Dynasty Warriors: Origins (PlayStation 5)

9/10, was so close to not buying this game from my experience with 7&8 hitting xxy on literally every character. So much so that i brought this thinking i was going to refund it after a few hours, boy was i wrong. Easily the best action/tactical game i have played in my life, coming from a fan of the total war series, it does real time gameplay mixed with light tactical elements to perfection, seriously well done to the studio who made this game.Context. I played Dynasty Warriors 4 as a kid and loved it. Played 7, it felt like the exact same thing only with better characters and a lot more characters and complicated story. Played 8, which looked slightly better than 7 with even more names. These games suffered from far too many playable characters, stories and complicated mechanics that just made it unplayable for me, to the point of where i turned it of after 9 hours. This game fixes that and redefines what an action army game is. It doesn't do everything perfectly but when you load into a match after 80 hours and it slaps with 80% of the strength of your first match, you know they have done something extremely right.Lets start with the pros.This character gives you a fresh new protagonist to experience the story with. This has multiple effects, firstly, they have introduced dialogue options, these start of really strong and give for some humorous trolling moments with zhang fei and hang dang. This makes it so that you actually get to know the characters personalities and character in general, big thumbs up. It also makes learning each character way more memorable, as you have a personality to the face instead of a few lines in a cutscene then they never show up again. This feels a lot more interactive and makes the story WAY easier to understand and ultimately enjoy.Combat/gameplay 10/10 - From the armies chargins along side you in battle, to the duels to pretty much everything. It would be a misjustice any description i could give. Honestly you have to play it to understand it. But this is easily the best combat in any of the franchises game i've played, and is actually one of the best combat/gameplay experiences i have ever experienced in any game period, my favourite game being sekiro. Some things i would like to say is extremely nice and just hits different is the parry system, the way how weapons now work, the atmosphere of the troops, maps, points of engagement, moral and bases and even small things like your gaurds ramming doors or their war crys when using their abilities. Gameplay systems are introduced at a great pace so that it doesn't feel overwhelming too. Honestly there is nothing bad here that i can think about, i literally cannot stop playing this game for this alone and would be devastated if they changed it after making it so good. This part of the game has me playing it like i played games when i was a kid, straight home for work ps5 on and this in.Graphics 8/10 - Massive step up. Everything has a next gen look and it surprised me how good each map looks, as i use to be a pc gamer. the game is extremely well optimised, with me yet to experience a bug. Environments look gorgeous but i wish they had a little more variety when it came to it. I would also say that the animations of the characters and there facial expressions could be improved, i don't know why they didn't use motion cap. It doesn't need to be in the whole game, just a set of realistic animations. Also a pet peev is that characters have this weird sway when they are idle, it just looks weird if they're standing still have them stand still. I'm really reaching here to find bad things, but it was noticeable, however i also understand this is and extremely subjective thing that i got use to after a couple of in game cutscenes.Story 6/10 - Easily the worse part of the game. It's not bad, and is actually a huge improvement. It really sucks because up until chapter three, the game more often then not hit really well. So where did they go wrong ? Firstly why does every character talk like they are deeply in love with my hero from the moment they've met them. Picture this as an ingame character reading my review and replying to me directly this response :"Reviewer, i truly feel as though are fates are aligned. I have seen the way you sore through the battlefield, you are truly the shining star of our army. It may be to soon to say, but your review will be read by thousands and surly leave a mark through history for future generations to look back on".Weird right, seriously however was involved in making the dialogue this way needs to be fired. I don't know why it's so hard for this studio to make down to earth relatable dialogue coming from wo long last year too. Seriously it sounds like each hero past chapter 3 has hr standing behind there back with a metal pole. If it's not something that you can picture a person saying in real life don't add it to the game, it gets so cringy that i just stopped doing bond missions. Again this is only really past chapter 3, which makes it worse as some of my faviroute characters were dong zhou, yuan shu, yuan zhao. Why ? Because they acted like real people who had admirable qualities, and had qualities to dislike. Everyone else minor a few exceptions, zhang fei and zhang liao are just goody to shoes. I hope this is addressed in the next game.Outside of that the story generally from an overarching perspective is good. You'll see that i referred to characters, this would of been impossible for me to do even on 4, genuinely surprised how many characters names i remembered seeing how there's a lot of them. Just wish they each had character flaws, instead of being perfect beings. It's especially weird seeing your enemy say they wish they didn't have to fight you after brutally taking out 90% of their army lol. It's just not realistic.Music 10/10 - Not much to say here top tier. I loved the music from 4 and 7 had a few bangers, can't remember anything from 8. The music here has a metal feel, but it's not too metal so it appeals to everyone, and every sound track is really good.Things i dislike - story and cringe characters.Troops. They just disappear ? Why? You've finished killing an enemy officer and all his troops disappear, I'm guessing this is for gameplay flow reasons. If you could change this then it would be a huge step up in my opinion. As i could just leave the officers with me to finish them off or i could do it myself. Either way it was annoying that characters would just disappear, if the devs could find a way to do this whilst making the flow of combat good, im all for it, if not then i get it.Things i'd like to see added/changed:More weapons. Again i don't need 80 weapons, a few more would be cool. Twin swords would be nice.Better realistic dialogue.More abilities for weapons on the skill tree that change the way each weapon plays. For example it would be nice to see a suck in mechanic for holding down y on the staff.Smoother animations. Not like the animations are clunky, cause they're not, but coming from the sekiro parry it would be really nice if you firstly had sparks flying, and also if you could direct the person left of right from your parry. Honestly wouldn't care if these things aren't added but the latter would be nice for crowd control in the true musou mode where it's more common to fight multiple officers at once.That's honestly it, i don't think much needs adding/changing. This is a great game, if your own the fence i would buy it, if you've stumbled across it i would buy it. If it looks even remotely interesting basically buy it. If we don't rewards devs when they get stuff right then we can't be surprised when they don't even bother to try, which imo these devs haven't been doing since the ps2 error when it comes to this franchise.

Classic dynasty Warriors, excellent game, great graphics smooth gameplay

I've played the demo and this review i based on that. It was decent so I have been very excited about getting this game on the date of its release, placing the pre order several months ago. However I've been very disappointed to find that the order is marked as delivered but it never arrived. I was told that it would be delivered in a few days, and then it still never arrived. I then had to get a refund as Amazon couldn't re order it for me. And now there's none available anywhere to buy. So I'm now having to wait before I can play. Great game from what I know just disappointed with the supplier!!

Good game!

Great game. Easy to pick up and play.

Great game and a big return to form for Koei and the DW series.

I bought the game as I am a great fan of the series and have been playing this since PS2 days. This one does live up to the reputation of the previous games (excluding DW9). It is a great game to play…with the exception of the end game boss. Lu Bu is too difficult to beat and ended up spoiling the entire game which I had but a lot of hours into. If this doesn’t bother you, then get the game and you’ll have a great time. If you like to complete games and see the end sequence, this will likely spoil it for you.

Great game, looks stunning, it’s been properly updated for current gen, good story and systems my only issue is not getting the change to play as 100 characters