The Dynasty Warriors franchise is slightly controversial because of how "mindless" the games appear to be. To an extent, I agree with this assessment, but the franchise still displays fun gameplay, interesting ideas, and good difficulty throughout some of its entries.
That said, while Dynasty Warriors 2 is not a mindless game, it's also not a good one. Its difficulty mostly comes from broken mechanics and bad controls.
You control a warrior of your choice. The characters are based on the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" book, of which I don't know anything, but they're basically historic warriors from China.
Your objective in each stage is to kill the enemy general, which you accomplish by conquering small parts of the map little by little. To do this, you have to kill enemies, of which there are bosses and nameless soldiers.
The gameplay is engaging in two ways. On one hand, conquering parts of the map is inherently satisfying. It feels like you're cleaning areas one by one.
The other engaging element is your character's ability to wipe an enemy's army by themselves. It feels great to hit 30 or so enemy soldiers with one combo.
These two parts are well-designed, so it's no wonder that they constitute the base of what is nowadays a pretty big franchise. However, this particular entry does not execute on its concepts well.
For starters, enemy bosses can recover health when knocked down, which means that you need to be careful not to finish your combos with them. This design choice is just baffling and it makes fights less fun. As if that were not enough, your "allies" can also hit enemies, which means that they can knock them down and recover their health despite your best efforts.
It doesn't help that you can't manually adjust the camera, except for looking ahead with the L button, so orienting your character is difficult.
Something else that I didn't like is that some enemies are too strong to beat on your first try, meaning that you need to go back to previous levels in order to grind your stats.
The story is also told in a poor manner. The cutscenes are really short and lack any context. Even the endings are basically 5-second cutscenes that say: "We won!".
As you can see, this game is an example of executing a good concept badly. I'm glad it exists because of what it represents, but I wouldn't recommend playing it today.
That said, while Dynasty Warriors 2 is not a mindless game, it's also not a good one. Its difficulty mostly comes from broken mechanics and bad controls.
You control a warrior of your choice. The characters are based on the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" book, of which I don't know anything, but they're basically historic warriors from China.
Your objective in each stage is to kill the enemy general, which you accomplish by conquering small parts of the map little by little. To do this, you have to kill enemies, of which there are bosses and nameless soldiers.
The gameplay is engaging in two ways. On one hand, conquering parts of the map is inherently satisfying. It feels like you're cleaning areas one by one.
The other engaging element is your character's ability to wipe an enemy's army by themselves. It feels great to hit 30 or so enemy soldiers with one combo.
These two parts are well-designed, so it's no wonder that they constitute the base of what is nowadays a pretty big franchise. However, this particular entry does not execute on its concepts well.
For starters, enemy bosses can recover health when knocked down, which means that you need to be careful not to finish your combos with them. This design choice is just baffling and it makes fights less fun. As if that were not enough, your "allies" can also hit enemies, which means that they can knock them down and recover their health despite your best efforts.
It doesn't help that you can't manually adjust the camera, except for looking ahead with the L button, so orienting your character is difficult.
Something else that I didn't like is that some enemies are too strong to beat on your first try, meaning that you need to go back to previous levels in order to grind your stats.
The story is also told in a poor manner. The cutscenes are really short and lack any context. Even the endings are basically 5-second cutscenes that say: "We won!".
As you can see, this game is an example of executing a good concept badly. I'm glad it exists because of what it represents, but I wouldn't recommend playing it today.