Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past few years, you’re probably already familiar with “Warrior” games, Musou, the hack-and-slash subgenre that Koei Tecmo and Omega Force invented 21 years ago with Dynasty Warriors 2. Their gameplay is as simple as it is cathartic, which is why they’ve been so successful and garnered a multitude of fans (also detractors).
Game Overview
Samurai Warriors 5 is the most beloved Musou Omega Force has made, anime licenses included. This is a video game full of energy, good stories, and powerful characters who manage to give meaning, coherence, and vitality to their usual massive battles.
Life-beating enemies to thousands as he marched through stages, leveling up and unlocking new characters. Except for small variations, he’s always been like that. But both the Dynasty Warriors series and Samurai Warriors, the first set in China and the second in Japan, they ended up stagnating.
After its initial amusing installments, it seemed that Omega Force had nothing more to offer except to repeat the same patterns over and over. Thankfully, anime licenses have come to the rescue of their productions. This has given Musou a second life creating many very enjoyable things.
The grace of Samurai Warriors 5 is to have been able to become a shonen at the same time during its fights, its scenes of pure narration, its menus, its talks, and in its presentation. And it does it so well that even though we keep beating enemies and cloning enemies, without much intelligence and running around like headless chickens on the stage, it gets that you want to do it, that you want to meet their commanders, get along better with your friends, recruit new warriors, level them up, and keep fighting.
For those of you who don’t know what shonen means, it’s a term used to refer to manga and anime aimed at young male teenagers. Among its characteristics, it stands out as a character full of dreams, lots of passion, and energy. If you think of Naruto, for example, you’ll understand what I’m referring to.
In other words, Samurai Warriors 5 doesn’t get rid of common Musou features that many abhor, but rather strengthens them, it boasts about them and that makes sense. And it seemed impossible.
Gameplay
Samurai Warriors 5 is not particularly innovative in its gameplay, not even up to “Musou” standards.
Combat continues to be based on two-button combos, quick attacks, and strong attacks, but with no incentive to use one combo or the other, you’ll end up hammering the buttons interchangeably while reducing the hours of “dummy” enemies.
In addition to the classic special attacks, or Musou attacks, which take place while we fill up a power bar, the most interesting thing this time is four skills that we assign to the four front buttons, throwing them while holding the trigger. Some are more powerful attacks, others are passive (boosts of defense, attack, or speed), and as their recharge time is short, you must be vigilant to use them continuously.
In some battles against bosses, much more adept at blocking or interrupting our attacks, the strategic use of these skills could be the key to victory.
All the missions, however, develop in the same way: moving from side to side, beating the targets that point you on the map. Sometimes you have to escort units, and other times defeat a certain number of dummies in a certain amount of time. Sometimes these objectives are optional, and you’ll decide whether to spend your time completing them to get more points at the end or not.
Most of the time in the story, the difficulty in normal mode is nil, so it is recommended, at least, to try playing it hard to experience a challenge (you can choose the difficulty before each level). If not, the wear and tear of always doing the same thing will become much more serious: you will see your kill count and lower the generals’ life bars without touching your hair, and without anything changing from one level to the next.
Between levels, you can dedicate your time and resources to improving your characters. But the vast majority of these effects are invisible. You can, for example, disassemble the weapons you get to obtain more materials, such as stones that you can attach to the weapons (as long as you have free slots) to improve some of their attributes.
The final straw of this, though common in all Musou, is that you can upgrade your characters without even having to use them.
In addition to the experience, the characters you use gain, you will gain stock experience that you can then distribute to any character you want in the menu. You can even buy more stock experience from the store.
Game modes
There are two game modes between which we will alternate: Musou, divided into chapters and where the toughest challenges are, and Citadel.
In this second, it will be time to do smaller missions, obtain equipment, upgrade our heroes, and grow our buildings. Throughout the game, we will alternate between one and the other, which provides a point of grateful variety.
Once again, there is a lot to unlock to upgrade your characters and their arsenal, but the process is very slow and repetitive.
Characters
There are many characters, but they all move more or less the same in terms of speed, jump, and weight. It doesn’t matter that there are almost 40 of them if the experience is going to be almost the same with everyone.
Actually, all characters can use all types of weapons, which is good news, I guess (although they still have preferences: I put a different weapon on one character than the one with the default, and in the animation of his Musou attack, the weapon he had put on disappeared and he pulled out his original weapon).
Weapons
There are many different types of weapons: katanas, long swords, hammers, double swords, bows, a kind of whip, and blunderbusses.
They feel different and have different combos. Yes, but there are also no enemies with weaknesses for specific types of weapons, so the one you choose will simply be the one you want most, no matter which one you use.
Oda Nobunaga: The Hero of Samurai Warriors 5
It is possible that your first contact with Warriors was with one of these spin-offs mentioned above, and as a result of your experience, you wish to enter the main series (Dynasty or Samurai). If that’s your case, then think twice and see if you really enjoyed their gameplay, or if what grabbed you was the mix of worlds.
Samurai Warriors takes place in a specific period of Japan’s history called Sengoku, and more precisely in the 16th century, full of civil strife and in which a young and ambitious daimyo (feudal lord) named Oda Nobunaga aspired to unify the power of Japan. “Incident at Honno-ji”.
Nobunaga is the protagonist of the game and the character we will use the most (and the one most worth “kicking” throughout the game), in a story that is told with abundant cinematic scenes, some more worked and realized with a cinematic style, and many other sequences of exposition of the historical context.
Game Storyline
Don’t expect deep storytelling, and in fact, many of the more melodramatic events were handled with simple dialogue and characters facing each other, although all scenes, even the most static ones, have Japanese voices. And don’t be silent even during battles, be prepared to read subtitles all the time, even during battles.
Unless you’re passionate about Japanese history, you’ll probably have a hard time following who’s who, what’s going to happen next, or why you should care.
Once again, this is something to keep in mind if you’re coming from other Warriors games with a fan-service factor because here, you won’t find any of that, and the characters, as much as they are real figures, are treated with very exaggerated dialogue and anime “shonen”.
Design and Animation
For starters, Samurai Warriors 5 has a fantastic artistic design. The characters are done with thick ink strokes, they are very different from each other, they are full of details, and they are well-written. This good taste is also in their menus, in their enemies, and in the direction of their cinematic scenes.
Samurai Warriors 5 is loaded with animated scenes full of oaths, promises, sacrifices, blood, and sweat. And everything has a sticky point (said in the best sense) and an over-action that suits everything very well; but not only that. During missions in which we continue to advance through fortresses accomplishing tasks, the characters never stop talking.
While not being anything otherworldly in terms of textures, they do have painting-inspired details, such as traces of weapon effects, which even make the gameplay more satisfying, and a cel-shaded style in the characters, with sharply delineated edges to make them stand out on stage.
Friends die, betrayals and new alliances follow, and when you meet a major boss, cinematic scenes are introduced during the match presented by the rival. Who was going to tell Musou a lively narrative construction he was going to find his maturity. This has already been done in part Samurai Warriors 4, but here everything is much better.
Sound
Music, which mixes more traditional Japanese sounds (or the sounds we all associate with Japan) with other, spicier melodies, is another big hit of the game, as are the artistic effects of transitions or illustrations that come out in special attacks.
Game Difficulty
There are common enemies who must be eliminated with special abilities, or they will not be defeated, musicians who encourage rival troops and must be eliminated first, archers who make it impossible to finish off a commander if we don’t kill them first, leaders who must be killed or private soldiers won’t stop appearing… Forcing you to be strategic.
Now, when you get to an area, you have to look at where all those troops are before you start hitting your target. If you don’t, you’ll lose a lot of life and you won’t be able to move forward well.
Many of the commanders you need to crush will make you stop and play defense, wait for them to attack, and block them so you can place your combo; especially the alternative bosses hidden on stage that are particularly difficult. We have a skill wheel that activates passive and special attacks. With them, we can cut off their most powerful attacks. If we’re not careful, they’ll leave us stunned and their hosts will do the rest.
Samurai Warriors 5 itself starts by warning you that you’d better play in the easy mode because normally it’s not as simple as other installments; but it’s just a little more complicated, it’s great so play normally.
How long to finish the game?
To crown these good feelings, there is the cooperative mode, double special attacks, there is enough differentiation between the playable characters, and many hours of gameplay both in the different lines of its campaign mode and in a way to do missions more freely, strengthen the bonds between friends, optimize our barracks, horses, etc…
All in all, you can play for over 25 hours and still have things to do and phases to improve your rank. All this is not to say that the game is perfect or that Samurai Warriors 5 has reached the zenith of the franchise. This grandiose presentation comes in exchange for reasonable performance drops during cinematics and combat, and enemies that only appear when we are close to them.
Samurai Warriors 5: A Must to Play Samurai Game
With 27 main characters and 10 supports, a fun-filled main mode told through the perspectives of Nobunaga Oda, Mitsuhide Akechi, and their friends, and Citadel mode for doing side missions, collecting gear, upgrading your castle, and strengthening character affinities, local and two-player online co-op, Samurai Warriors 5 should convince you.
It maintains the main lines of the previous game, but with better art direction, tone, and combat. It still has issues that many won’t forgive, but it struck a very fun balance between shonen energy and their usual massive battles.
