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Dynasty Warriors 9 [Second]

In the spirit of my current musou marathon, I feel compelled to do something few - if any - people have ever done before: A thorough deconstruction of Dynasty Warriors 9 that avoids hyperbole or overly simplistic dismissals like “it’s bad and they made the combat worse” from an insane person with the 100% achievement.

My initial review was a little bit tongue-in-cheek, deliberately less of a meaningful review and more of an ode to the very concept of enjoying things that suck. This one is going to be markedly more serious, and thus boring. I also have no real choice but to explain a lot of stuff that’s baseline for musou fans, so if you’re deep in the genre expect a lot of redundant walls of text.

Don’t get me wrong, I do still enjoy DW9 on a twisted level but there are so many things fundamentally and IMO inarguably wrong with this game that it honestly warrants a research paper rather than a Backloggd review. DW6 may be a game I hate more, but 9 is of worst construction by far. Many of the changes made here are so fascinatingly mindboggling that they result in an end product that’s only barely a musou - and indeed, I only call it one for convenience. If you know anything about this game you’re certainly already aware of its vast negative response and for once I actually think it’s entirely earned.

Anyway, enough preamble, let’s talk about gameplay.

In the vast bulk of musou games, you attack as such: Push the normal attack button, and occasionally end the combo by pushing the charge attack button, which triggers a cool finishing move. You can push the charge attack button on its own for either a different combo string or a nice heavy hit. Some musous even let you hold down a shoulder button or trigger so you can use flashy skills with the face buttons. It is a remarkably simple system that has nonetheless been fine-tuned to airtight perfection over the 23 years this genre has existed for.
DW9 dispenses with this - a move so bold that it’s inherently a red flag - and replaces it with something that’s been called the ‘Flow’ system and it is… Certainly an interesting topic of discussion.
As opposed to having multiple charge attacks, every character now has a single combo string with no charge attacks in sight. Each character comes with 4 Trigger attacks that can be used on command: Launch, Stun, Knockdown, and a special one that’s unique to each officer. Using one of these - except the special - changes how the normal combo string functions when used in followup. If you launch someone, your character goes into the air with them. Stun? That’s usually a wide sweep. Knockdown? Heavy hitting single-target combo.
…Uhm, except not really. This is what you’re told, but the truth is a bit murkier than that. What’s actually happening is that your character is reacting to the enemy’s state, which is ‘ideally’ caused by one of your Trigger attacks but in practice these are actually more like recommendations. Later enemies who can recover from attacks faster or ignore any knockbacks/launches will force you into the neutral string while the other enemies around them land safely. Or, worse: You will go into the aerial string after a failed launch and attack nothing.

A huge factor in why I find the combat in this genre so satisfying is the degree of control offered. Attacks are rarely multi-hits except when they’re combo enders/charge attacks and the distance on each button press is something that can be measured before being memorized. When I use the twin swords moveset in Samurai Warriors 4, I know that pressing X once followed by Y will launch the enemy and put me back a couple inches due to a backflip. 5 Y inputs followed by X sends me a significant distance upwards and then ends with an elemental slam to the ground. Stuff like that.
With DW9, both control and reliability are gone. With one button pulling quadruple duty, and the inherent knockbacks/knockdowns/launchers endemic to ‘normal’ attacks, every push of the attack button can have an entirely different outcome, and on the flashier movesets those outcomes can often involve you careening far away from the intended target.
Worse still, now that everyone’s movesets have identical functions, every character is essentially a clone. Not just a clone in the sense that “characters share movesets” - they do, it’s expected for a roster this large and not a problem for me personally - but a clone in the sense that every button does the exact same thing across every character. This is an issue that plagues the PS2 musous, even the allegedly cloneless ones. There are different animations, sure, but in practice they’re all doing the exact same thing.

I don’t normally think clones are an issue. Of the many things that longtime musou fans complain about, it’s always been the one that I’ve never been able to get, in part because it’s a huge nothingburger to me. In DW9, though? I don’t think people complain about it enough.

These aren’t actually the worst problems.

The actual worst problem with the gameplay is that all sense of progression is gone.

‘Progression’ in these games is twofold: You level up, and you unlock more attacks to use. Then, you focus on getting stronger gear to kill enemies faster and make the endgame/postgame missions less of a chore.

Dynasty Warriors 9 gives you everything from the start, and gear is meaningless thanks to the followup button. Every now and then, what was once the charge attack button will flash above an enemy’s head. Push it for free damage. It kills weaker officers in one hit and seriously injures named officers even with a massive level gap all the way up until Musou difficulty.
Combine this with the ease of stuns/launches/knockdowns and you have an experience that, for the only time in musou’s history, lives up to its undeserved reputation: This is a game where you should button mash to win. There’s no real reward for ‘learning’ your moveset or building/forging stronger weapons nor is there any tangible benefit to tracking down accessories. Non-special Trigger attacks have no real cooldown so they can be spammed until a followup attack pops up and boom, officer down.

As far as audio-visual and kinetic feedback goes, though, I wonder what went wrong. Koei Tecmo as a publishing body seemingly have an exclusive patent on making attacks feel as satisfying as they should be which is high praise indeed, yet it means DW9 stands out even moreso because every attack in this game feels distinctly lifeless. Sound effects are very limp and, dare I say it, wimpy? Most of them are reused between movesets even for attacks that should sound harsher like Lu Bu’s command grab. Said attacks have no screenshake or particle spam, making them visually indistinguishable from ordinary attacks. Auditory feedback from attacked enemies is mostly nonexistent and it wasn’t until I tried the demo on DW9 that I realized this is by design rather than being a bug I’d run into on PC. On a very basic, instinctual human level of ‘feeling’, DW9 fails cataclysmically.
If you ask someone who hates DW9 why this game is bad there’s a 99% chance they’re going to point to the open world. They’re right, by the way. But what I find fascinating about this one specifically is how often people struggle to actually identify why it failed, which is also why you sometimes hear people say ‘open world isn’t inherently bad, DW9 just fumbled it’.

As a certified Open World Game sicko who has way too many hours in Ubisoft’s catalogue, I’m here to tell you that DW9’s open world is bad! It has far too many open expanses that’re neither interesting to traverse, gorgeous to observe, or rewarding to explore. 80% of the map is Central China which means an incredible amount of flat plains and modest hills. North China is slightly prettier due to being caked in snow and very vertical, but as far as open worlds go this is definitely one of the worst from the last decade and a half. There aren’t any secrets, no caves, nothing to find. There’s no little overworld challenges, NPCs named John The Gooner hanging out, no incentive to stray from the beaten path.
I feel like Omega Force are aware of this, because whenever the player is faced with a steep incline or a wall, there’s a grappling hook option to just go straight up rather than bother to navigate, even during sieges. Total submission to their own failures.

DW9 isn’t bad because it’s open world, it’s bad because the open world is bad and does not work.

…

But I don't think it could ever work, is the thing. Open world as a format is very much anathema to musou as a genre. Oil and water, to be a basic bitch. In my Warriors Orochi 3 review I compared the experience of a (good) musou to a rollercoaster: They’re all foundationally the same, but how they’re arranged is what sets them apart. These games live and die by their bespoke roster of handcrafted missions. When you remove them, you remove all the structure, and when you remove all the structure, you remove all the musou.

Dynasty Warriors 9, as an open world game, is… Well, not arranged to begin with. Not structured. This is a massive problem that’s probably worse overall than the problems with gameplay.

I often gripe about the pacing of musou missions and how many of them are a bit overzealous with boxing you in until the narrative says so, but it’s preferable to DW9’s attempt at mission design. Granted, implying DW9’s missions are designed counts as a crime against truth.
When a Chapter begins in DW9, the player gets a ton of sidequests and a main objective. These sidequests are near-universally ‘go here, kill this NPC’ and they have no meaningful impact. Despite what naysayers say, they do have some impact - they’ll often stop reinforcements appearing when you go for the main target, but in practice…
During a Chapter, a small map of the region frequently appears showing the push-pull of armies across China. This is all smoke and mirrors. All of it, everything DW9 does to sell you on the idea of a ‘battle’, is smoke and mirrors. It’s fake. It’s made up. It doesn’t influence the actual game. Sieges? Catapults? Battering Rams? Fake. Made up. Not real. A mirage.

Do you know how I got the 100% trophy?

I just ran past everything.

DW9 offers no meaningful obstructions. Besides the main target, officers can be ignored safely. Peons pose zero threat, even the archers. You can bust down gates yourself or just use the grappling hook to go over the walls. On some chapters the target is inside a city, you can take the long way around on horseback, go over the back, and shoot the target in the fucking face with your bow. Some cities and forts are near a mountain, so you can skip the level by going up that mountain and dropping down… Or by shooting the target in the fucking face. Bows are strong. You don’t need no weapon.
I said earlier that completing side quests stops reinforcements appearing, true, yet even on harder difficulties you can expect to mulch stronger bosses in hyper mode within seconds. All of Guan Yu’s friends tried to jump in and stop him getting assassinated but he was dead by the time Guan Suo said a quippy one liner.

This hurts the actual moment-to-moment sure but it equally hurts a lot of what should be impactful missions. In the same way that every piece of Sengoku Japan art goes crazy for Sekigahara and Honnoji, there are several battles that every piece of Three Kingdoms art goes crazy for. DW9 fumbles them all, removing the structure that would create a setpiece and instead leaving a gap for you to walk around and shoot the target in the face. You may think my endless repetition of “shoot them in the face” is garish, but it’s objectively the most powerful option: Stronger arrows shoot in a shotgun spread, and the game often lags so hard trying to calculate the damage they do that the internal game speed begins to slow down.

You’d think this only hurts the gameplay experience but no, all of this takes a sledgehammer to the narrative experience as well.

I remember Shikanosuke Yamanaka’s death from SW5 because the level accompanying it is a manic one-army fight against an overwhelming tide of enemies that’s obscenely hard to do on Nightmare. I remember Dian Wei’s sacrifice from DW8 because its associated level is a cool gauntlet of traps and ambushes in a burning castle. I remember Spirit of Sanada’s Nagashino level more than any other iteration because it is brutal even in a game with lots of brutal levels. I remember recruiting Yueying in WO3 because her dreadnoughts can be a pain in the ass if not swiftly dealt with.

I’m not just discussing difficulty here, but mechanical variation. Gameplay-story integration, even. Further to the rollercoaster metaphor, these are the loops, curves, twists, ascents and descents that make musous memorable. You can’t separate these from the narrative, because the missions are the narrative. Much of the incentive to do certain objectives in DW8 or DW4 is so a guy will show up later and go “Yippee! I’m not dead!” and then be usable in future fights. You feel bad when Guo Jia or Sun Ce or Xu Shu die because they’ve accompanied you in previous missions.
DW9 strips it all out, hoping the cutscenes will be sufficient. They aren’t. It’s very bog standard 2010s JRPG fare where characters stand around occasionally doing a canned animation at one another while speaking in a flat affect. ‘Proper’ cutscenes have a complete disregard for cinematography, lighting, audio balancing or even colour grading, which often results in otherwise serious moments looking incredibly goofy.
Despite the reputation these games have, I earnestly and genuinely believe they’re all very tightly made using a formula that’s been ironed out to level perfection, even the bad ones. Dynasty Warriors 9, I feel, is an excellent showcase of just how well made Omega Force’s games usually are. Almost all of the fundamental building blocks of a musou have been thrown away here, and the end result is a game so deeply and fundamentally hollow that it inadvertently validates a lot of the otherwise-bad faith criticism musous often receive. This is a hollow button masher where nothing matters and you just hit dudes until the level ends.

I’ve written this breakdown for numerous reasons. On a simpler level, I think too many people go for the easy route when ‘critiquing’ DW9 and think that 9’s flaws are so self-evident that they don’t warrant a thorough deconstruction.

On a more complex level… Much of the critique I see levelled at this game is correct, but for the wrong reasons.

If you ever get into philosophy, someone will probably tell you to read Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’. It’s a good piece of theory, you should read it if you have the stomach for 650~pages of existentialism, but for the purpose of this review I’m going to zero in on something.
Sartre posits that existence precedes essence - a sentiment he did not start but did quantify for many. In layman’s terms: People don’t do Y because they’re X. They’ve done Y, so they’re X. Sartre’s own examples include the idea of a soldier who deserts; in his framework, the soldier didn’t desert from the army because he was a coward, he deserted and this makes him a coward. In even simpler terms: It’s not the Self that causes the Choice, it’s the Choice that dictates the Self. I am massively oversimplifying here, mind you.

This might seem like a fucking insane cut to pull in a DW9 review, but in truth it’s applicable to the field of criticism as a whole.

Much of DW9’s negative backlash includes a lot of statements that boil down to “They changed it! Now it sucks!” which is… Bothersome to me, as both a critic and a longtime musou fan.

Dynasty Warriors 9 isn’t bad because Omega Force changed it. It’s bad because what they changed it to is fundamentally unworkable for the kind of game this is meant to be.
Is Flow combat bad because it’s different? No, it’s bad because they’re a fundamental removal of control from the player in a genre where player control is central to the experience while also removing any difficulty and thus, memorable friction.
Is the open world bad because it’s different? No, it’s bad because the game no longer has any meaningful structure which in turn removes any concept of a ‘unique experience’ in each chapter.
Is the voice acting bad because it’s different? No, it’s bad because Koei cheaped out on dubbing and rushed it with amateurs while also not directing the JP or CN actors very well.
So on, so forth.

Change isn’t a bad thing. Omega Force have changed this genre so many times over the last two decades while still managing to keep the spiritual core of it entirely intact. You can change a musou and still have a musou.

The problem with the changes isn’t that they are changes, it’s that they’re bad changes.