This is not my favourite musou, but it's probably the best one Omega Force have ever mde, and the difficulty in surpassing it is reason enough for OF to never make a DW10.

Honestly, genuinely, sincerely: It's strange that every musou after this has been so "one step forward two steps back", because this game is proof that OF are capable of making a nearly perfect game.

Levels are long, open and substantial without being exhausting to traverse (as in older musous) or so easily traversed that their size feels extraneous (like modern musous). There's enough freedom to pick a path while still reigning you in enough to stop you breaking the sequence entirely - and sometimes you can do that anyway! There are rewards for it!

The storytelling is the right kind for a story like Dynasty Warriors. Rather than include jarring attempts to play chicken with morality or depth (as in 5, 7 or 9), 8's cutscenes merely focus on convincing you to be hype for the next fight while giving you a token retelling of ROTTK. You could argue that it's spartan, but having seen what results in DW attempting to take itself seriously I'd counter-argue that this is a virtue. Even despite the superfluous story, though, there are some excellent little characters moments here that really shine in the hypotheticals. It helps that this game copies DW4's excellent Kingdom-centric story mod, as opposed to dooming everyone to individuality.

And golly god, do I love those hypotheticals. They get a lot of praise, and rightly so. They're an iteration on DW4's hidden objectives, those little "beeline to a doomed officer and he'll live!" things you could do that were ultimately meaningless but nice flavour. Here, they unlock an entire alternate route. All of which feature gorgeous stages, incredibly use of reused/rearranged classic songs, and great character lineups. Even the 'canon' routes have their own hypotheticals, with my personal favourite being the saving of Pang De during Fan Castle, which leads to an EXCELLENT cutscene. They're just such a good fucking system, no notes.

On the topic of visuals, let's be honest. Technically, yeah, the game looks like shit. It shows its age with incredibly muddy textures and the absolute absence of atmospheric colours that aren't grey/brown/pale blue. But my god is the art direction solid. I still maintain that DW9's designs are better, but 8's are a close second and it's frankly amazing that they managed unique character silhouettes and busy-but-not-overdesigned designs considering the time period. The scale of some castle/palace stages is truly impressive too, even if the verticality is a bit of a ballache.

As for the actual gameplay, it's so airtight that I'm genuinely amazed the musous which follow its base-hunting format are so flaccid and uneven. While I do hate the affinity system, the actual core is just perfect. EX moves help to distinguish characters, and most weapons are just an utter blast. Being able to switch weapons (and utilize switch attacks!) is a joy, and it helps for those few characters whose base movesets just don't vibe with me. Combined with the excellent stage/battle design, and this game is a treasure to play.

And, unlike most musous that're fun to play, DW8XL actually has meaningful content. There are a lot of story and free mode stages with little in the way of repetition. This is not DW5 or 9, wherein experiencing each available story will make you repeat the same battles ad nauseaum. You don't know how fucking happy I am that I can do each kingdom's story without repeating the Yellow Turban and Dong Zhuo stages ad infinitum. That the missions lack a lot of more annoying DW mainstays (like escorts that get bogged down by peons) is a plus.

Ambition Mode, while not for me, is perhaps the gold standard for a mode aimed at people who wish to play the game forever. It fills Empires' niche - letting you engage in randomly generated musou fights forever - without pretending to be a 4x game and without an age of downtime between fights. As far as musou endgames go, it's exceptional and far less soul-crushing than something like History Mode (FE Warriors) or Adventure Mode (Hyrule Warriors).

Still, the game is near-perfect but I do have some very minor gripes. Not enough to impact the five stars, but worth mentioning.

1) The dub is mostly solid, but a lot of characters were translated poorly in terms of personality. Yue Jin is the most obvious example; in Japanese he's a hot-blooded character whose behaviour is contrasted by his polite and formal manner of speaking. In English, he has an extremely wooden voice and odd diction. Zhang Liao and Zhuge Dan have kind of the same issue. This is really obvious in the hypothetical stages, which required extra voice acting. But hey, at least Jamieson Price goes crazy as Lu Bu.

2) There's something wrong with the input buffer. It's extremely tight, and often leads to me using the wrong charge attack while I'm still adjusting to a new moveset. It's most obvious on Cao Cao's weapon, as there's a pretty noticeable gap in the input window for doing C2 and C3.

3) The XL characters are leveraged really weirdly. Yu Jin is EVERYWHERE when Wei on screen, Fa Zheng appears a lot but is functionally a UNPC with how little he says, Zhu Ran might as well not exist. Chen Gong seems to ONLY appear in XL stages, same with Lu Lingqi - AND SHE DISAPPEARS IN LU BU'S HYPOTHETICAL.

4) Hitboxes are a mixed bag, and make Havoc (range-boosting skill) mandatory. Really noticeable on Zhang He and Sun Ce.

These are really minor in the grand scheme of things, though. This game is the quintessential musou, and holding it up as the series' gold standard is one of the few times I'm in full agreement with the fandom.

Actually quite a bit better than I remembered. Compared to DYNASTY WARRIORS 7 this has much more engaging gameplay and is fuller-featured. But it seems like to achieve those steps forward they had to scale back the presentation significantly, and that's a shame given how strong 7 was in that regard. There is a TON of story content, but it's not particularly well done, with lots of important aspects of the narrative skipped over and mainly in-engine cutscenes which can be janky and ruin some of the drama. Overall there's less of a focus on the individual characters besides the big ones. Also, there are some notable corners cut here and there - missing v/o, an abundance of typos, graphical oversights. It seems a little bit like quality was sacrificed for quantity.

Honestly you could make an argument for this over 7, but personally, I can't put it there. It's frustrating that there has never been a best one of these games in all aspects.

Summer of Musou long over, the wind gets cold, Dynasty Warriors forever

After spending over a hundred of hours and playing ten titles in spanning most of Omega Forces's mainline library of series barring from the most popular and titular Dynasty Warriors, the lesser known sister series Samurai Warriors to one of the newer collaborative titles with Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes. A long summer finally overdue for a personal closure as Dynasty Warriors 8 will be the last musou game I play for a decent while and it's the best way to close out this small and personal project of mine in terms of trying to play as many musou games I can. What many fans consider to be the last great mainline before they try to reinvent the series again with the next installment to a lackluster reception and I think Omega Force feel like at this point they can only do so much having to remake the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in the same genre time and time again. With that said, Dynasty Warriors 8 finally feels like a refinement of 7 which was already step in the right direction with a few caveats that I think was due to a lack of focus in this specific area.

The yellow flames of rebellion burning brightly, the Han dynasty is finished.

A hard pill to swallow in terms of how the story is presented is that for those coming from 7's more intricate and quality presentation comes with a quantity over quality approach for how the story is told here. The lack of narration is sorely missed here for starters and the lack of specific events despite knowing that the first battles of the Yellow Turban Rebellion are probably overplayed to death at this point are kind of missed. The way the scenes are portrayed take a down turn too and take a less cinematic approach like not changing the control of playable officers every now and then going for a more traditional approach. The quantity comes in spades here is that's a lot of stages here to go through including hypothetical situations and actually allowing you to pick from a variety of characters for each stage compared to just one singular one for each stage. There's just so much to unpack here that after tens of hours, you'll still find stages and scenarios you never played yet.

History forever changed against the odds as Cao Cao's fleet turns red with the flames of Wu and the winds of Shu.

There's never been a huge assortment of moves and movesets in a mainline Dynasty Warriors game before and it truly shows here. Being a refinement of 7's dual and open weapon system, each character now has a completely unique weapon granting each of the eighty three characters something of their own. This is also not mentioning that each character has two unique ex charge strings for their unique weapon and three type of musou attacks not including their rage musou attack too. I really do like most of these moves as they do a great job of somehow still making each character unique and fun barring a few movesets that are inevitably not gonna be as good as other but there's such a healthy roster here that it'll be extremely easy to find a few characters you'll love here.

Attacking his own family, Liu Bei makes a hard decision which will decide the fate of everyone around him and fully form his own empire.

Apart from the standard free mode and challenge modes, there is one unique mode called Ambition Mode that is pretty important to go through if you value overall progression into the game itself. Ambition mode works like a very light premise from the original Xtreme Mode is that you essentially go through a gauntlet of mini stages gathering resources and recruiting officers in that all the progress is kept even after losing or ending a run early. You essentially get materials as well from this mode which is used to upgrade the shop for better weapons, facilities that grant you more gold and facilities that provide experience to your officers which you'll need if you want to level up all your characters quickly. I mostly enjoyed this mode until the second half when you go into the Xtreme Legends version of this mode when you lose a lot of your officers and the flow of gameplay completely changes into singular battles to fill out a subjugation percentage. After fully completing this mode, there isn't much of a reward other than the facilities which were already given at this point so I'd say just only really do this mode if you want to grab all the achievements or wanted a way to get experience for all your officers eventually.

A bitter betrayal leading to the god of war's demise, him and his sons fight on until the bitter end.

Despite the original title looking nine years old today, I have to say Dynasty Warriors 8 is still one of the best looking titles in the genre yet. This might be my huge personal experience playing the PlayStation 2 titles talking but it really feels like the characters and the overall designs look more simple running away from the complexity of the past two titles at least. The soundtrack also give Dynasty Warriors 4 a huge run for its money with some of the biggest battles having some of their best themes here. Not also mentioning you can freely select music from previous games as well making the whole package feel like a celebration more than a mainline unlike Warriors Orochi will usually do.

Entrusting his legacy to another, he takes the mantle one last time against Wei on the Wuzhang Plains.

A long road finally finished, history turned into dust itself. I can understand how people looked upon this title fondly as the last great Dynasty Warriors title and the fact that it's been nine years since a title like this is a bit sad. Finally given the complete retrospective view of everything, I can safely say this one is one of my favorite titles just for the sheer amount of content and things to do that make it fun. I've spent around fifty hours and only beating the story modes and ambition mode that I felt like I scratched the surface. If you somehow ever wanted to get into the series, definitely play this one. Experience the history and the feelings of truly overcoming the odds against what once was.


Under a new fourth kingdom, they would finally defeat the ever fervent Shu and the rest would follow as the chaotic era of the Three Kingdoms would truly be over. Peace would finally reach the land and the sun now rises into something new. Will the story ever be truly retold again or is this how the legend ends?