To accommodate for the difference in raw hardware power, Koei has been forced into making quite a large number of radical changes to the Dynasty Warriors formula. The game is still primarily about killing hundreds of enemy soldiers and officers, but the scale has been toned down considerably. The game isn’t even about the war between the forces of Wu, Wei and Shu, with all concept of a story mode and battle scenarios kicked to the curb in favour of an open ended system where players simply pick and choose supporting officers from either side. The number of playable generals has been reduced to all of three, and the game does not make a clear distinction over which side they represent, rather choosing to go with red and blue. The three generals are Phoenix (Zhu Que), Dragon (Qing Long) and Chimera (Xuan Wu) – and they work on the standard one strength focused fighter, one speed focused fighter and one balanced fighter system.
Large hammers and feathered head dresses were considered high fashion in the late 1900s
Rather than providing an open battlefield with tons of warriors under the command of various officers, Dynasty Warriors DS takes a new approach where the battlefield is broken into smaller segments, more manageable for the DS hardware. The game plays in an overhead perspective, somewhat reminiscent of Gauntlet Legends, and still retains the same combo system of regular and charged attacks, as well as the powerful musou attacks – but adds new magic and skill-based attacks which can be cast after the player has collected enough coins to fill the new coin meter. Unfortunately, the game selects the skill which can be executed at random, eliminating any element of strategy. The game world itself is divided into a number of different regions of China which the player battles to take control of, each of which is broken down further into smaller areas fight over. There is one main base, and a number of smaller supply bases which the player must assign a general to protect (and strangely, the general can be from any of Wu, Shu or Wei). To take a territory, a player needs to beat a certain number of foes, or the general in charge of the area, with the battle ending when the main base is taken. Simply put, the player must bash his way through his opponent’s territories while ensuring protection of his own.
It’s a little more complicated than that in practice (but not much), as the opposing side has the same set up as the player – taking either character that the player does not select, as well as generals of its own. The AI side’s generals are really easy to beat, often taking only two or three combos to defeat, and like many of the game’s soldiers, they do little to fight back. At many points during the battle, the player must clash with the AI leader, with the loser of the duel being cast off into some other point in the map. The problem with this is that the AI captain is generally a pushover, and sometimes gets pushed further into the player’s territory, rather than being cast back to his own territory. To make things slightly more fun to manage, the game has a collectible card system, where the player gets to collect cards to use on the battlefield at various times. Cards come in a number of varieties; red cards enhance a player’s attack rating, blue cards offer a new skill to use in battle, yellow cards provide an increase in both attack and skills. Other cards are awarded at the end of a battle when the player defeats an enemy general.
With only a small number of territories and playable generals, Dynasty Warriors DS does not have a whole lot of meat, which is a stark contrast to its console brethren. There are no new playable generals to unlock, very little on offer in terms of powering up and no hidden/extra weapons. There’s really no incentive to replay the story mode either, with no real reward offered for capturing the officer cards you did not get the first time around. Local wireless multiplayer is on offer for two to three players, but only for multi cart, competitive play – preview materials and early box art had indicated that there were plans to offer competitive multiplayer modes over Nintendo’s Wi-Fi Connect service, but this was obviously scrapped at some point in the development process. Players can only expect enough content to satisfy 2-3 hours’ worth of play, which is really quite disappointing for a full price release from a series known for offering ten times that amount, though the outright ease of play and lack of playable characters makes Dynasty Warriors DS distinctly less interesting than its console brothers.
To paraphrase Henry Ford, "You can have any environment colour you want, so long as it is brown."
One thing Dynasty Warriors DS does have in common with its console brothers is the rather woeful presentation. The game is played from a top down perspective, with 2D sprites on a 3D plane. While this style of presentation can and has been done well before, Dynasty Warriors DS stinks it up with distinctly poor sprites with low levels of detail and severely limited animation. In this day and age on a console renowned for its 2D prowess, having only 3-4 frames of animation for frequently used motions is just inexcusable, and gives the game a real no-frills look. Enemies are distinctly lacking in variety, but the game can manage about 20 of these monstrosities on screen at a time, which ensures some semblance of the Dynasty Warriors feel is retained. The environments are distinctly lacking in detail thanks largely to the low quality textures and the fact that every area in the game is a square-shaped area. The game’s sound veers on minimal, with forgettable music, monotonous sound effects and the odd muffled voice sample.
The big problem with Dynasty Warriors DS is that it has retained all of the franchise’s major weaknesses, but the strengths have been filtered out. While Dynasty Warriors cannot be feasibly recreated on the DS, Koei could certainly have taken a better crack and re imagining the franchise for the Nintendo DS, particularly given the popularity of the series and the format. Dynasty Warriors DS is a distinctly dull and pathetically easy game, which even the most dedicated fan of the franchise would do well to avoid.
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