Samurai Warriors
Omega Force has developed many spin-offs of Dynasty Warriors over the years, but none of those efforts found quite the same longevity as their first attempt did in Samurai Warriors. We’re now in the Sengoku or “Warring States” period in Japanese history — a 16th century setting where the divided country is engulfed by civil war. The Warriors formula remains largely the same here, with Omega Force once again combining historical events and tactical action to create another furious hack ‘n’ slash where players battle entire armies to unite the land under one rule.
My biggest takeaway from Samurai Warriors twenty years later, is how hard the developers tried to make it feel different. While the same Dynasty Warriors game engine and level framework is used here, you can see clear changes made to avoid allegations of this being a soulless reskin of an existing property. Omega Force wanted Samurai Warriors to succeed on its own merits, even if they failed to make that happen.
Before we get there though, it’s important to talk about the things this game does get right. The upgraded game engine looks good and plays well for the time, with improved draw distances, a higher variation of enemy types, and an unlocked combat system providing a smooth duelling experience.
Perhaps most notable is the tonal shift away from the rock and roll styling of Dynasty Warriors into a much darker atmosphere. You’ll see mild blood effects when defeating enemies, for instance, and the battlefields look gloomier and more desolate. The cutscenes portray moodier themes of intrigue and betrayal giving the character-driven story mode a sombre tone, as heroic men and women fight against hopeless odds on a march towards their inevitable demise. The wider story is quite dull most of the time, but the atmosphere is both powerful and authentic — especially when using the Japanese voice track.
Other nice tweaks include a dodge button, the ability to charge on horseback, and a new indicator showing which fighter has the momentum during weapon deadlocks. Samurai Warriors also has slightly different combo mechanics which are mainly just an elaborate variation of the same “press X to hit people” concept that defines the series. But the new musou attacks which slow down the action with a bullet time effect is pretty cool, and it adds yet another welcome pinch of depth to the existing combat formula.
Another major change is the new mission system which presents players with explicit objectives over the course of each battle. However, missions have annoying penalities if you ignore them, and they feel less organic than the battlefield events in Dynasty Warriors. It’s just more fun how that latter game cuts players loose and allows them to approach battles in their own way. Samurai Warriors feels needlessly prescriptive by comparison. (A quality it shares with other copycats like the execrable Ninety-Nine Nights.)
Making things worse in Samurai Warriors is how your play style impacts your character’s development. Players are graded in battle on parameters like completion time and number of musou kills. So if a player enjoys taking their time or saving their special attacks for decisive engagements, they’ll be penalised for not playing the way the game wants them to. This is because lower grades reward fewer skill points to improve your officer, with the kicker being skill points can no longer be earned once an officer’s experience reaches maximum. This is tremendously frustrating because maximising characters to their full potential is meant to be one of this franchise’s selling points!
Even then, the new skill system only provides the illusion of choice (unless you botch your build in the aforementioned way), so it ends up feeling needlessly confusing and over-complicated for the sake of being different. It’s easy to see how damaging this direction was by looking at the Samurai Warriors: Xtreme Legends expansion pack where the skill point cap was removed to offset the stupid grading system. (Although Xbox owners got shafted again because that expansion remained exclusive to PlayStation 2.)
The original soundtrack for Samurai Warriors mixes traditional Japanese instrumentals with techno music. It’s yet another way in which Omega Force made this game feel different from its sister franchise.
Samurai Warriors also has new game modes. Some versus modes are included for those times when two players grow tired of the main campaign’s cooperative option, and there’s a new survival mode where players ascend (or descend) as many floors of a booby-trapped castle as they can. The castle maps appear in campaign chapters as well, but they’re not as thrilling as regular battles because of their bland and limited confines. Additionally, the action in these scenarios mainly involves running past enemies to reach the next floor, which hardly plays to the game’s strengths.
If playing as famous figures like Oda Nobunaga and Sanada Yukimura isn’t enough for the Sengoku fan in you, Omega Force provided a mode for creating custom officers. Sadly, they somehow botched this as well!
The New Officer mode then is an over-designed and badly executed idea. Instead of creating a character from a range of costume parts and weapons like in Dynasty Warriors 4, players instead select from preset models and three measly weapon types. From there players compete in several repetitive mini games to boost their officer’s stats whilst contending with random events tied to their training regime. The story beats are lightweight and the challenges which include activities like racing to a castle exit or deflecting arrows fired by a row of archers, aren’t very fun, and are too difficult for what is essentially a forced tutorial. Hilariously, if players fail the final challenge, their character will be deleted altogether! What is this, Steel Battalion?!
Even then, the campaign that follows doesn’t join these officers to a specific faction (even though players choose one to represent), so the resulting story feels unsatisfyingly generic and uneventful. Again, the developers were clearly trying to make Samurai Warriors feel different here, but a standard officer creation menu would have been a much better option than forcing this aggravating nonsense on players for no real benefit.
In the end, it wasn’t surprising when Samurai Warriors received mixed reviews in 2004. While it did introduce some good ideas and innovations, this spin-off didn’t appeal until Koei released Samurai Warriors 2 a couple of years later — a sequel so enjoyably superior, it proved this initial misstep was one worth learning from.
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