Product Description

Dynasty Warriors 5 is the greatest Dynasty Warriors game ever. All of the characters will have their own story, and the events will be viewed from the Warrior's own perspective. Moire powerful weapons, smarter soliders and battlefields that are 30% larger, plus reduced fog and more detailed backgrounds. You'll be challenged to make snap decisions in the heat of battle -- and keep advancing into enemy territory to comple your goal and build a Dynasty. Twice as many characters per screen, for the most devastating Musou attacks ever Enhanced battlefield base system challenges your strategy skills in combat

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6269 in Video Games
• Brand: Koei
• Model: 40198001410
• Released on: 2005-03-30
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platform: PlayStation2
• Dimensions: 2.00 pounds

Features

• Massive roster of 48 playable characters -- largest cast ever for a Dynasty Warriors game
• New Jump attacks, new Musou Rage attacks and blazing 9-hit Evolution Combos
• Bodyguard officers give single players Double Musou attacks
• 38 newly designed maps, with environments that have their own look and feel
• Enhanced battlefield base system and intelligent soldiers respond to events more strategically

Customer Reviews

Huge leaps and bounds, major improvements in gameplay.
I had most definitely not expected this. I had a love/hate relationship with Dynasty Warriors 4, and Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires was so bad that I popped in for two days and then sold it off. Dynasty Warriors 5, however, seems determined to correct every flaw about the two above games and the results are surprisingly impressive.

DW4: Empires was a stinker to me because of endlessly respawning enemy generals, a tiresome "stronghold" system, worthless allies, and an inability to build up your fighters since they start at Level 1 at every new game. Much to my delighted surprise, all of the above problems were fixed.

PROS:
- The gameplay is now a hybrid of DW4 and Empires where enemy generals stay dead when you kill them (thank heaven), checkpoints and supply bases can be realistically captured without having to wait at one location for 10 minutes to defend it against endless enemies. The system of taking down enemy supply bases works very well; you actually see a marked turning of the battle in your favour as you proceed.
- No more levels where you kill a dozen enemy generals only to have a single, artificially enhanced enemy reinforcement pop up next to your commander to ruin your game. Your commander is no longer a dummy that can die with a poke. Obviously, this allows you to do more fighting and less running around saving your allies' butts.
- Fighter training is back (which was impossible in Empires), though a little more difficult than before because now your weapon doesn't go up in levels at the same time the character does; you have to find these weapon items while playing the levels, and the quality of weapons you find is proportionate to the difficulty of the level. Tougher than DW4, but manageable, and the system is logical enough.
- The biggest surprise: Allied AI became far, far superior. DW4 players will remember this hyper-annoying situation where if you slaughter every one of the enemies except their commander, your allied soldiers will run towards the commander like idiots, not attacking, and pushing the commander around so much that you can't get at him. That is, happily, history. Allied generals are now almost as skillful as enemy generals, and your bodyguard (now only one, rather than a team of eight at once) is now very helpful, aggressively attacking, healing themselves and you, getting you out of jams. About time!
- Happily, they kept the control system from Empires so that now you can fully control where your combos face. This was like a breath of fresh air. Now if you miss a hit, it is indeed your own fault, and not the computer messing you up.
- Marginally better voice work. Some of the changes in voice actors were for the worse -- Zhou Yu, Cao Cao and Lu Bu had good voices in DW4; now they sound silly. And new character Xing Cai is abysmal, sounding like a six-year-old reciting bad dialogue. But the overall quality of voice work has improved, with fewer stiff deliveries. Diao Chan, Yue Ying, Sun Ce, and Lu Meng all sound far better than before, and Jiang Wei's character lost that horrible accent and is now quite nice to listen to.
- Improved graphics. Seems like they added some shadowing, and the look is now more textured, a little grittier.
- Improved map design. You still have to do some running around, but aside from the labyrinthine "Battle of Chen Cang" level, no more levels like that insufferable He Fei map from DW4, where you had to run along the length of the map six to seven times to beat the level.
- The "peons" -- enemy footsoldiers -- are more numerous and less hard to kill. The later soldiers in DW4 were so hardy they were tiresome to fight; no such problem here, at least at Normal difficulty level.

CONS:
- No more duels. I personally don't miss this feature, but I know that one of the top requests from DW4 players was the ability to challenge computer enemies to duels. Instead of refining the duel system, they've dispensed with it altogether.
- No more customized officers of your own design. This was one of the more fun aspects of Empires -- gone with the wind.
- The new Musou Mode will not be to everybody's taste. Now, instead of choosing a side and having all of the officers of that side available to you, you choose a character who has a specific story arc, and you can't swap fighters midway. There are advantages to this -- more varied storylines, deeper gameplay -- but the downside is the inability to switch characters, and now you *have* to master every single character to finish the game.
- Enemy generals do an insane amount of damage. It's just not fun in any context to face an enemy that can take half your life bar with one single combo. It's nice that enemies do less of the "block you to death" trick, but to have to pay for one mistake with half your life bar is excessive. It doesn't ruin the game, but it mars the enjoyment.
- Cao Pi, Pang De and Xing Cai are all pretty unappealing as new characters. Cao Pi's moves are pathetic, Xing Cai is slow and unremarkable (terrible voice, too), and Pang De looks like a nameless general. It's as if they ran out of character-design ideas. Ling Tong's nunchaku are neat, but why not have a character use a mace ("liang ya pang", or "wolf's tooth club"), a whip, a quarterstaff, or tri-sectioned nunchaku?
- Character balance has actually suffered. The new weapons system, where each weapon has a "weight" rating which affects how fast you attack, actually skews the game even more -- the fast, powerful characters become overwhelmingly strong (Jiang Wei is almost unstoppable with the new weapons system), while "alternate", more joke-like characters like Zhang Jiao, Xu Zhu, and Diao Chan are now nearly feeble -- the slower characters are crippled by heavy weapons, short-ranged characters get overwhelmed by the increased number of peons, and slow-moving characters will get pummeled by the insidious enemy AI. They should have given these harder characters a little something to balance the odds.

Overall, this game has successfully restored my faith in the series. It was more appealing to pick up than DW4, and leagues above Empires in design and gameplay. Highly recommended for fans of brawler games -- not perfect, but the best example of this game series I've seen and played yet.

Same Fun with Improved Graphics
The Dynasty Warriors series of games keeps going and going! We're up to #5 now - with Chinese warriors running around slashing through historical battles.

If you have never played any of the Dynasty Warriors games, I highly recommend at least renting it. The series is incredibly popular and many other games tend to use bits and pieces of its style. In general you choose a warrior from one of several families. You take your warrior down his or her "path" in life - moving from battle to battle. Each battle involves you, your favorite weapon, and MASSIVE groups of enemies to bash your way through.

Remember the intro sequence to Lord of the Rings, where the Dark Lord Sauron and his giant mace taking a sweep and hitting multiple people in a row? This is the same sort of thing. You wade into large groups of enemies and swing your sword, knocking over 4-5 at a time. It can seem odd at first for someone used to realistic FPS games where your aim is one on one fighting. But the super-human bashing gets addictive very quickly, and you watch your KO count rise quickly to 200, 300, and more. It gives you a great sense of satisfaction.

Each Dynasty Warriors sequel improves the graphics, voices, reactions of your enemies and friends. In this version, you have a loyal bodyguard who stays by your side. When you do a power up attack, so does your bodyguard!

You can ride on horses, collect special items, plan out your strategies and hear the cheers of victory when you triumph. As always, you can unlock new people, new outfits, and work to achieve every ending.

The graphics are really nice, but are a bit polygonal. That's simply a limitation of the PS2, though. I really believe this is about as good as you are going to get given the PS2's abilities. You get flowing water, falling rain, fogs, cool special effects, and rather detailed armors.

The sound is very arcadey - but that's the point of this game. It's not about realistic stealth and atmosphere. It's about wild hacking and slashing. You get bouncy rock music and a lot of built-in quotes - "In the name of justice!" and "you've been training hard!" Nobody sounds even remotely Chinese, but I suppose many US players would complain that the voices were hard to understand if they tried to make it more authentic. I also suppose that a few of the outfits look more like medieval knight wear than Chinese traditional warriors.

The system of building up your levels, your bodyguard's levels and working from map to map is pretty much the same as in all of the series. You can really learn a lot about Chinese history, too, by playing these game series.

I really enjoy this series a lot. There is the simple hack-and-slash that is so gratifying after a long day of work - a feeling that you've waded through the enemy and come out victorious. There is also the ability to strategize your assault, to study the map and determine the most efficient way of winning the objective.

Some may ask why they really need to buy 5 if they own 1-4 already. It's a fair enough question, just how many Dynasty Warrior versions can you really need? But the graphics are nicer and the gameplay is definitely fun. I'd gladly consider this an 'upgrade' that I buy once a year, to improve my fun and enjoyment of the game. We definitely get months of fun gameplay from each release!

Highly recommended

Fun, but Love/Hate continues
Now I'm probably one of maybe 200 people on the continent that has actually read the entire unabridged "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" by Luo Guanzhong, Dynasty Warriors really messes up some of the history and the characters and yet I own 5 of the games. Why? Because they are fun as hell and they got most of it right, right enough anyways.

The Japanese makers have really "animade" the Three Kingdoms and seriously over-exagerated things but that is part of the charm.
I do wonder who decides which people to add, Guan Ping was a nice addition but Guan Xing and Zhang Bao(Zhang Fei's son, name sounds just like the yellow turban) are more important. Xing Cai was news to me, I never heard of her until this game and it sent me into a research frenzy. Suffice it to say, she never would've picked up a weapon(much like all the female characters with the exception of the daughter of Sun Jian, she actually did know her martial arts and put the fear of God into the generals that tried to stop her).

This game does a good job on the Sun family, in that unlike the previous games they actually include that Sun Jian dies before returning home from the (failed)attempt to remove Dong Zhuo from power.

Cao Cao is great, Xiahou Dun, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei all look perfect, just like the ancient paintings.

It may also bring joy to fans to know that Lu Bu did actually have the antenna-like feathers coming from his head. They did ruin him in this game though, they made him the "peerless samurai only searching for a challenge" similar to Musashi when he was opportunistic, petty and a total traitor(he killed his adopted father to join Dong Zhuo then killed him). Honor wasn't high on his list of priorities an dby the time of his capture(and execution) either Zhang Fei or Guan Yu were already strong enough to beat him.

Kudos for having the right Kanji(literally "written characters from China", in Japanese) for the names right.

If you know your Chinese history(which you probably don't, which is okay as few do) you might be bothered, but not enough to stop playing.

Oh, and his name is pronounced T'sao T'sao(Cao Cao) not Cow Cow, I'm almost at the point of murdering that French Voice Director, you'd think that since Koei has a branch office IN CHINA they could at least get my favorite professor's name right.