Small disclaimer: I am only marking my playthrough of Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition as completed because I did technically see an ending. After beating Orochi X in Chapter 4 of the Story Mode, you get a cutscene meant to signify the end and the credits start to roll. I imagine this is how the original game ends, but, of course, Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition is an expanded rerelease, so they have plenty more content and story to go through after the original ending. I plan on playing through at least most of that content since I unlocked Chapter 5 shortly after typing this review, but I feel I have experienced enough to review the game. All of that being said, here is my review.

So, Warriors Orochi is a Musou series that I have never actually tried until my time playing this game on Steam. I'm also very surprised I have not given this series a look before since I really enjoy both Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors, which this game heavily features a crossover between. It serves as a crossover between Koei Tecmo IPs in general, too, with characters like Ryu Hayabusa from Ninja Gaiden and Ayane from Dead or Alive popping up to join your ranks of playable characters. You have to unlock the characters over time by completing missions in Story Mode, but this game has 140+ characters and that's just insane. With a game that has that many characters, you'd think leveling them all might be a pain, but the developers must have thought to give players a helping hand since Growth Points exist. Simply distribute some points to the characters you want to level up in the dedicated menu for it and watch those levels soar. Unfortunately, some characters have the same weapons, but I found that most of the characters have original move-sets. I enjoyed experimenting with the characters every time I unlocked them; although I have not unlocked everyone, I did get my hands on most of the characters. I genuinely think that the roster is probably the best part about this game. I actually got a nice blast of nostalgia since a lot of the Samurai Warriors characters play pretty much exactly the same as they do in Samurai Warriors 2 Xtreme Legends, which was my childhood Musou game alongside Dynasty Warriors 6. Every character has a good amount of costumes and, as far as I know, this version of the game has most of the DLC costumes. I was particularly happy to see that nearly every samurai that was in SW2XL has their alternate costumes from that game to use here and so do the characters that were in DW6, but the primary designs for the characters used in things like their portraits in dialogue come from SW3 and DW7. I found myself pleasantly surprised with the guest characters. Ryu Hayabusa was one of my most played characters, as I expected, but I also really liked Nemea even though I don't even know what game he comes from. Other fun guest characters are here, too, like Achilles (I think he's from another Koei Tecmo IP), some anime-looking knight called Sterkenburg Cranach (I heard he's from Atelier but I dunno if that's true), and Sophitia from Soul Calibur. The game also has a good amount of what seems to be original characters to me, though they may have been in other Musou games that I just haven't played. These include the likes of Kaguya, Susano-o, Sun Wukong, Nezha, Kiyomori Taira, and plenty more. I found them to be a fun addition, even if you don't unlock a good chunk of these guys until way later in the game from the looks of things. My most played characters in this game were probably Ryu Hayabusa, Hanzo Hattori, Masamune Date, and Dong Zhuo. I actually used a somewhat varied selection of characters - I had a decently leveled Hideyoshi Toyotomi, Nobunaga Oda, Katsuie Shibata, Zhang He, Zhou Tai, Kotaro Fuma, Sterkenburg, and Nemea - but this list includes the characters I remember playing the most (as far as I could tell, there's no way to directly see who you played more). By the end of the story mode, my go-to team consisted of Ryu Hayabusa, Dong Zhuo, and Hanzo Hattori. They were all in the Level 70 - 80 range and my frugalness with Growth Points has resulted in me having a huge surplus of it, way more than I think I could ever spend. Once I pick the game up again to play through the rest of the story, I plan on trying out more characters to see if anyone else is as fun to play to me as my current go-to team.

As far as gameplay goes, I found that Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition is a fairly standard Musou experience. You're there to kill thousands of faceless goons, complete objectives to gain advantage in the battlefield, level up to get even stronger, earn powerful new weapons from the lambs of your slaughter, and just absolutely decimate anyone that dares to get in your way. Musou games tend to share a very repetitive formula, which is highly critiqued (and I understand why), but for some reason I almost never get tired of it when I grab a new Musou game. I think that the main way this game distinguishes itself from the rest is through its focus on team composition. In every battle, you pick three characters you can swap between at any time. The three fighters all have their own health and Musou bars, so you can swap to the next one if you're getting low or you want a quick and easy Musou attack. Characters regain health and Musou when you're not playing them. Pressing down on the D-Pad summons all three and they can help you out in fights, but definitely the main point of this feature to me is the team Musou attack that can be done if all of your characters have max Musou bar. You have some special moves you can perform through pressing the R button using some of your Musou up, which I think is a new thing but I really don't know if it is or not. Also, one small quirk with the game that's probably worth mentioning is that the Samurai Warriors characters (and some of the guest characters) have to hold the button to use their Musous, but the Dynasty Warriors characters (and some of the guest characters again) use it as soon as you press the button once. This was something I did not realize until looking it up, so I just assumed Samurai Warriors characters did not have Musou attacks until I saw I was doing it wrong. Kind of silly in retrospect considering that this game only does that because the Samurai Warriors games also have you hold the button down to do Musou attacks. The last noteworthy thing this game does differently from the Musou games I've played in my opinion is through its classifications of characters. Every character is under a specific type: Attack, Speed, Technique, and Wonder. As far as I could tell, these don't really change the way you play much, but the types do have their own special thing about them. Power types basically get super armor so no regular attack will make them flinch, Speed types get a double jump, and Wonder types can dash in the middle of their attacks by using a tiny bit of their Musou bar. I couldn't figure out what the special ability of Technique types is (if they even have one). I like these classifications, but they look more important than they actually are. For example, you'd think Power characters have stronger weapons, but that's not always true.

When playing Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate, Medium difficulty is the default I went for with all required story missions until I reached Chapter 4. When your characters get to around Level 30 or 40, the levels become way too easy on Medium difficulty, and by the time I got to Chapter 4's main story missions (after doing all the side missions of the other chapters) my main group of characters were around Level 70. I also got the strongest weapons - the special Mystic weapons, only obtained once by fulfilling special criteria in a specific mission - for two out of the three characters, so my team was plowing through bosses in Medium difficulty with just two or three hits. Naturally, Hard became my new default difficulty for Chapter 4 and beyond, which really isn't very difficult either with how strong my go-to team was. Before starting Chapter 4, I only changed the difficulty when I wanted to go on Easy difficulty to quickly finish the first level several times (I did this because raising bonds requires you to play a level to see the bond increase and it would feel like a waste of time not doing it on Easy imo) or when I needed to go on Hard difficulty to unlock the faster horse and the Mystic Weapons for my most played characters. Once I get to playing through Chapter 5 up to Chapter 8, I will likely try turning the difficulty up to the second most difficult option (Chaos) once I get to playing through Chapter 5. The difficulty feels like more of a level curve thing than actually making the game harder for you.

The story of this game felt rather unimportant to me, but that's not to discredit the tons of effort put into it through things like cutscenes and a metric shitload of dialogue. In fact, there's a lot of focus put on the story; I'm just not really looking for a great story when I'm playing a Musou game, so its inclusion is nice but inconsequential for me (and its still not all that great). You start off as Sima Zhao, Ma Chao, and Hanbei Takenaka fighting against a demon army and a huge hydra. The characters soon realize that they are completely powerless against it and try to retreat. They nearly die trying, but a woman from the Mystic Realm comes to save them. She reveals that her name is Kaguya (I believe that comes from a Japanese myth but I couldn't tell you about that) and she has the power to go back in time using the memories of people that were there. They use her power to wind the clock back to a time before the hydra attacked. The goal is to amass an army of the strongest warriors in the land to take down the hydra with. You learn more about the hydra, the godlike beings of the Mystic Realm, and other important characters like the trickster spirit Da Ji and Orochi himself later down the storyline, but in the beginning you don't really know who these people (or beasts) are. Basically, the entire game after the prologue mission is going through battlegrounds to fight some dudes either to recruit them or because they're in your way, and honestly I wouldn't have it any other way. The motivation for the characters tends to be at least a little different depending on who it is, but a lot of them either join because they got captured, want to go back in time to save someone (or correct a mistake of theirs), or they join the army for the greater good. A lot of stuff happens - typically within missions themselves - and there are a few fun twists and turns. I liked how, in the end of Chapter 2, everyone in your army is essentially left with no choice but to trust Da Ji's plan of using her own memories to go back even further in time. I think it would have been interesting if we saw a more good side to Da Ji through this, especially since there's a character that is unshakably loyal to her, but unfortunately she is just evil and using the army to revive Orochi. Maybe that's explored more after Chapter 5, I don't know. Nonetheless, the story does ultimately (heh) feel more like set-dressing for the sake of an epic scale to me. For the most part, I saw the story as just a way to add flavor to the missions, make you feel more invested in the characters, and give them reasons to fight each other. The funny thing about the latter point is that a lot of characters just kinda act like they know each other already, although the dialogue between characters highly suggests that this is because WO3U is a sequel to the other games. I wouldn't know because I haven't played those games. Still, its amusing how Achilles can threaten to take his opponents to Hades while fighting alongside fantasy ninjas, magic ninjas, samurais, magic samurais, warriors with weird weapons, sorcerers, Yōkai, demons, Oni, and gods from Taoist, Buddhist, and Shinto stories.

In the Story Mode, you get a base that serves as a small hub you go to after beating missions. Characters show up in the base depending on what mission you beat or what characters you're playing and you can talk to them. This either leads to fun banter between characters, discussions of what happened in the mission you just did, or a conversation that will unlock a new mission for you. Unfortunately I found that a good chunk of missions are only attainable through talking with characters, so sometimes there's a pressure to talk to everyone you see and keep swapping between characters to find the right one for unlocking a mission. I'm no completionist for most games I play, but I did still talk to everyone in the camp when I could and often swapped characters just to see if any of them made a new mission show up. I found that most of what I did in the hub was fuse weapons or buy new ones from the Blacksmith. With the sheer number of characters that are in this game, I liked to micromanage them all and make sure they all had decent weapons, even the ones I didn't play once. One feature that annoyed me about the camp in this game is the bond system, which a good amount of missions are locked to. The bond system is just a few gauges that represent a character's relationship with other characters. You have to have the character your playing talk to another to start a bond, then raise it through various ways. The easiest way is to host tea parties by talking to the dedicated tea shop guy and going through some menus. Don't even bother with the bond system until you get moon viewings (the most expensive tea party option), it will save you a lot of headache. Once you get that, you just dump some of the in-game currency into two or three moon viewings for the characters that need the bond, then play a mission with them all in your party and you can unlock the mission. This whole system is more of a minor nuisance to me than anything, but it was something I was often wondering how I would ever raise until I looked it up online and found out that its a pain in the neck to raise bonds before you get the moon viewings. It felt pointless to me overall, yet characters and missions are locked behind it. I would have preferred not having to keep playing the first level on Easy difficulty with all these characters since it felt like a waste of time to me.

To be frank, I really did not think I would have a lot to say about this game, but of course its nearly impossible for me to write a short cohesive review on this site. I give Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition four stars. I really enjoyed my time with it and I see why people say its one of the best Musou games out there.