Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires - Review

It’s 184AD, the Yellow Turban Rebellion has risen under the leadership of Zhang Jiao. Are you ready to lead an army to victory and the conquering of Japan? Perhaps you wish to be an officer in an army and help a leader conquer it.

Dynasty Warriors is a series that spans 5 generations of consoles. From its humble beginnings back on the PS1, we’ve seen the series sprawl into numerous main line titles, the creation of Samurai Warriors and a more strategic and politically driven style of gameplay in their Empires series. After the behemoth that was Dynasty Warriors 7: Empires, a surprisingly powerful game after how weak Dynasty Warriors 7, a standard was etched in stone for all future empires’ titles. Does the newest entry into the series expand upon the success, or does it suffer from the same problems that plagued the previous Empires title in Dynasty Warriors 8: Empires?

Upon booting the game, the first thing I did was jump straight into the edit mode to create my own officer. One of my favourite memories with DW7: Empires is making entire families of Officers to play in the games, as the edit system was perfectly constructed to allow so many unique officers to be created. I spent many weekends making my own campaigns on my own, or at a friend’s house. So, I was very excited to jump into the edit mode and have a fiddle.

Unfortunately, the edit mode here is nowhere near as well-crafted as it is in Dynasty Warriors 7: Empires. Using a typical older RPG style selection system, the split between pre-set looks having stylised images, and then the more advanced customisation only having numbered options to choose from is a bit difficult to start. Worse still, you have to apply the change every single time, to see what the change looks like, rather than the game giving you a preview of the change. This means that every single change requires individual confirmation, and that you have to go through the whole menu again to your preferred option if you wanted to check different styles.

Beyond this, it seems the combat style options that were given in some of the earlier Dynasty Warriors: Empires games are completely absent here, and it’s dependent on just your weapon selection, rather than a style of gameplay. This means you can’t have strange crossovers like heavy hitting speed weapons, or speedy heavy weapons. Things that worked quite well in previous titles. So, instead of creating an entire family of unique and individual characters to play as, I made my one, and was on my way.

Dynasty Warriors 9 took a different path than previous entries in the series. This was met with rather harsh response from the fan base. Taking an open world style, this problem of non-defined battle scenarios flows on into Dynasty Warriors 9: Empires. In a horrendous design choice, every encounter is now fought in a Castle Siege rather than iconic battles that we’ve come accustomed to. Every single map is just 1/4 castle, with the rest being open plains, and several small camps to take to get siege weapons to break into the castle. I find this incredibly dividing, because whilst the Castle Sieges feel intense at the beginning, with the smaller maps meaning encounters with officers and the retaking of captured camps far more regular. It also strips all life that iconic battle scenes of the series are known for. No Battle of Red Cliff or Bai Di Castle. No battle of Chi Bi or Hu Lao with Lu Bu destroying an entire army.

Combat is refreshing, if not a little mundane at times. You’ll easily be shredding up 1000’s of enemies in every battle. Casting special abilities that you unlock, or if you’re really game, giving Dong Zhou fans to really accentuate his lithe fighting style. The variability of the way you can engage battle is great, yet the lack of variety in the actual combat is a huge downfall. There is no life or excitement in invading. What should be a pivotal, and enjoyable key point, is largely absent. The most diverse roster of characters ever, with nearly 100 main officers and several hundred generic officers, and the majority of their battles are held on copy and paste battle fields with nothing interesting to look at.

Previous titles would have special battle opportunities occur whilst playing, after a certain amount of time had passed, or particular objectives met. If this is a feature in Dynasty Warriors 9: Empires, I was completely unable to initiate them. It made the different campaign choices feel little more than just a pre-fill with officers and overall map adjustment, rather than a particular event in history that you could participate in by doing the historically accurate choices.

The political aspect of the game is interesting enough, if not a little bland. There is a lack of nuance, and most interactions feel pretty useless. There doesn’t seem a huge necessity to do more than your rations gathering, and your stroll. This leads to further problems in that unlike previous titles where you would spend ample time preparing for invasions and recruiting and strengthening yourself and your areas, in preparation for large invasions, with Dynasty Warriors 9: Empires you’ll often just have the bare minimum to invade once every policy period. It is also feels like the difference between being leader and an officer has been mitigated and that there is not a huge difference between the two. A few things are exclusive to leaders but not many.

The stroll sections whilst interesting in allow you to explore an open world area, there is seemingly not much to do in these besides buy some items and communicating with your officers. The most interesting instances are the unique random cutscenes that can occur. Like a party, or my personally favourite, Dong Zhou diving in front of a cart like an acrobat to save a Shiba Inu puppy. These are funny, and interesting, and whilst I couldn’t entirely work out what caused them, they were interesting additions to the game that added some life to the world that is severely lacking it.

The biggest offense of Dynasty Warriors 9: Empires isn’t that it’s a bad game. The biggest problem is the game is incredibly average and bland. There was a multitude of problems with the previous title, and it seems like nothing was fixed with this title, despite a 7-year gap between Dynasty Warriors 8: Empires and Dynasty Warriors 9: Empires. Even with only a two-year dev cycle between the main title and the empires title of the 9th entry, there is really a lack of content available. Dynasty Warriors 7: Empires is still a far better empires title, and between the two it is the one that will continue to see long time play. The changes to 9 Empires, whilst ambitious and appreciated, lack the depth that this title needed. A serious re-look at what has gone wrong since 7 is definitely required.

Dynasty Warriors 9: Empires is an unfortunately disappointing entry into the series. Whilst it does some things right, it doesn’t do anything particularly well. It’s bland and mundane, and problematically, offensively average. Whilst still one that can easily have hours dumped into it, and if you can be bothered with battling with the poor edit mode system, a roster of fun created officers is possible. Having the largest roster in history is wasted here, with the severe lack of actual game available.

The Score

6.0

Review code provided by Koei Tecmo

The Pros

+Combat is fun and flows well

+Visually stunning and sounds great

+Huge roster of characters

The Cons

-Incredibly bland

-Castle Siege is repetitive and unenjoyable

-Officers are boring damage sponges

-Edit Mode is painful to use