Warriors Orochi 3: Ultimate is (primarily) a crossover between Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors. It is the third game in the series and the Ultimate version has additional content compared to the original release. If you have played any of the Warriors series, then you’ll have no trouble playing this as the controls and combat are the same. If you haven’t, then it’s easy to pick up anyway so the lack of a tutorial doesn’t really matter in the end.
The story mode has a lot of content, spanning eight chapters. Even if you haven’t played the first two games, as long as you have read up on the highlights then you’re good (basically, the characters of Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors are brought together to fight off the demon Orochi). The story initially is actually somewhat interesting, as it starts off with three surviving characters fighting against the Hydra. It’s a losing battle for humanity, and at this point, Kaguya, a goddess, arrives.
Kaguya has the ability to travel back in time, within certain limits. The characters then return to the past in order to correct their mistakes and save the other characters who had perished in battles. By doing this, they are able to build up their army and hopefully at the same time, find something that can actually hurt the Hydra. This is a pretty neat concept and although it never explores any deeper than this, it does a pretty good job at pushing the players into all the levels, and then having several characters unlock once those are cleared.
The Warriors games all play very similarly, with only slight additions with each iteration. Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate’s combat is pretty much the same one from Dynasty Warriors. Light attacks are Square, Strong attacks are Triangle, Musou attacks are unleashed using the Circle button, X to jump, and you can combine the various buttons into a chained combo. Additionally, characters can block, have dash attacks, and you bring with you a team of three that you can switch out at any time. It’s definitely a basic combat that gets extremely grindy, even a few levels in once you’ve realised there is nothing more to it.
The game has RPG elements. Each character can level up, although gaining experience is extremely easy and you’ll hit Level 100 pretty soon. You can then promote them to boost their underlying stats and reset their level back to 1. However, this means the game tends to push the player towards using the same characters to improve them more and more. So even though the levels have “recommended” teams to encourage trying out new characters, it’s almost never worthwhile as those new characters are too weak unless you’re willing to spend limited points to push their levels up.
The key draw of the game is the large scale battles in terms of the sheer number of mooks that you can defeat. The developers seemed to have thought that more is better so there are literally thousands of mooks on the battlefield that dies in one or two hits. You’ll easily get over 1000 Kos each level, if not 2000 or 3000. It’s actually quite distracting with the number of enemies and allies on screen at once, as they end up swarming your character, making it hard to see where they are and where the boss is. Unfortunately, there’s still a ton of pop in, but there’s just something soothing about effortlessly mowing down thousands of enemies that makes it a guilty pleasure.
The other big draw of the game is the sheer number of playable characters. The Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors games alone have impressive large casts, but combining the two here makes it gigantic. Then in addition there are some Warriors Orochi originally characters, and also crossover characters from Koei Tecmo’s other games like Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive. The huge number of characters means you’ll probably only play your favorites as there aren’t really enough reason to play all of them, especially with the leveling up mechanics for the story mode.
Levels generally play the same in that your main aim is to not let the leader die, and to defeat most of the bosses on the battlefield. It’s generally an easy game on Normal difficulty, although it can be annoying when the objective changes to preventing the enemy from escaping, but they escape anyway since it tells you too late and you get lost in the environment due to the verticality of some levels. The environments are bland in general but better than Dynasty Warriors because this game has varied settings taken from both present(ish) day to the past.
Each level doesn’t take that long to beat, depending on the difficulty. You can blast through the levels in around 10-15 minutes on easy, although playing on harder difficulties just means the opponents are more damage sponges rather than being difficulty. Although getting stunlocked is still annoying. You can clearly tell where the original’s story ended, as it begins a new arc for the new content. The story has potential, playing with time travel and building up the ultimate army to beat Orochi, but it ends up devolving into fighting against all the characters so that they’ll join you type of scenarios. The new content’s story arc is also quite underwhelming, especially since the antagonist is nowhere near as cool as Orochi and the Hydra.
The takes around 10 to 15 hours if you rush through the compulsory levels, and even more if you decide to play the side levels. Even with just that, there is heaps of content, however, there are other modes apart from the story. Duel Mode harkens back to the original Dynasty Warriors in which it’s a one on one battle. You can either battle against the CPU or online against other players. There is a Survival mode within to see how many opponents you can defeat before you lose all your health. In this mode, there are also “strategy cards” which you would have been collecting throughout the game. These cards have different effects that you can activate during battle.
Then there’s the Gauntlet mode, which is where the meatier content comes into play. In this, you pick a squad of five and then go through the map with infinitely respawning enemies, that also gets stronger as time goes by. The aim is to go around the map and activate portals, one of which will lead to the exit. There’s no story to go around with this mode but it has a ton of stages, and New Game Plus of sorts where you can go back in to unlock more. The Musou Battlefield mode is a level editor, while the Free mode allows you to play a level of your choice. So in summary, there is a lot of content, but it is all very similar and repetitive, so if you’ve had your fill from the story levels, then there’s nothing new in the rest of the game.
Overall, Warriors Orochi 3: Ultimate plays it safe with its formula and doesn’t try anything new. However, this just means that fans of this gameplay can continue to enjoy destroying thousands upon thousands of enemies that has a new story to go along with it. While it can get repetitive and predictable, there are times where it can be soothing just to mow down so many opponents with ease. The game has no shortage of content though so you’ll more than likely become bored of the game before running out of things to do. In that aspect, this game caters to a specific audience, but is a great game to that audience.
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