It looks quaint by today’s standards, but Dynasty Warriors 2 was an impressive achievement when it landed in 2000. Combining elements of beat-’em-ups and strategy games, it sought to capture the feeling of taking to the battlefield as one of Romance of the Three Kingdoms‘ larger-than-life heroes, carving through enemies by the thousands. In the 25 years since, that games many, many successors have continued to iterate on that concept and chase the dream of truly bringing those massive battles to life. In terms of sheer scale, Dynasty Warriors: Origins sets a new benchmark.
According to producer/director Tomohiko Sho, the development team’s goal was to display 10,000 soldiers on screen at once. I can’t tell you if they succeeded in any literal sense—I didn’t count them, please accept my apologies for this journalistic negligence—but what I can say is that battles in Origins feel huge. It’s not unusual to wade into an enemy force with foes as far as the eye can see, unleash your ultimate attack to kill several hundred in one fell swoop, and barely make a dent in the enemy numbers. Several thousand characters on screen at once would be a conservative estimate, and the results are battles that feel genuinely epic.
It’s not just about raw numbers, though. Dynasty Warriors: Origins introduces several new ideas that help bolster the sense of scale. Large Forces see enemies band together to create a huge army—again, we’re talking thousands of soldiers and dozens of commanders—that fights as one big unit. Soldiers within a large force become much stronger and gain access to disruptive squad manoeuvres, like a charge formation that will interrupt your attacks, or a shield wall. Enemy commanders can issue powerful Grand Tactics that can dramatically turn the tide of battle if you don’t stop them by completing some objective within a set time limit. Allied commanders can use such orders, too, with success dependent on keeping them alive.
A large force has its own health bar; killing enemy soldiers will slowly chip away at it, while taking down commanders and interrupting tactical assaults does more noteworthy damage. When that health bar runs out, the large force disbands, significantly decreasing the enemy’s morale and making clean-up a quick and easy task.
All of this makes battles in Dynasty Warriors: Origins feel like, well, battles—the kind of grand, sweeping conflicts that feature so prominently in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Every combatant, from footsoldier to general, has a role to play and has a presence on the battlefield. Yes, you can still kill a hundred enemies with one swing of your spear, but those foes still feel like part of something bigger, rather than just fodder to pad your KO count.
Where Origins takes a more divisive turn is in how it approaches its storytelling—and, by extension, the characters you can play as. Warriors games typically give you a large roster of playable characters to choose from, letting you view the story from their perspective and explore lots of different playstyles. That’s not the case in Dynasty Warriors: Origins, which instead casts you as a silent, relatively blank-slate protagonist—Ziluan. Aside from brief moments where you can temporarily control one of a small handful of companion characters, this mysterious but fairly generic hero is who you’ll be playing.
From a storytelling perspective, it works. Ziluan is a perspective character, not really there to be a major player (though Origins does try to weave him into the plot, with limited success) but rather to be an outsiders’ point of view on the intriguing figures and many moving pieces of the Three Kingdoms era. This allows a more holistic, cohesive retelling of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, with the first half of the game taking you between factions and seeing things unfold in much the same way as the novel itself. Halfway-ish through the game, you’ll have to choose which kingdom to join, at which point the story branches off and you see that faction’s story to its conclusion.
This approach makes for one of the better adaptations Three Kingdoms, whether you’re coming in as someone familiar with the story or not. Where earlier Dynasty Warriors relied on piecing together the overarching story by playing through each campaign, Origins creates a more flowing and comprehensive account, providing more context for the eventual conflict between Wei, Wu, and Shu—and, by extension, making the choice of who to join more meaningful. The inevitable replays to witness the other stories feel better contextualised, too, as do the alternate timelines that can be witnessed by players strong enough to divert the course of history.
On the other hand, Ziluan is as bland as they come, and not being able to properly play as the famous, beloved characters that surround him takes away one of the most exciting this about Dynasty Warriors. Sure, you can pick different weapons for different playstyles, and temporarily take control of your chosen companion as a sort of power-up state, but it’s not the same. I don’t want to play as some generic fighter who looks like the default option in a character creator while wielding Guan Yu’s weapon; I want to play as Guan Yu, dammit. Even if this narrative approach requires a perspective character, at least give us a freeplay mode with companions as fully playable characters.
Aside from that bizarre decision to not make the dynasty warriors themselves playable in this new game, Dynasty Warriors: Origins is a welcome refresh for the series. The core 1-versus-1000 loop remains in place, and as enjoyable as ever, but it’s bolstered by a raft of changes to make battles feel more tactical, more dramatic, and more significant. If this game sets the framework for the series to follow, there’s an exciting future ahead for Samurai Warriors 6 or whatever collabs Koei Tecmo can dream up—so long as we can actually play as the beloved characters at the heart of those games.
Dynasty Warriors: Origins is a bold refresh that brings epic Three Kingdoms battles to life like never before. But why can't I play as the storied heroes at heart of this tale?
