Goddamn.
This game is such a marked improvement over DW2 it's honestly kind of insane.
DW2 isn't really a musou, I'd argue. It's just a 3D beat em up.
Here, in DW3, is where the entire genre that Koei have been riding the wave of for two decades was built. This is where DW gets its own style, where the levels take on a format beyond mountainous terrain and walls, where the music stops being "guy goes ham on the guitar before a 15 second break", and where objectives actually matter - to an extent. I could go on, but really; this game is foundational, and while it's not perfect, it's honestly kind of overwhelming to go back this far and see where it all came from?
Anyway, enough gushing, time to review.
I appreciate that characters are no longer stuck with the same attacks for the entire runtime, buuuuuuut linking new combos to weapon drops was a bit of a shit move. For reference, I gunned the campaigns of Cao Cao, Liu Bei and Sun Jian just to be ~all-encompassing~ and in the latter it took me until about 3/4th the game to get a weapon that let me use C5. It's not great.
Also, as an aside, this game made kinda understand why some people whinge about clones; I dicked about with a lot of auxiliary cast members in Free Mode and damn, everyone with a sword feels near-identical. Even characters with more interesting weapons felt samey since C2/3/4 are launch/stun/sweep on almost everyone.
On the level front, just... Holy fuck they're actually enjoyable, barring some issues I'll get to later. The presence of objectives and events helps keep things entertaining to a degree, a welcome respite after DW2's ascetism. And, of course, there's the trademark dogshit DW3 dub to keep you entertained too. Above all else though, I appreciate that the paths forward are far less binary and droll.
But eesh, they hadn't really nailed the enemy density:level size ratio just yet. It's really noticeable in Chibi, where it feels as though a third of the map goes completely unused. Even outside of it, there's a loooooooooot of trekking through empty space, because...
I know PS2 musou fans swear by the morale system, and this game's especially, but in my experience (playing on Hard, thanks to some old PCSX2 save data giving me a starting boost) the morale system actually makes the game feel terrible.
I'm no musou spring chicken, so these games are easy to me by default. Here, in DW3, it actually feels as though the game punishes me for being good by letting me not play it.
An average DW3 stage sees me daisy chain officer kills together, sink the enemy morale, and then struggle to find new things to kill as my emboldened allies sweep the stage like locusts. This isn't an issue in any other DW, even this game's immediate predecessor, so it stands out really heavily here.
Further compounding this is the decidedly strange stage distribution for some characters. For the three I finished it's fine, there's a very nice buildup from easy peasy to hard. For characters like Gan Ning, you get a boring filler stage (the fandom wiki even calls them as such) and are then thrown in at the proverbial deep end with Chibi. For a newer player, I can see how this might be a little odd or even offputting, as the game makes no indication of which characters are the 'core' characters (i.e, have the most stages and better difficult distribution).
Looping back to the topic of presentation though, it's amazing just how much more of a game DW3 is, let alone a musou game. Stages are visually distinct, characters have a personality (despite the dub cutting most of it out) as opposed to being silent golems, the music finally has a distinct flair to it and the flow of levels actually feels like a battle now. While the progression systems suck, they're at least there, and help add a little justification to why you would ever engage with this game beyond a couple of musou/xtreme mode runs.
This game also sparked a ton of feelings regarding my history with the musou genre, a history which spans about 22 years and may be older than some of the people reading this review.
But I'll leave that till this marathon concludes. Till next time.
This game is such a marked improvement over DW2 it's honestly kind of insane.
DW2 isn't really a musou, I'd argue. It's just a 3D beat em up.
Here, in DW3, is where the entire genre that Koei have been riding the wave of for two decades was built. This is where DW gets its own style, where the levels take on a format beyond mountainous terrain and walls, where the music stops being "guy goes ham on the guitar before a 15 second break", and where objectives actually matter - to an extent. I could go on, but really; this game is foundational, and while it's not perfect, it's honestly kind of overwhelming to go back this far and see where it all came from?
Anyway, enough gushing, time to review.
I appreciate that characters are no longer stuck with the same attacks for the entire runtime, buuuuuuut linking new combos to weapon drops was a bit of a shit move. For reference, I gunned the campaigns of Cao Cao, Liu Bei and Sun Jian just to be ~all-encompassing~ and in the latter it took me until about 3/4th the game to get a weapon that let me use C5. It's not great.
Also, as an aside, this game made kinda understand why some people whinge about clones; I dicked about with a lot of auxiliary cast members in Free Mode and damn, everyone with a sword feels near-identical. Even characters with more interesting weapons felt samey since C2/3/4 are launch/stun/sweep on almost everyone.
On the level front, just... Holy fuck they're actually enjoyable, barring some issues I'll get to later. The presence of objectives and events helps keep things entertaining to a degree, a welcome respite after DW2's ascetism. And, of course, there's the trademark dogshit DW3 dub to keep you entertained too. Above all else though, I appreciate that the paths forward are far less binary and droll.
But eesh, they hadn't really nailed the enemy density:level size ratio just yet. It's really noticeable in Chibi, where it feels as though a third of the map goes completely unused. Even outside of it, there's a loooooooooot of trekking through empty space, because...
I know PS2 musou fans swear by the morale system, and this game's especially, but in my experience (playing on Hard, thanks to some old PCSX2 save data giving me a starting boost) the morale system actually makes the game feel terrible.
I'm no musou spring chicken, so these games are easy to me by default. Here, in DW3, it actually feels as though the game punishes me for being good by letting me not play it.
An average DW3 stage sees me daisy chain officer kills together, sink the enemy morale, and then struggle to find new things to kill as my emboldened allies sweep the stage like locusts. This isn't an issue in any other DW, even this game's immediate predecessor, so it stands out really heavily here.
Further compounding this is the decidedly strange stage distribution for some characters. For the three I finished it's fine, there's a very nice buildup from easy peasy to hard. For characters like Gan Ning, you get a boring filler stage (the fandom wiki even calls them as such) and are then thrown in at the proverbial deep end with Chibi. For a newer player, I can see how this might be a little odd or even offputting, as the game makes no indication of which characters are the 'core' characters (i.e, have the most stages and better difficult distribution).
Looping back to the topic of presentation though, it's amazing just how much more of a game DW3 is, let alone a musou game. Stages are visually distinct, characters have a personality (despite the dub cutting most of it out) as opposed to being silent golems, the music finally has a distinct flair to it and the flow of levels actually feels like a battle now. While the progression systems suck, they're at least there, and help add a little justification to why you would ever engage with this game beyond a couple of musou/xtreme mode runs.
This game also sparked a ton of feelings regarding my history with the musou genre, a history which spans about 22 years and may be older than some of the people reading this review.
But I'll leave that till this marathon concludes. Till next time.