I’ve always had a love for the Musou series ever since I got the opportunity to play Dynasty Warriors 2 a couple years after it came out in 2003.  Since then I’ve made it a personal goal to catch every title in the main series for at least one playthrough.  DW3 will forever be my personal favorite, 4 and 5 made vast upgrades that did much for the replayability, 6 and 7 and 8 ushered in new generations with more over the top action, and we don’t talk about 9.  Notwithstanding the side entries as the additions of the Gundam and Hyrule series have done a lot of heavy lifting in recent years, it’s safe to say that it’s been a long time since mainline DW fans have had anything to root for.

If you think about it, not counting Xtreme Legends, Dynasty Warriors 8 came out 12 years ago.  After the doomed try of “open-world” gaming for 9, we fans have been on the sideline pleading for a return to former glory.  So when the announcement trailer for Dynasty Warriors: Origins released back in May of last year, I was stunned to see a trailer out of nowhere but also a little concerned.  The story looked to be surrounding a nameless warrior traversing through the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a deviation from picking your favorite warrior and reigning terror on your enemies, but original enough to be an intriguing diversion from the norm.  All it needed was to play well and run properly and you’d have most of your target audience happy with the results. Good news: of the 10 hours I’ve played so far, Origins is shaping up to be one of the best entries in the franchise.

Origins starts your journey as a warrior without faction, amnesic to your past but handy with the steel.  With the country’s lowest tormented with starvation and ruling factions looking to pillage for glory, your tutorial pits you with an interesting ally for the series: the Yellow Turbans.  Often succumbed to being the first in line of many enemies to tackle in the series, the band of misfits brought together by Zhang Jiao is your first guide to glory.  Origins still angles your work in third-person with the camera taking a more cinematic approach.  Controls still keep the arcade-like pick up and play model of having your light and heavy attacks, but Origins really sets the tone of what it provides by its customization of its gameplay.

One of the series’ roughest points was fighting enemy officers.  With its patented “1 vs. 1000” approach to fighting, 1 vs. 1 duels never felt as approachable and were an afterthought when sweeping through hundreds of smaller soldiers.  In Origins, each elevated officer feels like a problem as they are not easy to mow down like the rest thanks to the addition of Fortitude.  Each officer has ranks of fortitude that you must cut through before being able to do bigger damage. Your hero can use basic attacks to dwindle away at it or use the new Battle Arts to turn the tide in your favor.

Battle Arts are one of the snazzier additions to the Dynasty Warriors. You’re given 4 customizable choices to unleash over-the-top moves that can be used to sweep through waves of foes, parry incoming attacks and cripple an officer’s Fortitude, or to elusively evade danger and prep a counterattack.  These are used by consuming Bravery, which is replenished by defeating foes.  This gives the player even more of an incentive to run through giant waves of enemies as this will allow you to set your next battle up for success with all the Bravery you’ll need.

Once you’ve learned your controls and get a taste of battle, you’re given a time jump to the Yellow Turban Rebellion and access to Origins’ world map.  Your hero will not only find himself in every major battle, but the world map will provide smaller missions to restore peace in certain provinces.  Restoring peace not only provides higher rewards within the area, but allows you to level up any of the 10 weapons you’ll find in the world.  Each weapon comes with different Battle Arts, and Origins encourages equal use of each weapon as leveling up your weapons levels up your character.  Certain levels grant access to perk trees that unlock stat upgrades and new Battle Arts, so it’s worth taking a few sidequests before tackling the larger scale battles.

Throughout towns you’ll run into legendary heroes, all providing some insightful context to the task at hand, or in Han Dang’s case, wondering if you will even remember him after your meal?  Heroes can give you training missions that are small to-do lists which reward you with more skill points to boost your character once completed.  Each big town on the map will have a shop to purchase new weapons and an inn where you can read letters given to you, customize your character before battle, or create Gems to aid certain parts of your kit.

Gems work almost like Materia ala Final Fantasy VII.  Finding Pyroxene in the open world or nabbing it from would-be thieves in side-battles can be used to create gems that can upgrade an assortment of tools like attack range, damage against aerial targets, or chances to automatically block incoming attacks.  Duplicate gems will upgrade current made gems so take the time to create where you can, but you can only take one in battle at a time, so choose wisely!  You can also equip accessories that can boost base stats as well, and I will always take more HP since I get hit a lot in every game, defensive maneuvers be damned.

Once you’ve seen all that the towns have to offer, you’ll set yourself up for the large-scale battles, which come with plenty of voice-acted cutscenes and quite possibly the most underrated addition to the mainline franchise: fully voiced Chinese language for characters.  Why wouldn’t you opt to listen to the native tongue from where this all commenced?!  Once you approach a battlefield a roundtable preparation phase starts with all the notable characters surrounding the war table.  From there you’re given a detailed breakdown of where each team will go, strategizing before heading out, and getting one of the better feels of pre-battle preparation the franchise has ever had.  It really sinks you into the game and brings you ever closer to the action.

Finally, after learning all the tricks and trades, meeting your allies within this Volunteer Army raised to fight the Yellow Turbans, and picking your weapon and Battle Arts of choice, it’s time to see where Origins shines brightest: the chaos of battle.  Next gen upgrades finally have provided Omega Force with the ability to plant hundreds of soldiers on screen at one time and not once in any of the most cramped battles did I feel a hint of slowdown.  Origins had me Musou attacking literal hundreds of enemies and my game stayed smooth as butter the whole way.  As mentioned before, the elevated officers hit hard and have a mountain of HP, but are so satisfying to chip down as the game provides plenty of breaks in the mashing with perfect parries, just evades, and Battle Arts primed to break Fortitude and cut through the bigger enemies.

Big battles need big setpieces, and Origins takes the coup de grâce of each battle to a satisfying, deafening crescendo with its Large Force battles.  These commence when both sides gather large amounts of their armies to swing the tide of battle in their favor.  These battles have thousands, literal thousands, of enemies doing battle.  Enemies will do unblockable coordinated moves to send dozens at you simultaneously, enemy officers will work together to retreat and fight in tandem with other officers.  They are there to kill you, not to just be a statistic, and these setpieces are absolute perfection of the Dynasty Warriors formula.  You’ll be using all your focus, evading and parrying attacks, depleting your Bravery to give yourself an modicum of space to breathe, breaking down the Fortitude of the officers looking to put you in the ground, all while carving through hundreds of enemies in an attempt to turn the tide of the battle once and for all.  It’s an injected cocktail of serotonin and adrenaline into your veins that is worth every single penny of your hard earned money to purchase this game, and Omega Force deserve their flowers by providing such an absolutely tremendous experience after where the mainline series was left.

Oh, and there are boss battles now?

I’ve got so much gameplay to continue to play through and I’ve been chomping at the bit to continue through this iteration of the Three Kingdoms.  Omega Force and Koei Tecmo have done a masterful job at revitalizing the Dynasty Warriors formula by making every battle, whether against 1 or 1,000, an invigorating experience.  I’m gonna boot this back up and I’ll see y’all at Hu Lao Gate: you just know who I’m gonna avoid.