Dynasty Warriors 9 Reviews
The musou genre needed new ideas - but reinventing it as a shoddy open-world game wasn't the answer.
After the resounding success of Dynasty Warriors 8, Dynasty Warriors 9 feels like a major step back. What's lost in the move towards an individually-centered story spread across a massive open world far outweighs the minor benefits that are gained. While the excellent button-mashing gameplay stays intact with great tweaks and additions, it wasn't enough. The lack of multiplayer, missing alternate game modes, and emptiness of ancient China left me far from satisfied.
A new open world breathes life into this ancient franchise.
Battles were raging and allies were calling for help, but for once the game offered me the option of deserting the fray and contemplating the larger world around it. It's a shame that everything else in the game works so emphatically against it.
Dynasty Warriors 9 is a perfect example of why you should be careful what you wish for.
Dynasty Warriors 9 attempts to revitalize the franchise with a fresh approach to its standard formula and kind of succeeds.
Dynasty Warriors offers a plethora of playable characters, large-scale battles, and a feeling of godhood as you smash through scores of enemies with a single thing. What more could you ask for from a Warriors game?
Dynasty Warriors 9 still has the 'levelling hundreds of dudes without breaking a sweat' core loop so you feel like a badass, but the open world removes some of the depth. Fans can still enjoy, but it won't win any new hearts this time.
There are a lot of exciting moments in Dynasty Warriors 9, both those related to the story or bloody clashes, but this does not match the many other problems the game has, whether the virtual world design and the size of the activities it provides, or tasks that become repetitive and similar after a period, or The characters, some of which share the same weapons and combat tactics, add to the limited level of animation, sounds and user interface, making the title many years late for many open world games.
Review in Arabic | Read full review
Dynasty Warriors 9, with the new open world sandbox-style, is a nice new approach to a formula too exploited, but that can not stop it from being tedious within a few hours.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
While combat remains exhilarating and fun in a way that will feel familiar to veterans of the series, Dynasty Warriors 9 isn't just one versus a thousand anymore. We're part of a war that unfolds all around us, with plenty of allies in need of help and enemies begging for a healthy beating. It's a bold step in the right direction, and while Omega Force may have overextended in certain aspects, the fun outweighs the jank and the experience remains one that I am eager to return to and to see improved and further evolved in Dynasty Warriors 10 or Samurai Warriors 5.
Admittedly, many of the flaws or problems I have with Dynasty Warriors 9 are nothing entirely new to the series. It's just that now there's a whole new layer of problems that have been put on top of them that make the original issues that much more apparent. For almost every aspect of the game's features that I felt were on par with the quality of past titles, there is a contradiction.
Dynasty Warriors finally gets the overhaul it's long been waiting for… and while it addresses a few old problems it creates just as many new ones.
Unfortunately, the changes in Dynasty Warriors 9 are a bit too superficial and kept too much of what made the series suffer in previous titles.
With Dynasty Warrior 9 Koei Tecmo makes a decisive turning point for the saga, and despite several structural flaws, the game turns out to be a solid framework for the next episodes.
Review in Italian | Read full review
The open world, RPG elements and new battle system make Dynasty Warriors 9 the first refreshing entry in this old series. This is without a doubt the way to go for future games in the Dynasty franchise.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Sadly, this isn't the breakthrough fans were expecting. Omega Force took a pretty big risk with Dynasty Warriors 9, and while its open world integration can be seen as a small triumph, this newest entry is marred by its heavily outdated approach to combat design.
The hack-and-slash moment-to-moment action works in its favor even when transitioning to a new style of play, but Dynasty Warriors 9, like some of its predecessors, is clunky and unwieldy; hampered by the aforementioned bugs and performance problems. If you're into the idea of playing an open world game where its arcadey elements are entwined with therapeutic but sometimes dry exploration, maybe give it a shot.
As it stands, though, Dynasty Warriors 9 is more of a foundation for the next title than the dawning of a new era for the franchise. That's perfectly acceptable, too, given that series like Dynasty Warriors inevitably must evolve to stay relevant. Right now, there are just some growing pains, and anyone who was interested in the newest iteration because of its new gameplay features would do better waiting for the next one instead.