Bite-Sized Musou

Dynasty Warriors has been in my gaming brain for decades, dating all the way back to the PS2 when I first played Dynasty Warriors 2. I’ve talked about how much I enjoyed Dynasty Warriors 3 and still give it hours of my time to this day, as well as owning almost every re-hashed and re-run copy of the main series on Steam. This franchise holds a near and dear spot in my heart, but maybe not super recently as anyone who played DW9 is sure to explain to you.

The last mainline title released in 2018 (with the standalone expansion DW9: Empires releasing in 2021) and it was…not good when it came out. The series’ first introduction to an open world was barren, dull, and un-optimized for anyone unfortunate enough to purchase it on the PC. So we are approaching nearly 10 years since the last serviceable mainline Dynasty Warriors title, dating all the way back to DW8: Xtreme Legends back in 2014, and those fiending for another hit of Musou goodness have been plated Dynasty Warriors: M, NEXON’s mobile entry into the franchise. At first I was apprehensive given mobile games aren’t quite my cup of tea and the game was rumored to be leaning heavily on DW9’s assets, but I’m always down for a quick dip into the Musou pool. So let’s swim.

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms has been a tale retold more times than can be counted and that can almost be said in the video game form as well. Spanning Musou Beat Em Ups, RTS’s and everything in between, the decades-long war to unify China has made household names out of each faction’s mightiest warriors throughout the franchise’s over 30 year run. DW:M takes the “ain’t broke, don’t fix it” line as there’s little done to change the formula here. As of this writing, DW:M only has Story missions up to the Battle of Chibi, so there’s a good bit left to be brought over with regard to the timeline.

You start your DW:M journey with Zhao Yun, quintessential mascot of the DW franchise, and a small tutorial going over what’s on your phone screen. Combat is presented in a real-time system with your left thumb providing movement and your right thumb having an assortment of attacks to choose from. Icons will indicate common attack strings, interrupting launchers, level-traversing sweeping combos, and more. Each character has 4 distinct combos, a basic attack, and a dodge roll to cancel out of lengthy attack animations and avoid danger. K.O. enough soldiers and do enough damage and you’ll raise your Musou bar to unleash a devastating Musou attack, which even on the small screen are still very exciting to watch.

Once the tutorial is completed, you’re put into your main area. If you’ve played any mobile game that requires resource collecting there are no surprises to be found here. The amount of stuff you can do in this game is daunting and will be overwhelming at first, but all ends up being very cohesive once you’ve found the groove in which they want you on this racetrack. When looking over your village you’ll notice several areas you can upgrade, found in the Castle Construction page. These 14 areas are upgraded via resources (Wood, Stone, and Iron) that are accrued daily (via the Sawmill, Quarry, and Forge) and through challenges and missions. Upgrading these will increase productivity within your idle collecting, the rarity of items found in the Market, and so forth. The Research area provides passive upgrades to your characters that need the above resources in addition to Copper and Knowledge Points. Upgrades are on a set timer that increases with each level but as with most mobile games you can skip the timer with Gold, DW:M’s premium currency, but we’ll get to that later.

The majority of your playing time will be divided into two areas: the Musou and Conquest tabs. The Conquest tab feels like a watered-down version of DW7’s Conquest Mode, where DW:M presents 13 areas of China you can complete by beating 15 levels within each area. The more missions you complete, the higher your Loot Level goes, which provides even more idle rewards. Having side missions and smaller events to provide more rewards and having 3 difficulties to beat, there’s over 700 missions to fully complete Conquest (for context, I’ve finished Normal and Hard, with Chaos still to start). There’s not a whole lot of plot to be found as much as planted excuses to fight enemies, but you’re looking for rewards to upgrade your officers and that is exactly what you’re going to get here.

The Musou Tab contains an assortment of game modes that have daily rewards to provide. I’ll speedrun through these. Daily Challenge is where you’ll receive the brunt of your upgrading resources through 4 different styles of challenges: Hero’s Showdown, Slay the Beast, Protect the Cart, and Suppress the Bandits. Higher levels provide higher bonuses and each can be run 4 times a day for multiplicative bonuses. Sortie is a 30-level progressive battler where you choose between 3 difficulties and receive cards on victory that passively upgrade your three selected officers during that run. Harder difficulties make subsequent battles tougher as their difficulty level scales more, so there’s a high risk-high reward aspect, which often results in a need to tactically sandbag if you want to see the final boss.

Apex Martial Artist contains progressively-scaling challenge areas that group trios of officers based on faction or tag (Strength, Agility, or Intelligence). These floors carry small rewards but every 5th and 10th floor grant rewards to pull new officers so it’s worth going through the floors for those alone. Eight Gates Formation has you handling multiple groups of three to handle different challenges and combine for a total victory between all your officers for massive rewards. Very good for Knowledge Point gathering and also high-end materials for equipment for your team. Arena is the closest thing DW:M provides to “PvP” combat as you put your best three officers against other players’ best three officers in three 1v1 fights based on selected preference, although your opponent’s team is controlled by AI. Arena is a fun little diversion to see how you stack up against the whales, but good luck with that because there are some whales out there.

Getting to higher ground on Conquest and Musou modes will require your officers to reach higher levels, better equipment, and higher ascension. Officers have five different areas to be upgraded: Level, Equipment, Tactics, Special Weapons, and Officer Souls. Levels and Officer Souls are your basic passive upgrades to your officer. Equipment are scalable accessories that can upgrade specific stats and be upgraded in multiple ways to boost productivity. Tactics are collectible upgrades that can be leveled up as well, with up to three slots to add any combinations of upgrades to your officer. Special Weapons are your officer’s “4th weapon” type upgrade that grant massive boosts to your officer since they are kind of a hassle to get the necessary materials.

All the above upgrade your officer, but the key to really progress your characters and unlock most of these upgrades in the first place is ascending your officers. For you SR and SSR-hounding fanatics, here’s your time to shine. Ascending officers require multiples of the wanted officer as well as multiples of smaller officers. It’s an intricate, highly optimized word vomit that will require you to reach over to mobile games’ bread and butter to butter you up and spend your bread: Gacha. You’ll need to pull officers, a lot of them, to get to the higher rankings necessary to complete the later missions. The resources necessary to pull officers are slowly dripped in daily but with a SSR officer automatically provided on every 30th pull and the probability of hitting not only a SSR character, but the SSR character you need, being particularly low, you’ll need more pulls than you’ll initially feel comfortable going for in order to keep up with the curve.

Luckily with DW:M, Gold is easy to acquire since the game handsomely rewards daily logins and check-ins. Doing the basic rundown of daily tasks and logging on each day will cover you with so much premium currency you may wonder why there’s a Shop in the first place, especially since there’s always something new being provided via a reward track that will allow fully-free players to enjoy most of what the game has to offer. It’s a refreshing change of pace knowing you aren’t immediately blocked out if you don’t want to grab your wallet.

Which is very good, because the sticker shock in the Shop is incredible. There are a litany of purchasable options to choose from to boost your officers and your productivity but some of these options are upwards of $90 for one pack and there are multiple of these to choose from. It is not foreign to this Shop that if you wanted to get the biggest leg up for your team that you’d be pressed to spend literally thousands of dollars. I’m not a big mobile gamer but the amount of FOMO employed by the shop is a very icky feeling and I hope people are responsibly taking these games in because, just, wow. (It is not out of the ordinary to see individual players topping every single leaderboard by a huge margin, only to watch another one leapfrog the second a new character comes out. This game doesn’t have whales, it has leviathans. – Demetri)

As much as I have praised DW:M above for all the things you can do in the game, it is all compiled into the singular battle system. After playing for a good while you’ll eventually notice the diverse amount of challenges are just the same person with different disguises trying to get another sample of your free time. If you aren’t a fan of the battle system, which is visually appealing but very one-dimensional, this game will lose your interest very quickly. But if you’re like me and have the monkey neuron activation of watching the big numbers go up, you can still enjoy some time watching your officers absolutely steamroll.

I will also point out that during my time with DW:M, I’ve had multiple hard crashes when navigating menus that have not been fixed throughout the numerous patches brought out. Considering the app-opening splashes and loading of files takes a couple minutes to run through, it’s aggravating waiting to get back in. For reference I own a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, so if it’s a hardware issue then not a lot of phones will be immune to my issue.

Games like Dynasty Warriors: M are always an interesting anomaly as you have to break your findings down as a fan and as a critic. As a devout fan of the franchise and a beginner into the mobile scene, I’ve been playing almost daily for a few months now and have enjoyed my time! The graphics are visually appealing, the developers practically give away a deluge of rewards, and there is so much content to chomp into that making your officers feel stronger and beating challenges allows yourself that proverbial self-high-five as you continue to optimize your team.

But as a critic, the mirage of multifolded gameplay mechanics and one-dimensional combat sugar-coated on top of an absolutely repulsive premium Shop can and will deter fans of the franchise and newcomers who aren’t making 6-digit incomes. I understand that this being on a mobile platform is going to hinder opportunities and lower expectations given the commitment needed to reach a quality manageable on smartphones, but to repeat myself once again for this franchise’s countless years among numerous titles: this will be for a select few, and hopefully that’ll be enough.