individual in ambition mode after your task of construction of the Tongquetai Palace in is complete. But once so, close your eyes and take a deep breath, as all your current recruited officers (aside from a few characters that are in close relationship to your controlled character) will vanish back to enemy forces. To make matters more insulting, the effect is universal in ambition mode and hence applied to even the original survival battles. You would have at least thought KOEI TECMO showed some decency and courtesy, respected your immense time in obtaining all your officers and simply allowed the game to continue on the way you left it, but nah... they mocked your efforts and forced you to unlock every playable character for this mode over again. *Claps* Bravo!
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| There's no going back after talking to this special guy. |
The actual gameplay portion of territory suppression resembles sort of a bastardized and miniaturization of Empires, and an extreme one at that.
You start off with being able to select one territory and one battlefield within. To wholly conquer a territory requires you to conquer 100% of each of its four battlefields. How so? The percentage increases after a successful battle in each battlefield. Subsequent battlefields are then unlocked when the percentage of the prior battlefield are raised high enough, and raising percentage of battlefields will raise the overall percentage of the specific territory. Additional territories are unlocked when the overall percentages are high enough. Don't worry if all that percentage talk above is the cause to your sudden headache—the concept is pretty much straightforward and simple, I promise! The most important thing you should need to know is: expect to play through the same battlefields a heck lot of times!
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| That's a whole lot of percentages! |
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| Constructing your own forces of officers. |
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| Flags, enemy bases and officers are the meat of territory suppression. |
Alright, with details of territory suppression aside, let's talk about two of its primary flaws.
First, there's nothing terribly enticing or innovative about the entirety of the gameplay. Like I stated earlier, it feels like a kindergarten version of Empires—conquering territories, recruiting and losing officers, formation of your own forces, taking over bases, etc. all without the fundamental strategic components that makes Empires special and fun. I was also borderline bored going through the same battlefields multiple times to raise the percentage enough to unlock additional battlefields and territories. A little more variety and choice would be a welcomed addition.
Second, the whole aspect of friendly officers returning back to enemy forces after being defeated makes the experience unnecessarily frustrating. This is especially valid as the only way to play playable characters is through recruiting them to your forces. While your controlled character can never be seized away, the opportunity to utilize and better develop other playable characters (notably through ambition mode exclusive facilities) becomes restricted once they've been captured. Playing thoughtfully and well will prevent your officers from getting defeated, but you aren't always going to be able to keep them all safe every time. Attempting to re-recruit lost ones over and over again becomes an inconvenient and senseless task, heightened by the fact officers are seemingly randomly placed on battlefields. The only way to truly avoid losing playable characters is to keep them out of your forces entirely, i.e. only bringing generics to the battlefield. But that's not any fun, now is it?
Territory suppression is marginally fun and a nice change of pace from regular ambition mode survival battles, but it's certainly not going to get anyone steamy over its inclusion.
Ambition mode also introduces a new weapon tempering feature for the blacksmith. This one's entirely separate from the original and thankfully works identical to Warriors Orochi, allowing you to swap in elements, increase attack power and change affinity from two weapons with ease. Good luck being able to use this feature often though, as it requires much grinding for gems in territory suppression.
FREE MODE in Xtreme Legends has also been revamped with a new interface and enhanced with supplementary features. You now get a lot of options and features right at your fingertips in the menus, including entire access to the blacksmith, equipping bodyguards and more. All other existing options have been completely streamlined, making free mode now incredibly easy to jump in and get going.
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| The newly revamped free mode interface. Sure beats the old one! |
Finally, the game incorporates a ranking system that ranks your gameplay efforts with a alphabetical grading scale after each stage. Earning higher ranks, as you might have guessed, rewards you with higher experience points. Now I'm uncertain how the ranking system works and could care less, but if you play like a madman like I do, you'll be gifted with an S or A rank in no time!
GAME OPTIONS has been sprinkled here and there with some new options. The most remarkable being the ability to set storm rush to activate manually using the square and triangle buttons simultaneously. Remembered how I complained about the automatic activation of storm rush and wished for manual activation in my Dynasty Warriors 8 review? Perhaps KOEI TECMO does listen to their fans after all. Kudos, kudos!
You'll also discover MixJoy in any Xtreme Legends, allowing you to "remix" the game by inserting your original Dynasty Warriors 8 game disc to "load its contents", then reinserting back your Xtreme Legends game disc. This allows the game to be unlocked with all the original content in addition to the new content. Of course, everybody and their grandmas should know that nothing is really being loaded when you insert either game disc. All that happens is a system check is made to verify if the discs are valid and are of the correct games. Every single spec of data of the original game is already in the Xtreme Legends disc. Hence, this is just a pure folly way for KOEI TECMO to force you to own the original game alongside Xtreme Legends.
Xtreme Legends does have other version variants, including a PS4 version that has contents of both games included. Again, the Xtreme Legends with Dynasty Warriors 8 and Xtreme Legends solo are likely the same damn thing, just with some changes to the code that allows the player to have all content non-hidden from the start.
GAMEPLAY AND CHARACTERS
It isn't Xtreme Legends without a couple new faces to the existing mammoth cast of characters. This time, the spotlight gets shined on notable officers of Lü Bu's forces, including his wicked strategist Chen Gong and his own daughter Lü Lingqi (who's own name KOEI TECMO has fancied up). Contrary to what Chinese historians say, where Lü Lingqi was essentially a poor soul that was pushed around by her father for forced marriage, she's certainly no pushover here. In fact, she's just as bit as tough and diabolic as her father, even going as far as completely stealing his cross halberds (remember those?) and using it to show amazingly utter badassery.
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| Who said a woman has to be weak?! |
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| "Would you like a ride on my magic carpet?" |
One of the minor issues with new characters are the designs themselves. Now, I typically adore KOEI TECMO's character designs, but some of these poor souls just screamed a style that's both lazy and generic. Both Chen Gong and Yu Jin looked more like generics than actual playable characters, only colored and facially detailed in a way that remotely makes them unique.
New characters aside, Xtreme Legends adds and changes a significant amount to the gameplay. So let's spent some quality time with each of the new and different.
Accompanying the original EX attacks of each character and their primary weapon, a second EX is added to every standard character and weapon combo. This new implementation almost makes equipping and using non-primary weapons personally degrading, as there's a huge increase in the amount of strength and diversity in primary weapons now. While not all second EX are equal in performance and aesthetics, it's nice to know that KOEI TECMO is indirectly encouraging the usage of primary weapons (at least for one of the two weapons). I don't know about you, but I'm tired of being disgusted by seeing players running around as Da Qiao with Twin Axes or some other variant, which often just looks awfully wrong.
Character stats and levels have been raised from their previous maximum limits. Character levels are now capped at 150 and stats for attack and defense are increased to 1,500. Although this overall raise is mandatory for the intention of the new Nightmare difficulty, it just simply means a whole hell lot more grinding for your finger and thumb thwacking pleasure if you wish to get there.
A new, harder difficulty has been added called "Nightmare". If I were to describe this difficulty, I would label it Dynasty Warriors 7: Xtreme Legend's nightmare difficulty minus both the extreme enemy aggressiveness and player life absorption ability. Enemy officers in particular have the ability to boost their attack plus defense, and their damage output is crazy high even if you have max defense. I congratulate KOEI TECMO for finally delivering a difficulty that actually feels challenging and worthy of its name, unlike the tired and failed nightmare and chaos difficulties of the past. Nevertheless, it's still another Warriors Orochi type of high difficulty, where the challenge lies in both the player and enemy capable of tremendous damage output. Some of this is actually due to the game failing to fix blatant broken aspects in the original like they did with the 7th version of Xtreme Legends. The enemy AI is still a soft spot, unfortunately. We'll talk more about the AI in the AI and difficulty section.
Personal bodyguards makes a welcome return, allowing you to tag along three bodyguards and boss them around in the havoc. Unlike bodyguard systems of the past, where your selection was limited to pretty much a bunch of faceless and boring nobodys, the new one in Xtreme Legends allows freedom to select all three as any character in the game, non-generics included. Being able to fully utilize the bodyguard system (such as equipping more than one bodyguard and equipping non-generic characters as bodyguards), requires you to build up your leadership level in ambition mode under territory suppression. Bodyguards' actions can be controlled on the battlefield by either manually selecting the actions in the pause menu or use shortcuts via the directional pad on the controller. The actions range from following you closely to defending a specific base. Leveling bodyguards can also be achieved by simply having them continuously fight alongside you, or exchange existing recruited officers in ambition mode for an exchange in their increased experience. Overall, this is a good addition.
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| My very own team of bodyguards... Aww... |
Speaking of weapons, Xtreme Legends adds a hefty ten new weapon elements that can attached to your weapons. Five of the new elements are exclusive to the challenge mode mentioned earlier, and the rest of the five are exclusive to ambition mode under territory suppression (where the emperor grants you a gold weapon with a new element each time you thoroughly conquered a territory). The bulk of the new weapon elements are not terribly beneficial to your arsenal; however, thunderclap is one element which should have been in the game in the beginning. It essentially gifts you the ability to avoid getting staggered by enemies, similarly to how the combat resistance weapon seal worked in Dynasty Warriors 7.
While most weapon elements and their effects are untouched in Xtreme Legends, several do get whacked with the change stick. Most of the changes are incredibly minor and therefore negligible, but one in particular really switches things up in the gameplay—Cyclone. Cyclone has a bit of controversy in the original, as it was a weapon element that hugely broke the difficulty balance of the game (going as crazy as to kill Hu Lao Gate's Lü Bu under chaos in one hit). It's standard tradition that with any new Dynasty Warriors game, KOEI TECMO squeezes in something that purposely or accidentally breaks the game, then swiftly patches it up in the expansions. In Dynasty Warriors 7, it was wind element coupled with multi-elemental hits, which was mostly patched in Xtreme Legends to reduce the insane damage. Did KOEI TECMO execute the same plan for cyclone in this Xtreme Legends? Not quite...
In fact, they completely transformed cyclone into something else that works similarly to the Blast Orb of Dynasty Warriors 4. Cyclone now only activates and deals its percentage damage on blocking enemies. In addition, it can no longer break an enemy's guard, period. Call me crazy, but I think it's utterly confusing to abruptly change an element's effects to behave drastically different. Cyclone equates to wind, and wind should remain in its current form in the recent games—an element that breaks an enemy's guard (along with dealing additional damage). KOEI TECMO furthermore didn't bother reducing the percentage damage on cyclone, so what's the point? The game is still broken because of it, as you can still run rampant on nightmare throwing cyclone knives at blocking enemies and instant killing them in one hit. If anything, it chiefly reduces the amount of freedom and style in combat when utilizing it, as you're obviously going to want to use it on blocking enemies only. How boring...
GRAPHICS
If you were judging this game based upon graphics alone, then it'll be sucky. But that's ignorant. You have to take in consideration how taxing it is for console hardware to implement and render a game such as Dynasty Warriors, where players are predominately placed on giant, free roaming battlefields with hundreds of enemies at once. For this type of game, the graphics are more than beyond good, especially considering how much the graphics from the series has evolved throughout the years.
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| This is about the only time you'll be drooling at the in-game graphics. |
AI AND DIFFICULTY
The AI, particularly the enemy's, has been vastly improved from the original. In fact, the AI and combat mechanics have been so greatly adjusted, it's pretty much no longer a BSing game—you either play to win or not play at all. In other words, forget messing around like the original and attempt to pull off crazy, stylish combos for fun. That's just going to wind up as a personal embarrassment here.
Why so?
Lots of small tweaks have been developed to put a stronger halt to player's ability to juggle enemy officers than before. One of the major ones involves massively ramping up their ability to switch affinity both on ground and in the air, regardless if they are under attack. If you recalled in the original, enemy officers rarely ever bothered to switch affinity, even though the feature was clearly available. Heck, I even yelled out it happened only twice during one hundred hours of play. So the supposed outcome was to stop juggles by having the enemy officer switch to a different affinity (usually superior to yours) during the juggle, rendering them then futile. This of course will also increase difficulty, as you're gonna be seeing that warning sign more often than anything else now. There's somewhat of a problem though, dear KOEI TECMO... Why does the affinity switching take them so bloody long to execute? By the time you realized they are attempting to switch affinity, you can easily knock them out of it completely with a simple weapon switch (they can't be staggered by most other attacks while affinity switching), rendering them inane. Yes, it does greatly kill combos via juggling, but for increasing difficulty alone it's poorly implemented.
Storm rush is now seemingly much more difficulty to activate, as destroying an enemy officer's affinity shield requires twice or three times the normal effort. This is more notable on higher difficulties than lower, as in the lower difficulties storm rush comes out just as fast as usual. I have no complaints about this change, as this is something welcomed to help fix storm rush being vastly overpowered in the original.
The incorporation of nightmare difficulty gives a strong boost to better difficulty varieties—ranging from being so easy you could play with your toes and win, to being actually sweaty and anxious trying to stay alive. Nevertheless, nightmare can still be a complete pushover if you're utilizing good weapons, have high to max stats and learn to avoid taking damage. The sheer, continued brokenness of cyclone doesn't help matters, either.
AUDIO AND MUSIC
For the most part, audio and music remains stable in its high quality form. The new music introduced are quite unremarkable and immediately forgettable, which is a repeated act of shame as the majority of music from the original game suffered the same mediocrity. Then again, all ears are not created equal, so I'm sure a few people may actually dig the new music.
For individuals that wants some more of that nostalgia factor, KOEI TECMO does tack in a lot more music derived from earlier Dynasty Warriors games. From within you'll now find classics such as "In Full Bloom" and "Ultimate Pressure".
Voice acting are great and clearly continue to be unmarred. The Japanese here surely have raised the bar high and no one else is going to touch them in this department. Even unwarranted death does not shake them up one bit, as the new voice of Sima Yi is just as lunatic and awesome as the former.
REPLAYABILITY
Short answer: You'll be playing this game more than once, even if you finished the game multiple times. That's because there's still additional paths (such as hypothetical paths) to embark on in story mode, a never ending ambition mode and challenge mode. Let's not forget the over 80 plus individually unique characters that you can play as and develop alongside hundreds of weapons to collect.
By no means can this game or any Dynasty Warriors become an addiction like an MMO, it just means you're never going to run out of things to do.
CONCLUSION
I believe it has arrived to an unsettling point where the Xtreme Legends games no longer feel special and wholly worthwhile to play. KOEI TECMO has proven their desires in continuing to go down the same old road of stagnant, tired and industry safe game formulation. Dynasty Warriors 8: Xtreme Legends shamefully contains nothing exciting or creative, shoving back in content that's been rehashed from their earlier games of the same category.
The combat has additionally devolved a further notch, offering much less possible variety, style and fun factor in exchange for increased challenge and difficulty that could be worked in other, better ways.
The saving grace of it all merely lies in its expanded story mode, where much of the actual effort and talent of the game developers lies. If you enjoyed playing through story mode whilst learning about Chinese history at the same time in the original, then that same amount of joy can be found in a sparing amount here.
It's also good to note that Xtreme Legends does greatly enhance certain experiences that are missing from the original, such as more streamlined menus, additional features such as bodyguards, easier weapon tempering and secondary EX attacks.
Still, the combat and lack of originality dilutes the pros of the what's offered. In the end, the game become something of a mixed bag that can be described as mediocrity.
OVERALL RATING: 6.0/10
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| Wipe that stupid smirk off your face. |
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