I’m Kinglink and… ugh… Dynasty Warriors 9 is so … meh. 

There’s something I’ve been struggling with for the last half of 2023, and while it’s older than that time period, I think Dynasty Warriors 9 is an example of it.  It feels like games have been made to be more disposable.  More designed to give you dopamine hits for enjoying it but also able to shake you off and make you go play the next thing the company produces before long or designed more with microtransaction than quality in mind.  Nothing radically improves, and especially with sequels, there’s this feeling of average games being treated as great milestones because the fans want them.

But also not in Dynasty Warriors 9’s case.  Oh boy no, Dynasty Warriors 9 is a perfect example of something much more problematic.  It’s a sequel that simply isn’t as good. A sequel that tried something different, and has not found more than a couple of fans. And because of that… it just made me want to go back to where I first fell in love with the series. 

Here we are.  Wait, what’s this?    

This looks right but… oh let me see here let’s go a little farther back… There we are.  Yeah, Dynasty Warriors 3.  This is the real deal. 

Dynasty Warriors 3 takes me back to my college days.  Someone really was enjoying the game and showed it to me, and instantly I fell in love.  So many places to level up, killing tons of soldiers… and then of course this….  This beast of a man that every fan of this series knows.  Lu Bu.  This is easily the best game to get introduced to him and the entire franchise.  It’s not the best game in the franchise, but it’s a wonderful start.  I already feel my nostalgia goggles on my face, but still, this is fun.

In hindsight, I will admit I wasn’t the best judge of games 20 years ago, yes this is a 20-year-old title, and I feel very old admitting that.   But back then I valued playtime over quality, but at the same time there are 42 characters, tons of stages, and almost every character has a unique weapon, and each character has their own Musou mode which is essentially a story mode…  

Ok well most of them go over the same stages, 35, not 42 characters each with 7-stage Musou modes, technically three leaders with 10 stages, don’t worry I know the nitty gritty here.   There are only about 20 stages in the game, and even with two sides to each stage, that’s around 200 character Musou stage pairings, and only 40 possible choices for stages, so there’s a decent amount of repetition.  You’ll play Wu Zhang Plains and the Yellow Turbans Rebellion so much anyone will get sick of it by the end.

The combat of Dynasty Warriors series is simplistic but always makes you feel powerful, you just tear through enemies as a general and decimate forces.   And yet ok I get why people don’t love this series, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say this is one of my favorites for the mindless button-mashing I can get away with here and still enjoy myself. 

At the same time, talking about how powerful I feel.  Coming back to this game I forgot that Dynasty Warriors 3 has a bit of a bite.  There’s a good difficulty here that if you rush forward into battle, you can struggle a bit.  Lu Bu as mentioned is a beast, but even just generally, while you can run and attack the enemy commander straight away, if you don’t take your time or are sufficiently leveled up that will be a hard battle, especially if the enemy has a high morale. 

I don’t want to go too deep into the intricacy of how the games work, there’s a fantastic guide on Gamefaqs all about the morale system and much much more.  There are a ton of very deep systems at play here, and I have learned entirely too much about how this game works but trust me when I say that system is extremely complex.

Replaying Dynasty Warriors 3 also reminds me of why I love the Dynasty Warriors story.  Of course, a big part of that is the narrative in these games is based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms books by Luo Guanzhong I’m sure I’m butchering that name, there’s a reason I’m trying not to namedrop too many people in this game, but the thing is … As great as that book is.  This isn’t exactly that story, and that’s also something special about Dynasty Warriors 3, for good and bad reasons. 

There’s so much hammy overacting in this title. There are so many bad line reads, There are characters not designed as they originally were, or extremely flamboyant.  Hello Zhang He, one of the first characters I played. 

But still, there’s also a great history explored and one of my favorite battles here is Chi Bi, especially if you can trigger the fire attack which changes the stage, and gives a real epic feel to this title. 

This is where I fell in love with this series and the reason why I’m talking about Dynasty Warriors 3 is that I’ve owned and played almost every in this series here, as well as The Xtreme Legends, some of the Empires titles, admittedly I never liked Dynasty Warriors Empires as much, Samurai Warriors though is amazing, Warriors Orochi, Gundam, One Piece Pirate Warriors, Berserk Band of the hawk, and so many more. 

Playing this one again, it’s brilliant.   And we’re talking about a 20-year-old video game that may be better than the most recent entry.  Yikes… but good for the fans.

Yeah, there’s a reason to talk about this title. This game being such a major title for me meant a lot, especially with it being the first one that brought me into this franchise… well of course this is why we’re talking about it.  So after finishing Dolphin for the Atari 2600 on RetroAchievements, which is now a 40-year-old title by the way, I decided to tackle this beast of a game.  I’ve gone from one of the most simple Arcade style games on the earliest consoles released 40 years ago, to this beast of a game on the most recent system supported… for now, no further comment on that,   But I can say, I had a ton of fun working on this title.

There’s a ton of learning about how Dynasty Warriors worked and what tricks and features could be used on the PS2.  And honestly, there’s one problem I have with Dynasty Warriors 3, or rather two.   The first is simple, the programmers for this game were dirty.  And by that I mean they would often leave memory in whatever state it was last in until that memory was used again.  There are so many achievements that would be easy to do, except when you switch from one stage to the next, the entire memory footprint is the same as the last level, so it’s not completely obvious what’s going on.  There are a lot of ways around that, but man it made stuff more complicated than it should.   But that wouldn’t be a big problem though.

The other big problem was in this game, players were able to do a quick reset, by hitting the Start and Select button.  Combining these two issues meant that memory was left in a dirty state as players returned to the main menu, so there are all sorts of edge cases where players were doing one thing and then quick-reset and moved to a different mode or slipped into the demo, and stuff was set up incorrectly. 

Ugh, but the good news is there’s a ton of achievements here. 213 achievements, 94 Leaderboards.  There’s an achievement for unlocking each character, finishing each Musou mode, and so on. 

In the Warriors series though you can chase down weapons for each character, and of the 42 characters, 42 of them have a unique final weapon that has to be earned through different specific feats that admittedly the game doesn’t tell you.  So each of those has an achievement as well.   There are rare items as well that need different unlock processes.  Each character also has to beat all 7 stages of their Musou mode on the hard difficulty, as well as a challenge to beat each stage without using the in-game save system, which can be abused quite liberally here, and probably should. 

I also added special achievements for most of the bonus characters giving them a little additional tale or reason.  Apologies to Yuan Shao, I couldn’t think of anything other than his special weapon requirements or playing the Yellow Turban Rebellion for the millionth time, and I wasn’t going to force anyone to do that again. 

So like I said, there’s a huge quantity of content here and almost all of it is covered in this set.  In about the month that it’s been out. This achievement set has only 3 masteries so far.  I’m sorry it’s taken so long to get this video out, Humble and the flu have had me a little out of commission.

Dynasty Warriors 3 has been a huge undertaking and I honestly feel great about this achievement set.  I feel like it properly tries to honor one of the most important games in my past.  If you’ve ever liked any of the Warriors series you should probably check this title out and if you want to check out the achievements, you can log into Retroachievements with the most recent versions of PCSX2 and chip away at this list. 

If somehow this was your least favorite version of the Warriors series, there’s a Dynasty Warriors 5 set out as well, that includes the Xtreme Legends.  There’s the original Dynasty Warriors title which is a fighting game if you like that, I know at least one more Dynasty Warriors game is coming soon.  And …. Oh Samurai Warriors Xtreme Legends has over 500 leaderboards.  I’m sure that’s not related to anything at all. 

But really, check out Dynasty Warriors 3, or 5, or 9, or none of them.  But more importantly, think about the past a little more when playing games.  If a new game isn’t living up to the legacy of the company that puts it out, it probably means you should go replay the original games from that developer rather than chasing those old feelings with weaker titles and paying full price for those experiences. 

I actually spent about 300 hours working on this title, and the achievement set, mostly testing, almost completely testing.  But I also had so much fun revisiting this, whether it is just great gameplay or complete nostalgia goggles. 

Though as I worked on this video I’ve been thinking about how I want to handle these videos going forward. I do like talking about these games when they’re good. 

Then again I did an achievement set for Oink, and I don’t have much to say on that game.  It’s another early Activision game, it had an official badge back in the day, the gameplay is extra simplistic, and I did a set for it. That’s all I have to say about it. 

I have a feeling we’ll probably do a rapid-fire retro review in the future, and talk about a couple of games at a time.  However, I do have two more important videos planned.  There will be one at the end of this month, a launch trailer, if you will, for my achievement sets, and a good theme between.  The controller is shown for obvious foreshadowing.  And something else rather big happened, but I do want to take the time to talk about that in a lot more depth, so probably next month.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this discussion and either remembered a game you once played or have a new game to check out.  On the other hand, if you think there are better choices for my time and effort, feel free to leave a comment about what retro games deserve a great achievement set, or what old retro games need to be checked out by more people.

I’ll pop up my video on Dolphin as well as let YouTube suggest something to you, but for now, I thank you very much for watching, and I’ll see you next time.