If you haven't known, I'm a pretty big Dynasty Warriors fan, so when I heard that Koei/Omega Force was gonna go ahead with "yet another Warriors" game set in Feudal Japan, you bet I went nuts over it. However, I chose not to spoil myself with too much info, as I wanted to personally experience the game for myself.

It was one heck of an experience.

This review will assume that you know how DW3 and 4 works, so I'll just focus on the changes and whatnot.

The characters have very original designs. Each character isn't a "clone" of another (something DW3 and 4 was suffering from pretty badly). (Japanese) voice acting is very well done. The in-game action system has been highly streamlined to make it a lot more faster paced than it was in 4.

The game is now heavily dependent on the rank of your character. As the rank of your character increases, so does the difficulty of the stuff around you. To increase your rank, you gain experience points in battle. To increase your stats, you must do well in certain categories - Musou KOs, completion time, Mission completion, and Item collection to get your various stats maxed out. Doing well in these categories also net you a new concept called "Skill Points". A lot of abilities from the previous Dynasty Warriors that were originally item-based are now based on Skills, and many new and interesting skills were added to the mix to make the game even more diversified. These skills give huge avantages to your character, such as permanent True Musou, elemental attacks to any of your charge attacks, ability to take enemy attacks as you're attacking, and increased Musou charge rate.

The ingame fighting system has been revamped too. Fighting on horse is much more venerable - the horse has its own Charge attack, and all characters can swing to one side. Musous now dizzy on startup, and knockback on the last hit, which can be considered a double edged sword, depending on which Musou you use. You can also Musou, let go of the button and then do normal attacks to create your own "custom combo", which are heavily amplified in damage and range because of the "Musou" mode you're in. There are no C5 or C6 charge attacks anymore. It's either ST, SST, SSST, or SSSS. However, each of these charge attacks are unique to each character, and if you hit T several more times you can make additions to these character attacks to do more damage.

Items are found DW3 style - weapons must be found, and will contain random bonus stats. Items can be found, and their stats will vary depending on level. Speaking of level - they included an "Expert" (a.k.a Chaos) difficulty for you crazy hardcore players. Very smart move on Koei's part.

There are also these things called Castle levels... in these levels, the area is filled with traps and ninjas that drop down from the ceiling. You also cannot see the entire map when you begin - you either have to use a special item to see it or just blindly run your way through it to get to the stairs up/down. It usually takes a bit of time and several flights of stairs to reach the end. I personally found these levels tedious.

There is a LOT of dialogue in story mode, so if you're the kinda person who loves drama, this game is the game for you. Characters tend to talk a lot more in general, and the game's pretty good at keeping you hooked to it if you're playing a character's story mode.

The graphics are awesome in this game - characters are well modelled, and the 3D renditions of characters are well done. Probably one of the bigger problems you'll have with this game is if you have your back to the wall. The camera starts getting stupid when you're there, but a simple walk forward will solve that problem. Additionally, you may notice that enemies disappear more often, as this game is truly pushing the aging PS2 to its graphical limits.

Music is also great. Most of it is modernized versions of "ancient" sounding Japanese tunes. It's a huge change from the heavy rock that DW3 and 4 emphasizes on, but I personally like it - some don't. Your mileage may vary.

Sound effects are the same stuff from DW4, but again, that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. Sounds in general are still as "satisfying" to hear as ever. You never end up thinking to yourself "huh, that doesn't belong there". However, the ability to change the voice settings from the awful English voices to the wonderful Japanese ones was yet another smart move on Koei's side./

Control. Well - it handles like any other DW game. If you didn't have problems with the controls then, you're not gonna have problems with 'em now. It's still button mashing fun... no timing required.

Obviously this game is highly replayable, all DW games are. You're going to find out you'll be resetting your favorite characters just to be leveling them up again, as it's easy to screw up a character's build if you don't "play" them properly (to fulfill all that stuff I mentioned above). (01/09/05 note: Play the Xtreme Legends version of this game if you want this 'fixed.')

Overall: 8