Character Creation Reviews: Dynasty Warriors 6 Empires

Dynasty Warriors is really one of those "love it or hate it" series.  For those who don't know it, the basic concept behind every game in the series is that you are playing one of the major warriors or generals of the Three Kingdoms era of ancient China (or in the spinoff Samurai Warriors, playing one from the Warring States period of Japanese history).  You fight on the battlefield against thousands of other troops, aided by your own troops, and by the time you're done with a level you'll have taken down several hundred to over a thousand enemies personally.  Most of the normal soldiers won't be a real challenge, and you can often take out five or ten with a single blow, but the officers may sometimes give you a run for your money if you're playing on a decent difficulty.  The challenge of the game primarily comes from managing your time properly, surprisingly enough...you'll be given various objectives over the course of a mission, ranging from things like supporting an endangered ally to taking a certain base to taking out specific officers before they accomplish a task, and your success in the mission to some degree involves succeeding at as many of these objectives as you can.  In easier missions, this isn't too hard...you have plenty of time to work with.  In harder missions, though, the objectives get a little more complicated, the game throws obstacles like environmental conditions in your way, you get multiple objectives at one time, times are shorter, and objectives are placed far apart across the map.  It can be pretty tense at times, wondering if an officer will live long enough for you to get in to save him when you decided to go for another objective first.  The combat in the series is fairly simple, though I'd argue that it is just complex enough to do what it has to do, but I still find it entertaining.  The game is particularly fun in co-op, as there's just something purely enjoyable about scything through hundreds of troops side-by-side with a buddy (or wondering where your buddy's gone off to and then finding him by seeing a a good ten or twenty troops flying through the air from a hard hit).  I wouldn't put the series up for major awards for innovation, but it is a fun series and I would certainly call the games good.

The Empires offshoot of the series takes the same basic playstyle and lets you choose your hero and build your own empire instead of following one of the stories of the Three Kingdoms.  You decide where to attack, who to recruit, who to ally with, and what strategies to use in battle.  It's an interesting concept and is done pretty well.  Unfortunately, Dynasty Warriors 6 Empires (DW6E) is just kind of missing something.  The main problem that seems to exist in the game is the battles lose that "objective" setup that they have in the main series, and thus the actual combat is mostly just you going to each base on the map, taking it, and then taking the main camp.  The lack of specific objectives would be fine if the enemy AI were trying interesting strategies or pulling out fire attacks and other things throughout the battle, but this isn't the case...instead, each battle starts with one enemy officer pulling one of three tricks--supercharging his own abilities, disappearing to make a sneak attack, or (if I recall correctly, as this one rarely comes up in my games) moving in to make a fire attack--and once you've dealt with that strategy, the enemy just continues sending their officers out to attack various bases.  Thus, once you've dealt with the opening gambit the enemy has no more surprises up their sleeve, and you don't end up with the tense moments in the main series.  On higher difficulty settings it can be a bit challenging to survive the fight, but that's all, and it doesn't play to the strengths of the series.  It surprised me a bit, because Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires, as I recall, did have enemies that tried special plans multiple times in a battle.  The kingdom management and map strategy is fairly basic as well, and there aren't really any situations that pop up that are hard to deal with...you basically just keep upgrading your equipment and skills and pop into various battles.  In a nice touch, the game allows you to play as a ruler or as an officer serving a ruler (or even a wandering one, though you have to take service to be able to win the playthrough), and the officer mode is actually pretty interesting, at least giving you one additional critical objective in each battle and including some fun options like the ability to turn traitor in the middle of a fight. It is important to note that the game plays like playing a custom game in an RTS--once you have beaten the empire mode, starting a new game means starting a new game--no character progression carries over by default, though there are some options you can choose to carry over from your completed save file. Actually, I rather like this for an Empires game, as it makes each game almost totally a new experience. Overall, DW6E is a fun game, but just doesn't include as much to focus on in the battles, and thus is harder to play for an extended period of time.

Luckily, it actually has a pretty decent creation mode.  For appearance creation, you start out by choosing a gender, and then can choose from three different faces.  Each face then also has six different eyes, six different noses, and six different mouths.  This lets you actually set up a pretty good variety of faces.  There's a pretty good selection of hairstyles, as well, and a few other facial accessories like scars or beards (though you may only select one accessory and there are only a few to choose from).  For the body, you can change height, weight, and build pretty nicely.  Height and width are changed via sliders, and build by selecting from a list (thin, average, muscular, etc.).  You can actually build characters that look like anything from preteen kids/young teens to giant hulking warriors that would dwarf pro wrestlers, so the system is pretty flexible.  Skin tones are (somewhat unfortunately) only pretty realistic shades, so I couldn't give my friend's giant orc warrior character green skin.

There aren't many outfits, but the ones available run a pretty good selection between normal clothes, robes, barbarian outfits, and various armors.  There were even a few free DLC outfits that gave some more styles, and since you can mix and match pieces (you have slots for head, chest, arms, legs, and feet) it isn't hard to come up with a pretty good look for most characters.  I managed to build most of the cast of my fantasy tabletop RPG (including NPCs) and feel good about how they all looked. Still, if you actually make use of the large number of character slots they give you, your characters are going to start looking a little too similar after a while.

In a nice touch, the game also features about 10 voices for each gender, and includes a pitch shift option.  Unfortunately using that option for more than minor shifts will lead to some odd-sounding voices sometimes, but it is still appreciated.  Again, you'll probably end up with some repeat voices, though, and with the voices all showing strong personalities it can be hard to find one that feels close enough to your character.  Still, it is always good to see this option, and the pitch shift is handy for getting at least a little more mileage out of the voice sets.

If I have one major complaint about appearance customization, it is that the game does not use color sliders.  Instead, it provides a decent-sized list of colors for hair, a small list for skin tones, and an incredibly small list for clothing colors.  If I recall correctly, eye color cannot even be set--the color of the eyes is determined by which of the six eyes you picked.  Enabling color sliders for each of these things could go a long way to increasing variety.

Ability settings are basic, but decent.  You can pick a stat for your character growth to focus on, or leave your character balanced.  You then pick a fighting style from among all the ones used by main characters in the series, which gives quite a list (though unfortunately some motions in the styles used by the female fighters are unmistakably, ah..."girly," and thus likely to seem awkward on a male character).  Most major weapon types are pretty well represented, and I could find styles to adequately represent the styles of each character from my RPG.  Next, you pick the character's starting special move, which can be used frequently throughout the battle--this might be an attack boost, a fireball, a super-speed charge, etc.  You can buy more of these in play.  Finally, you pick a strategy card that the officer makes available, again from those assigned to the main characters.  This card can be used in the game's strategy map to give bonuses of some kind (for instance, it might enable you to fire attack a base in the next fight, or increase your defense, or give you money).  These selections combine to create a pretty good variety and ensure that your created characters will feel different from each other and different from the main characters' whose styles they are using.  That said, the special moves are not game-changers, and no character really has any traits that make them stand out extremely from the rest, so you aren't going to have a notably different experience playing one character than playing another.  It's just that one might be faster, another might take more hits before going down, etc.

Overall, character creation in DW6E is acceptable but not outstanding.  I very much hope that the designers continue to include creation modes in future games, whether the main series or the Empires offshoots.  (I also hold out hope for a Custom Warriors game which concentrates on building characters and even missions, as that would be a lot of fun, but I know that's a long shot.)  If you're looking for some good fun and a good co-op game that happens to also feature a pretty decent character creation setup, you can do worse than Dynasty Warriors 6: Empires.