Koei brings us yet another Warriors game, originally titled: Warriors Orochi. Of the many great games in the series, this is the twenty sixth. I guess you can't fault them for their persistence, can you?

All jokes aside, Warriors Orochi does offer an original story. The opening cut scene outlines the plight of the Warring states era of Japan, and the Three Kingdoms era's struggle for survival against, not one another, but the overwhelming armies of Orochi. You also see parts of a battle between Lu Bu and Tadakatsu Honda, but thats of minor importance (It's just cool).

In the opening Scenes of each storyline, we learn more about Orochi, how the two time periods came together, and why.

Orochi himself is described as the Serpent King. It is told that he used his demonic powers to create a twisted fusion of the Waring states, and the lands of the Three Kingdoms to make a new world in which he could test his might against the greatest fighters of those generations. Many of the best generals have already been defeated in battle, and the results of this are shown in each individual story line. Cao Pi, now leader of the Wei clan after his father Cao Cao's reported death, strives to prove he is just as good as his father, with or without him, by besting orochi. Zhao Yun, despaired after his ruler Liu Bei's defeat, and held captive by Orochi, is given new optimism for the fight when he is rescued and informed his leader might still be alive, and sets out to rescue him. After Sun Jian's capture, the remaining Officers of Wu are forced into servitude for Orochi for the fear of Sun Jian's execution - Sun Ce must make a hard decision, fight against his friends, or risk his fathers life? The Demon King, Nobunaga Oda, takes it upon him self to orchestrate a grand scheme to over come Orochi, and entangles all the other clans within his plot.

These are our four story lines, and it is our job to re-build the armies, rescue friends and family of the respective clans, and eventually defeat Orochi to break the hold he has over the land.

Gameplay:

The core gameplay hasn't changed, as is to be expected. Locate enemy, move to enemy, proceed to button mash enemy until he/she falls to the ground and vanishes before your eyes, collect item (optional), then repeat. And for good reason - twenty five other games would argue that this formula works quite well. There are a few minor alterations to the experience, however, such as the addition of a new move set called "maneuvers." These maneuvers have a variety of uses and effects ranging from stunning the enemy to break their guard, increasing attack speed, or simply causing mass amounts of damage with a single devastating blow. Many maneuvers use up a portion of your musou bar, and a sectioned off portion of said bar indicates how much will be used each time. Most of these attacks will find the best use against enemy generals, but a select few (Like Mitsunari Ishida's) have fantastic application as a crowd clearer or officer destroyer. Needless to say, maneuvers are a very useful addition.

The most noticeable change to the gameplay would have to be three man team. Instead of just being able to chose one character to play as, like in all the other Warriors games, in Warriors Orochi you are able to chose 3 separate characters, and can switch between all three at will on the battlefield. I found, unfortunately, that the usefulness of this feature was overrated. throughout almost all the time I spent with the game, I found that no matter what team I had, there was always one character that I took a liking to, and use him/her more than either of the other two. This was less true after having unlocked several of my favorite characters, but that was only during free mode or towards the end of each storyline, seeing as each story line has its own set of unlockable characters, and only the characters unlocked during that story line are playable in the storyline. There is greater use for having three health bars...I mean characters...on the harder difficulties, but other than that, the most use I got out of it was combining maneuvers. Stat increase maneuvers are applied to the whole team, and increased attack speed can be very handy for the more powerful, yet slow, characters.

I think what would have made the team system worth while would have been being able to apply separate abilities to each character. Abilities are familiar to the Warriors games, and increase the stats of your team. Abilities affect everything from HP and defense rating, attack strength, recovery of health and musou, and even EXP gained. Warriors Orochi only offers eighteen different abilities to chose from, but with only seven slots available for your whole team, its still hard to chose which ones you want most. There are abilities that effect the stats of each character category (Character categories are speed, strength, and technique, and really only effect your starting stats) but instead of applying two or three of these to cover each member of my team, I only used one at a time for the character I used most. Separate abilitys for each character would have created a greater distinction and use for each character, and would provide more reason to use separate characters for different tasks. A speed character to run across the map, a power character to defeat officers, and a character with a move set that work well for crowd clearing. This play style can still be put to use, but its effectiveness seemed trivial when one character did each job ALMOST as good as the next.

The last major changes are found not in combat itself, but the pre-battle menus. This is the character growth and weapon fusion features. Character growth allows you to level your character out of combat, which is simply a power levelers dream. The leveling system in Warriors Orochi differs from other Warriors games in that instead of counting down from a set number, it counts up from one to ninety nine. In combat, levels come quickly, even at higher levels. I was still earning two or three levels each battle when my characters were in their eighty's-ninety's. Each level increase does have a smaller impact on stats, but each character is able to max every stat just by reaching level ninety nine. No more attack, defense and musou increase items from defeated officers, now they only drop EXP scrolls and weapon pickups. Weapon fusion is just as it sounds - take two weapons and fuse them together to create a better one. You have significant control over the fusion process, which gives rise to the creation of some very powerful weapons. Each weapon is able to carry up to eight attributes. attributes affect a wide variety of aspects of the weapon, and, much like character abilities, are stackable from one to ten. This increases the effectiveness and/or likelihood of any particular modification. The slots for these attributes can be added through weapon fusion, as can additional attack strength up to +20.

These features do come at a cost. Growth points, different from EXP points which are applied instantly to the level of the character who earned them, are stored for use in any story line, on any character or weapon, at any time you like. On average, a single level will garner you about ten thousand points, but I was able to earn in upwards of twenty thousand on more than one occasion. Despite how fast they are earned, you will find little need to use them so quickly. Unless you plan on playing through the game on hard or chaos the very first time, leveling your character outside of combat is completely unnecessary, if not cheap. The price for increasing the level of a character caps out in the high 2000's, and thats around level 75. The main use I put the Growth Points to was for weapon fusion. Each change you make to a weapon costs a set amount of GP, from adding one slot which costs 150 GP to adding ice 1 which costs 700 GP. These prices stack the same as the attributes them self, so adding two slots would cost 300 GP or adding ice 2 would cost 1400 GP. The most considerable dent I put in my GP in a single action was transferring ice 10 from one weapon to another, at the cost of 7000 GP. The fastest way to run dry your GP is to power level a newly unlocked character from level one to level forty, which is easily done, and shows the power of the character growth system.

Graphics:

Remember playing Dynasty Warriors 3? Well then, this aspect should be very familiar to you. In the handful of years and dozens of games, it is the one thing that seems to have remained unaltered since the beginning, the graphics.

Understandably, these games cant be expected to run the highest level shaders and particle physics. With all the large scale battles raging in several places at once, even its current level of graphics tend to cause the game to be choppy at times. But considering we are supposedly in "the next generation" this is inexcusable at this point.

Not only for its substandard last gen graphics, but also for their lack of effort to improve said graphics in such a large span of time, Warriors Orochi scores very poorly in this category.

Sound:

Surprisingly enough, what it lacks in the graphical department, it seems to be making up for in the audio. At least to a degree.

Background music and menu sound effects blend nicely together to create, quite effectively, the calm before battle. The menu music, never overbearing or distractingly annoying, is pleasant to listen to, and almost makes you not want to leave the pre-battle screens. While the battle music does a good job of not only bringing you into the thick of battle, but also provides a nice beat to attack to for most characters (and no, I'm not joking about that).

Not only does it deliver well on the sound effects and musics, but also in the voice acting. Fans of anime and other such voice acted shows will most certainly come across several familiar voices. That familiarity combined with the fact that these actors know what they are doing create a much more enjoyable dialog than many previous Warriors titles.

However, all the voice talent in the world cant save you from a limited script. The frequency of certain lines of dialog will begin to wear down on you, and the use of the same voice actor for several characters does nothing for its originality.

Longevity:

Four story lines that will each take between 5-10 hours to complete and no online play mean that a purchase of this game is hard to justify. The special levels, or 'X' levels, effectively double the time to play through a story line (Which is the 10 in 5-10 hours), but are not required to advance through it, so are easily passed by. They add more to the story of the game, than actual play time.

With the ability to level three characters at once, and the addition of Growth Points, even die hard fans of the series who insist upon maxing out each character will find that it doesn't really take that long.

Even the achievements, which can add at least some re-playability to most games, fails to do so. They can mostly be gathered in a single play through of each storyline, in a single rental period. And thats exactly what this game is: A great rental.

Overall:

For long time fans of the series, like myself, the story lines of this game will be very interesting and enjoyable to experience. Seeing familiar characters in situations and interactions with other characters in new ways is quite exiting. But for new comers, this might not be the perfect title to jump onto the bandwagon with, seeing as these interactions will be lost on them.

There is potential in the three person team based gameplay, but Warriors Orochi doesn't do a good job of proving it. Had that potential been realized, there would have been more to offer for those interested in trying a Warriors game for the first time. This would have added greatly to the total value of the game.

With fantastic story lines, but without the fully realized team system, Warriors Orochi appeals much more to old fans than it does draw in new ones.