In an unforeseeable twist, Dynasty Warriors 7 actually make[sic] some big changes from it’s[sic] predecessors. And they’re all for the worse. WTF Koei?
That’s what I tweeted on August 17, 2011. Cut to today, the sixth of September of the same year, whereupon I’ve logged over 30 hours into Dynasty Warriors 7.
Why? Call it a palette-cleanser. After embarking on a Summer-long JRPG bender in an effort to make something resembling a dent in my gaming backlog (almost all of which are RPGs of some ethnicity), I’d about had my fill of spending anywhere from 30 to 60 hours slowly powering up my heroes in order to achieve the strength necessary to save the world from a retro-tech cyborg Nazi and his land battleship that shoots lasers out of a giant lance that used to be a castle or a time-traveling military intelligence officer/monster made from pieces of ruined staircases pulled from a pocket dimension that looks like the only M.C. Escher painting that has any pop-cultural relevance…
JRPGs are weird.
After all of… that… there’s just something refreshing about being able to rush into a feudal Chinese war zone and come out the other side unscathed with 1,000 notches on my cartoonishly over-sized sword. But playingDynasty Warriors 7 made me realize something: as good-enough as this game is for what it is (a grind-fest), it has room to do so much more. I’m not talking about any drastic changes to the basic mash-X-and-stuff-dies grinding formula — just a few simple suggestions to add some weight to the game’s tertiary strategy elements. Continue reading
In case the name didn’t give it away, Dynasty Warriors: Gundam is a spin-off of the Dynasty Warriors series using settings and characters from the Mobile Suit Gundam series of anime. The first entry in the new series was released in 2007. It was a rather mediocre game, even by Dynasty Warriors standards, and appealed mostly as fan service. Now that Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 is here, one thing is certain: This game is karmic retribution for my belief that the series had nowhere to go but up after the first game. 
