Review by François de Marquis

Warriors Orochi 2 is a sequel to a game I originally passed on playing because I was put off by the concept. I wasn’t a fan of the Samurai Warriors games due to some really bad level design in the first game, and being unimpressed with the characters. Mixing the Dynasty Warriors characters that I greatly enjoy with these goobers seemed like a bad idea.

Then Omega Force took away Dian Wei’s axe in Dynasty Warriors 6 and Dynasty Warriors Strikeforce. I wasn’t too keen on the changes made to the new games and my most favorite of all the Romance of the Three Kingdoms heroes. Looking for any port in a storm, I turned to Warriors Orochi 2 and was pleased to discover that despite being teamed up with a bunch of ninnies, Dian Wei had his axe in tow.

Later I stumbled upon the joys of cleaving my path through the bodies of the Samurai Warriors and Orochi characters. Why didn’t I think of this sooner?!

The game screen can be cluttered during the heat of battle. Meters populate the four corners of the screen – enemy officer health is in the upper left corner, morale bar and stage map beneath it in the upper right, K.O. count in the lower right, and the Health, Musou, and Experience bars for all three of the officers under your command. Additionally the the Ancient Chinese and Japanese perfected a battlefield version of Twitter which will pop up on screen when you fell an enemy officer, your commander issues you an order, or there’s just general smack talking and banter between you and a worthy foe. These exchanges are all voiced, but if you miss any of this, you can pause the game and go look it up in the History to stay on your toes.

The conditions for victory vary from stage to stage; but generally center on don’t let your leader get killed, or prevent your main camp from falling by beating back the enemy hordes as they attempt to invade. Here’s where the strategy and meat of the series comes into play – laying waste to all who stand in opposition to you and your sire. The battlefield hierarchy goes like this:

Leader > Officers > Gate Captains > Nameless Troops

The morale meter is a visual indication of how hot blooded your troops are, and the more morale you have, the more aggressive your faction will be. In order to turn the tide of battle in your favor you will want to cut down the enemy leader’s officers first. These named officers will put up more of a fight than a nameless troop and also drop experience or weapon pick ups. For each officer you kill you will receive a grandiloquent commendation from your peers or leader and your troop’s morale will increase because you’ve felled a known foe.

Next you’ll want to stem the flow of enemy reinforcements onto the battlefield by snuffing the Gate Captains. They’ll drop an experience item and once they’re gone your team will gain control of that gate to facilitate friendly troops flowing into the fray.

Nameless troops are just the grist for your death-mill. They pose no real threat on lower difficulty settings, but will gladly contribute to your undoing on higher difficulties.

Of course you don’t need to play this way, you could just go straight for the enemy’s leader and attempt to cut him down first; however it’s not uncommon for the leader to be reinforced with officers who will proceed to dog-pile you.

Not to mention there’s a perverse pleasure in sweeping across the battlefield like a blood soaked wind demoralizing and utterly oppressing your foes. I grin every time I hear an enemy captain order “Retreat!”, and if I have a character with suitable attacks and speed I’ll ensure none escape the area alive. Joyous day!

All of this is accomplished through effective application of your available game controls. Square attacks, Triangle is a harder attack, Circle is Musou attack / Musou charge, X is your Jump button, Left shoulder button is Guard / Strafe, and Right shoulder button is a Special Attack. You can choose to control your on screen avatar with the D-Pad or the analogue nub. If you use the nub to move, then you will toggle map size pressing up / down on the d-pad and tag out your officer by pressing left or right on the d-pad. Another change is now you start the battle with a horse instead of needing to find a saddle item in the game for use. Press select and your steed will surge to your side ready to sweep you across the map. The horse is extremely useful for covering large distances quickly.

Additionally if your officer’s health bar is red indicating you’re near death and all three of your officers have full musou bars you can activate a three character musou attack which will inflict impressive damage by pressing both shoulder buttons at the same time.

The game takes the tactical beat’em up formula of the Musou series of games and refines it. In previous Musou games, you had to unlock a new weapon to expand the number of attacks you could perform in a combo. Now your combo count is linked directly to your officer’s level, in addition to level raising increasing other character attributes like – life, musou, attack, defense, and speed.

You can obtain new weapons, up to four different variations of an officer’s type and a total of eight weapons in your character inventory. The weapons also now feature a high level of customization in addition to granting you higher attack power. You will find weapons with certain attributes attached to them. These attributes can be combined to increase their level, e.g. Drain 1 added to another weapon with Drain 1 becomes Drain 2. Additionally you can add up to eight slots to each weapon to add up to eight total attribute buffs to the weapon. Although You cannot remove or reassign these attributes to other weapons. Be mindful of what you’re combining and try to leave some open spaces on a weapon just in case you want to build it up or add an attribute later on without losing one you’ve spent time and upgrade points on growing.

There are also Treasures to be obtained by completing certain in-game conditions, which can then be used to imbue weapons with attack perks. Think of them as trophies that actually serve a purpose in the game. Obtaining all of them will take some time as you’ll need to play through each faction’s story mode, each faction’s story mode contains eight missions. Once you complete a mission, you unlock it for replay in Free Mode for experience farming, or to go back and meet the conditions required to obtain further treasures if you missed them the first time. You’ll want to keep an eye on the map in the upper right hand corner of the screen once you hit the treasure conditions, a blip will appear indicating where the treasure has appeared. You then need to go retrieve it before completing the stage.

Graphically the game is solid considering the amount of characters, visual effects, and objects on screen. The musou series has always strived for the grand scale battle feel akin to the opening of Fellowship of the Ring where-in The Last Alliance campaign to put an end to Sauron. That same feeling is here, but with fewer polygons and some pop-in of enemies. Considering you’ll often encounter upward of 20 characters on screen trying to put an end to you, it’s an admirable effort. Only once did I encounter any significant slow down during the final battle against a boss with some rather elaborate visual effects on his attacks and the aforementioned 20+ NPC’s on screen battling away.

Omega Force has also added some nice graphical flourishes when you fell certain enemy officers. The camera cuts to a more dramatic view of the killing blow in slow motion with focus lines drawing the eye to the critical moment. It’s a small addition, but really helps sell the impact of the action.

I would like to see more complex structures on the maps, castles, fortifications, etc; but this is the PSP. Not PS3, and even with more detailed environments in Dynasty Warriors 6 the game doesn’t deliver the level of fun Warriors Orochi 2 on PSP packs.

The audio is a mix of new tunes, familiar Dynasty Warriors themes, and I’m assuming some Samurai Warriors themes as well. The original compositions for the game are a fun, upbeat rock / club sounding music. Sound effects are all suitable and cue players to the events going on around them. However you may want to play the game with a good set of headphones since the PSP’s speaker cannot deliver the bass impact of steel against armor.

The game supports both English and Japanese language tracks and subtitles. So you’ve got some flexibility there depending on your preferences. Although some of the officer’s canned banter during combos may get a bit tiring after a while, so switching to Japanese which I find easier to tune out, could be beneficial if you’re easily annoyed. However I find not using an excessively chatty officer works just as well.

The game offers adhoc co-op modes and versus modes; but none of my gamer pals are into portable gaming so I couldn’t test these features. Which leads to an obvious failing of the game – lack of infrastructure co-op and versus play. Koei is making it’s first foray into online Musou games on consoles next year with the PS3 and Xbox360 port of Dynasty Warriors Strikeforce. Hopefully this benefits the future iterations of this series, as it has proven to be a ton of fun to play co-op with friends on the Playstation 2 in the past.

In conclusion I’d say Warriors Orochi 2 is a fantastic title for fans of the beat’em up genre. At the very least, it’s a very strong rental recommendation.