#Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

yeonchi · 21 days ago

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Koei Warriors Retrospective Part 20: Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate

Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate - Definitive Edition (無双OROCHI2 Ultimate - DX) Platforms: PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC Release dates: Japan: 26 September 2013 (PS3/Vita)/26 June 2014 (PS4)/4 September 2014 (Xbox One)/9 November 2017 (Switch)/12 July 2022 (PC - DX) USA: 2 September 2014 (PS4/Xbox One)/30 September 2014 (PS3/Vita, digital only)/12 July 2022 (PC - DX) Europe: 5 September 2014 (PS3/Vita, digital only/PS4/Xbox One)/12 July 2022 (PC - DX)

Last time, I was in the middle of covering Warriors Orochi 3 when I discovered that the post was starting to get a bit too long for comfort. As such, this post will be dedicated to covering the Ultimate expansion and the rant for this game when Alec and Shanna come back to me with their findings.

Considering that the Western localisations of the vanilla game came out 3-4 months after the Japanese release and the PS4 and Xbox One launched a couple of months after this expansion came out on the PS3 in Japan, I'm actually surprised they didn't chase the launch dates for those consoles, even with the PS4 launching in Japan about 3 months after the West. They did chase the Xbox One's launch date in Japan though, so it's weird why they didn't do it for the PS4 considering that everything was ready to go and, well, Sony is their main target console company of choice, after all. This expansion was also not released on the Xbox 360 meaning that such ports are now dead in the water, but I'll talk more about it when we cover DW8.

Apparently, console gaming was stronger in the West at the time of this game's launch, while mobile games and handheld gaming ruled the market in Japan because of their on-the-go lifestyle and their xenophobia making them prefer Japanese games over Western games. In 2016, Sony restructured Sony Computer Entertainment, changing its name to Sony Interactive Entertainment, and moved it under the umbrella of Sony America, symbolising the shifting demographics.

These factoids are but a preview to the divide between Koei Tecmo's Japanese and Western fanbases as I prepare to confront the Koei Tecmo New Normal Copium (again). The retrospective continues after the break.

Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate (Definitive Edition)

Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate is a game that can truly be called an expansion to its parent. Where WO2 was a continuation of WO1, it acted as an entirely separate game with no way to carry over save data or play stages from the first game on the second. The combined format of WOZ was only realised on the PS3 and PC in Asia, with an attempted localisation apparently being rejected by SCEA.

If you have save data from WO3 and you boot up Ultimate on the PS3, it will obviously ask you if you want to import your save data and carry over your progress (on Vita you can also carry over your progress from Special on the PSP). But what if you want to play Ultimate on the PS4 or the Vita? Can you import your PS3 save data from the vanilla game and can you transfer your Ultimate progress between those consoles? Yes. To import your PS3 save data, you need to upload it to PSN in Options > Save/Load, then download it when you create the Ultimate save data on the PS4 or the Vita. From there, you can use the Share Data option under Options > Save/Load to effectively sync your Ultimate save data between your PS3, Vita and PS4 via the PSN. This is what is known as cross-save.

DLC from the vanilla game will be made available in Ultimate for free, even if you're playing on Vita or PS4. This also goes for the Xbox 360 and Xbox One; while you can't transfer save data from the vanilla game for some reason, DLC does transfer over. Likewise, Ultimate DLC purchased for either the PS3, Vita or PS4 will also be available on the other two consoles. However, just because you bought Ultimate on say, the PS3, it doesn't mean you can get the Vita or PS4 versions digitally for free; this is what is known as cross-buy, and apparently, it's usually reserved for (AAA) first-party and indie games.

Apparently, playing online multiplayer between PS3/Vita/PS4, also known as cross-play is a thing, but from what I've read it's a bit finicky. I don't know if people have actually been able to do this, but the cross-play I'm thinking of is using the Vita as a second controller via Remote Play, which can be done.

These cross-platform functions are awesome and all, but there is one question that needs to be asked; does it need to go through the PSN? For cross-save in particular, why can't you just transfer saves via USB? I don't know how save files are managed between the PS3 and PS4, but in an ideal world, I should be able to connect a Vita to a PS3 via USB (or via Wi-Fi without having to go through the PSN) and transfer the save data from there. This is an important question that more people should be asking, especially considering the discourse around online stores/servers shutting down for older consoles and the fervour over buying physical copies of games for preservation.

Man, to think that this could have been in the retrospective for DW8 even though this is more about gaming in general. Anyway, let's get onto the story for Ultimate with the fifth chapter.

Some time after the good ending of the vanilla game, Sun Wukong was hanging with Da Ji and Himiko when they heard the voice of Orochi, telling them to fight so he could awaken himself. Guided by the voice, they followed its origin to a stone, confusing them. Seeing that Jiang Wei and Hanbei's armies were nearby at Hinokawa, they decided to attack them. Jiang Wei is captured and the others are defeated; when Da Ji's group put Jiang Wei in front of the stone, its power created a copy of him.

"Jiang Wei" returns to the Shu-Tokugawa Army and informs them that the Oda Army are working with Da Ji. Liu Bei leads his army to Honnōji to demand an explanation from Nobunaga. Just as Nobunaga is defeated, Jiang Wei arrives and criticises the Shu-Tokugawa Army for attacking him. When asked about this, Jiang Wei states that he didn't remember what happened after being captured, except that he did see a tail. This leads everyone to realise that the "Jiang Wei" from earlier was an imposter.

Ranmaru reports to Nobunaga that the Wei Army is advancing on Nanjun, possibly with the intention of attacking them. The Oda respond in kind, and they learn that the Wei Army are under the belief that the Oda attacked them first. After defeating Guo Jia and Zhenji, Mitsunari and Cao Pi lead an assault unit to attack the Oda camp. With the Wei Army defeated, Da Ji appears with a copy of Nobunaga.

Following the battle, Da Ji escapes and returns to the stone, which reveals not Orochi, but a woman named Tamamo, who wields a mirror in her hands. Nobunaga and his officers catch up to Da Ji, but Tamamo uses her mirror to absorb them into it, taking us to the sixth chapter.

Numerous officers across the lands begin disappearing as well, leading to the remaining officers heading out in search for them. Sima Shi, Masamune and Gracia lead an army to Ueda Castle in an attempt to find Da Ji, but when they do, she reveals Tamamo and seals them in the mirror along with Shennong and Kaguya, who had come just too late to stop her.

Inside the mirror world, Shennong tells everyone about Tamamo, that she was an evil spirit who was imprisoned for her misdeeds. Sakon, Ujiyasu and Wang Yuanji decide to explore the world and their party ends up in Kawanakajima, where they fight Sima Zhao, Lu Xun and Ginchiyo, whose armies believe them to be enemies. After the battle, Shennong and Kaguya meet up with them and they explain that they are inside the world of the Divine Mirror; presumably, the enemies that Sima Zhao's army fought were mirror images of the real thing. Kaguya cannot send anyone through time while they are in the mirror, so they have to focus on finding their friends.

We learn more about Tamamo and the Divine Mirror as other officers deal with mirror images of their friends. Since ancient times, Tamamo has been deceiving humans into fighting each other to feed on their sadness and anger, resulting in her being sealed within the Killing Stone. Kaguya senses that there is a rift in this realm that isn't completely shut, likely meaning that there is a way out of it.

Despite interference from mirror images preventing the heroes from escaping the realm, Shennong and Kaguya find the exit in Jiangdong and everyone escapes through it. The heroes confront Tamamo and Da Ji in Xu Province, then with the help of Fu Xi and Nuwa, Shennong has Tamamo sealed back into the Killing Stone. Peace returns to the land again... or so the heroes thought, for this is merely the good ending of Ultimate.

Shennong explains to the heroes that their battles with the Hydra and Orochi's power likely weakened the Killing Stone's power before Tamamo used Da Ji to create more negative power so she could free herself. As such, there is a chance that Tamamo could escape again and they need to complete the seal with the Divine Mirror if they want to stop her for good. However, because the Divine Mirror broke and lost its power when the heroes escaped the mirror realm, they need to go back in time to before then.

Aya, Shingen and Gan Ning go back to Ueda Castle before they were absorbed into the mirror realm in an attempt to find Tamamo. Tamamo is defeated and she offers the Divine Mirror up to the heroes. Shingen goes to take it and Gan Ning pushes him out of the way as Tamamo uses the mirror; when they get back up, they see that Tamamo has disappeared, leaving the Divine Mirror behind.

The heroes discover that the mirror is cracked; Shennong and Kaguya realise that this was the source of the rift that allowed them to escape. They are unable to seal Tamamo with the mirror in its current state because if they did, she would be able to escape. Shingen suggests that they go back to a point in time before the mirror was even broken, but they would need to find out when it happened first.

The rest of the Coalition are informed about Tamamo and were asked to help find her while continuing to deal with her imposter plots across the land, resulting in certain individuals being revealed to have tails upon their defeat. The tails gathered where Tamamo was hiding at Itsukushima and the Coalition confront her and Da Ji there. After interrogating Tamamo and losing her due to Da Ji's actions, Fu Xi realises that they have to go back to the Mystic Realm, long ago before Orochi created this combined dimension.

The Divine Mirror was a treasure of the Mystic Realm used to imprison evil spirits. Long ago, it was in the possession of the Heavenly Emperor before it went missing after he was assassinated by Orochi. Fu Xi takes some of the Coalition and Kaguya sends them back into his past in the hope that he can save the Heavenly Emperor, which he failed to do back then as the other mystics were fighting demons at the time.

In the seventh chapter, Fu Xi's group joins up with fellow mystic Yinglong and they work to purge demons from the Mystic Realm. Though the demons are defeated, they end up surviving the battle due to their leader's power and retreating. As Yinglong wonders who the demons' leader is, he is approached by Tamamo, who informs him that the Heavenly Emperor is using the Divine Mirror to control them.

Fu Xi's group was unable to catch up with the demons, so they decide to hurry over to the Heavenly Emperor's Palace to rescue him and Yinglong. When they get there, the palace is overrun by demons; Fu Xi explains that the Divine Mirror's power is not unlimited and it could lose its power if the demons are too powerful or too great in number. They get to the throne room just as Yinglong confronts the Heavenly Emperor, having witnessed the latter using the Divine Mirror and believed Tamamo's words for himself. Yinglong snatches the mirror and attempts to destroy it, but the mirror cracks and releases a miasma that turns Yinglong into... Orochi. Fu Xi's group prevents Orochi from killing the Heavenly Emperor and they escape the palace with him in tow.

Fu Xi suspects that Orochi's desire for destruction was born from the power of all the demons imprisoned within the mirror, but if you've played WOZ and listened to the subtext, Orochi sought to find a worthy challenger who could end his life, perhaps out of atonement for being fooled by Tamamo or a hatred for what had become of himself. This gives Orochi a more sympathetic backstory as the fires he lit were constantly being spread by others like Da Ji and Kiyomori. It also begs the question of why the Mystics didn't send the DW and SW characters back to their own times after the events of the first two games, but that's neither here nor there.

Orochi begins wreaking destruction as he is apparently spotted at the Wuhang Mountains. Because Susano'o was busy with the demons, he sent Sun Wukong and a "human" Nezha to deal with Orochi, and so they are joined by Fu Xi and his group. They encounter some mystic officers on the way, but they turn on them for some reason. When other mystics arrive and attack them, the group deduces that Tamamo has to be involved and they decide to find her first. Upon being confronted, Tamamo reveals that she has regained their power thanks to Yinglong and that she was the one who was in charge of the demons attacking the Mystic Realm.

Tamamo manages to escape as the Heavenly Emperor recovers from his injuries. He states that he can repair the crack in the Divine Mirror, but it needs to be done in a pure environment and the Mystic Realm is enveloped in miasma thanks to Orochi's presence, so the Heavenly Emperor needs to imprison Orochi first. As such, Fu Xi's group, including Lu Bu and Nezha, head to Koshi Castle to fight Orochi. Nezha is the first to fight Orochi, but he ends up being defeated by him. Fu Xi's group cuts through the army of demons and defeats Orochi, allowing the Heavenly Emperor to imprison him in the Wuhang Mountains, thus setting the stage for the events of WOZ.

The Heavenly Emperor states that Yinglong's soul has changed upon becoming Orochi, hence the Yinglong that the mystics knew is no more. He repairs the Divine Mirror and hands it to Fu Xi's group so they can use it to seal Tamamo for good in the future. As for Nezha, Susano'o would revive him and turn him into his cyborg form, but without the memories of his former self.

Fu Xi's group returns to the present with the complete Divine Mirror as the eighth chapter begins. The Coalition confronts Tamamo at Wan Castle, but when they arrive, they find Lu Bu's army camped there, who suspects them to be on Tamamo's side. Nezha arrives and accompanies the Coalition to the castle; Lu Bu is convinced that they are imposters, but Lu Xun believes Lu Bu to be the imposter. Lu Xun has a letter sent to Chen Gong, who decides to confirm it for himself; when Lu Bu refuses to move upon hearing that Nezha and Tadakatsu are outside, Lu Xun's suspicions end up being confirmed and Chen Gong sides with the coalition. Tamamo arrives upon "Lu Bu's" defeat and reveals Nezha to be another imposter as well. The Coalition defeats Tamamo and prepares to seal her inside the Divine Mirror, but she deflects it, revealing her true form as the nine-tailed fox, Kyūbi.

Kyūbi has the power to impersonate people and can use her tails to do so as well. With her power to create demons, Kyūbi remains a threat that still needs to be dealt with. After pursuing her through Dongkou, they finally confront Kyūbi once and for all at Odawara Castle. Her tails take on the form of Ujiyasu, the three lords of the Three Kingdoms or the Sengoku Era, Cao Pi, Kiyomasa, Shuten Dōji and Orochi X; even a tail takes on her own form as a decoy while she attempts to escape, but the Coalition catches up with her and defeats her, sealing her within the Divine Mirror for good.

The mystics descend and gather the Coalition together, retrieving the Divine Mirror and thanking them for their help before sending them back to their own times for good. This is the true ending of Ultimate.

After this, a set of Divine Mirror stages (marked in English as "Mirror Realm" but they're not actually set there, go fuck yourself, Koei Tecmo) will be unlocked, allowing you to expose the imposters created by Kyūbi's tails. They don't contribute to the story and they allow you to obtain a weapon orb (or two) depending on the difficulty you play in. You'll also unlock two stages detailing how Tamamo/Kyūbi was sealed in the Killing Stone in the first place, then there is a trio of stages showing Kyūbi in the mirror realm, using her tails to fight the reflections within the realm and recruit servants for herself so she can take her "revenge" on the "mystics".

On top of this, there are other Ultimate-exclusive stages set in the main saga that follow certain groups and show battles from different points of view. Some of these tie into some of the vanilla game's DLC stages, like the one with Kiyomori recruiting puppets for his army. All in all, combined with the new stages added in Special and Hyper, Ultimate contains double the stages of the vanilla game and much more if you include the DLC.

Although the new stages take place after the good ending of the vanilla game, it's actually recommended that you unlock all characters and play the true ending before you start the fifth chapter. Apparently, the wiki says that camp conversations won't happen unless all the relevant characters have been unlocked, but for some reason, the conversations still happen (at least for me) if I haven't unlocked one of the characters. Maybe Koei Tecmo should have been clearer with this requirement and made it so you have to clear the normal, good and true endings of the vanilla game first before you can begin the new chapters.

Before starting a stage in Story Mode or Free Mode, you can select which character you want to start the battle with on top of what team you would like to play with. Also, a funny thing about recommended characters; human Nezha is a recommended character in Chapter 7's War in the Mystic Realm when he is unlocked after clearing that exact same stage, so one of your current team's characters ends up getting carried over if you're playing this battle for the first time and you decide to play as the recommended team. Why couldn't human Nezha have been unlocked after clearing the previous stage when Yinglong was unlocked after clearing Chapter 6?

A new camp design has been introduced for Ultimate which is unlocked when you start Chapter 5. There is also a temporary Mystic Realm camp design that is seen during Chapter 7. There is no way to switch camp designs, but a modified version of the old camp design can be seen in Gauntlet Mode.

As is obvious, the characters who debuted in Special and Hyper appear again in Ultimate with a few new additions exclusive to the expansion:

Tamamo

Yinglong

Nezha (human)

Kyūbi

Hundun

Xu Shu (Dynasty Warriors 7 Empires)

Kasumi (Dead or Alive)

Sterkenberg (Atelier)

Sophitia (Soulcalibur)

All in all, there are a total of 145 characters in Ultimate. And look, while that is a lot of characters to be voiced, it should be noted that several voice actors do voice multiple characters, so while the number is still great, it's not as bad as you think.

As stated, the three new characters from Samurai Warriors Chronicles 2nd are not included even though this game was released a year after it. Sophitia's inclusion in this game is interesting considering that Soulcalibur is a Bandai Namco franchise and there are other characters from other Koei Tecmo franchises they could have used, like Toukiden. Don't think they couldn't have done it; Warriors All-Stars included William from Nioh and they were released nearly two months apart; Toukiden being released three months before WO3U is nothing. This creates a problem for my take on a potential alternate WO4, but to keep it simple, I replaced Sophitia with Zhou Cang from DW9.

Some changes have been made to the battle mechanics in Ultimate. All characters gain a new aerial Type Action, Technique type characters gain a new evasion step ability can can be triggered when attacked, pressing the down button allows you to change battle styles, aka summon your inactive characters to fight alongside you in battle, and holding down the up button allows you to summon your horse and automatically mount it, something which was implemented in DW8 (why couldn't they have kept it on the down button?). Also, True Triple Attacks can now be performed on horseback.

Triple Rushes can be performed when switching characters after landing Charge Attacks. This will allow inactive characters to tag in and perform attacks on enemies before coming back to your character. Special Triple Rushes can be performed when you have certain characters in your team and you start a Triple Rush from a specific character. No matter which direction you go for a Special Triple Rush, they will always go in the same order.

When all three characters in your team are on the battlefield with full Musou Gauges, you can perform a True Musou Burst with them. You can do this with up to 6 characters, whether with your team in Gauntlet Mode or with characters who you have a high friendship with. It's just like the Double Musou Attack but with more characters.

A new item, the Book of Enlightenment, has been introduced in this game. It's a power-up that allows you to farm 300 EXP from every enemy you defeat for 20 seconds. You can bring your character up 10 levels with it, but there are two problems I have with it; one, EXP items only level up the character you're using so your team's levels can become unbalanced if you're trying to balance them out, and two, there is no indicator added for this power-up like with the other stat buffs, so you can't tell if it's active or not. You'll randomly get one of these in each battle (two if you're playing on Chaos).

Battlefield Bonuses can be activated just before starting a battle by pressing Square, which will cost you 100,000 gems. Activating it will allow you to obtain stronger weapons (including weapons with ridonculous attack boosts) and gives you more chances of finding Books of Enlightenment.

I said in the vanilla game that you can't directly add specific attributes to your weapon unless you have another weapon that has it first. This is now possible in Ultimate; through playing the Divine Mirror stages or Gauntlet Mode, you'll be able to obtain weapon orbs that can be equipped onto your weapon to add +5 to a particular attribute (I wish it were +1 instead though). This will also cost a small amount of gems as well. Weapon orbs can also be crafted with two of an item dropped by a particular soldier type and one of a crafting material, along with 1000 gems and 1 crystal.

New weapon attributes are also available, including attributes that combine the powers of two elements. There is also a Tri-Element attribute that gives you the power of Flame, Ice and Bolt; when coupled with the Windslay attribute, your weapon would become more of a unstoppable destroyer than it already is.

Five-star mystic and X weapons are now available for all characters. Mystic weapons are obtained similar to how rare weapons are obtained in other games (usually on stages where they are recommended characters in) and crafting X weapons require two of a characters' personal item (found by obtaining the red orbs when defeating officers on higher miasma) and one of a crafting material, along with 20,000 gems and 2 crystals. Maxing out the compatibility gauge gives you +18 for mystic weapons and +99 for X weapons. Something to note for the Vita version is that the KO requirements for obtaining mystic weapons are 75% that of the PS3 version.

The EXP stock cap has been expanded tenfold to 999,999 instead of 99,999 from the vanilla game. In addition, the maximum level is now 100 instead of 99; when characters reach level 100, they can receive a promotion, meaning that their level is reset back to 1 and they gain two extra item slots, a second skill and upgrade gems every time they level up which can be used to permanently upgrade a stat. On the second promotion, they get two more item slots. Characters can be promoted up to 9 times (formerly 3), with extra bonuses available from the fourth promotion onwards.

Under the items, saddles (or stirrups for some reason) are now a separate category, giving characters back an item slot. Saddles remain shared amongst your team. With the promotion system, characters can carry up to six items after being appropriately promoted. New items and rare items are obtainable in Gauntlet Mode.

Free Mode is now in a menu format with battles able to be sorted by chapter or battlefield like in DW8. Duel Mode is carried over from Hyper and once again, I wish Battle Royale Mode was carried over from Special.

Musou Battlefields are now upgraded to Musou Battlefields X in Asian versions. The 50 point cost limit has been removed and you can now create up to 100 of your own battle dialogues and messages to swap out. Battle dialogues can be up to 120 characters long (40 in Asian versions) while battle messages are up to 60 characters long (22 in Asian versions. Battle messages can only be swapped after testing the stage once, which will populate the message timeline. The only catch with creating your own battle dialogues is that no voices will be played when they are displayed - now wouldn't that be a golden opportunity for AI voices?

Gauntlet Mode, or Unlimited Mode in Japanese, is a new mode for this game. This mode is set in a world of chaos brought about by the Hydra's appearance causing distortions in space and time that also affected other worlds. To put it simply, this mode is Chaos difficulty on steroids.

The default characters you start with are Zhao Yun, Zhang Fei, Hanzō, Mitsunari and Aya, but you can choose a team of 5 characters from those unlocked in Story Mode. Other characters are unlocked when you defeat them in this mode and obtain a Sworn Ally Bond of Fate (the wording in the English version is atrocious, I know) for that character, which you can use to unlock them. Any remaining bonds can be used to directly increase friendship levels with them and before you say that it's a waste of resources, keep in mind that each character has their own friendship levels with every character in this game.

This mode has you fight enemies in battlefield-shaped dungeons as you open treasure chests and follow the Dragon Portals to find the escape point. Each dungeon will be filled with a miasma that will grow stronger as time goes on. Dungeons can be made up of 1-3 battlefields, and dungeons that display red text are Extreme Dungeons, which contain roid rage battlefields where miasma increases dramatically and enemies become significantly stronger. In exchange, you can also obtain greater rewards. Sometimes there are missions (up to 3) that you can complete as well.

By activating the Dragon Portals by holding L1, special effects can be activated on the first activation, such as discovering hidden treasure chests, revealing escape points, recovering your health and Musou or activating the effects of the Scroll of Enlightenment on purple portals. After a short cooldown time, they can be activated again to reduce the miasma level and recover your Formation Skill Gauge.

Treasure chests can contain materials, gems and crystals, but they can also affect the miasma of the area, cause enemy officers to appear (particularly when opening red treasure chests on Extreme Dungeons), eliminate enemies in the area or teleport you to a faraway Dragon Portal among other effects. Some treasure chests are initially shrouded in miasma and won't be openable until it goes away.

Before going into battle, you can select three Formation skills to use in battle (why can't it be five?). Red formations provide temporary stat buffs, green formations conjure effects against enemies (that can be combined for greater effects) and blue formations focus on searching, which causes your team members to spread out and explore the dungeon. Your team's stats are also affected depending on what formation you switch to, plus formations can be maxed out to level 10 the more you use them. Formations are unlocked when you unlock certain characters or a certain amount of characters. Formation Skills are activated with R3 and they take up a portion of the Formation Skill gauge. Each formation has five skills that are allocated to a character based on their position when you save your team lineup.

Sometimes, powerful opponents can appear from other worlds, but they yield greater rewards. Saddles cannot be used in this mode and you will only be able to keep the materials and items you obtained if you escape all battlefields in a dungeon. If all five members of your team are defeated before they get a chance to respawn, you lose the game and you only keep the EXP you earned.

In the camp, the mystic will have a list of missions you can do, of which you can accept five at a time. Clearing those missions will yield you with gems, crystals, weapon orbs and sometimes rare items. A couple problems I have with the rewards system; one, in the English version, the Repel Curse Sorcerers mission actually requires you to defeat 500 Charm Sorcerers, Curse Sorcerers being the next rank up (once again, go fuck yourself Koei Tecmo), and two, the Repel missions should be merged by soldier category and rank so they can be done faster (even if they up the number requirement), so things like Rikishi/Ozeki, Bandits/Thieves and Archers/Flame Archers/Inferno Archers should be merged. If you're focusing on higher levels and harder dungeons, then you won't be looking for base-tier soldiers on easier dungeons.

Unlocking dungeons requires the use of keystones. There are four types of keystones; red, yellow, blue and purple, and each colour is unlocked when you complete Gauntlet Mode and replay from the beginning up to three times. You can also pay five keystones to shuffle the contents of a dungeon and alter it.

There are four levels of dungeons and in each of the first three is a barrier to the next level. Barrier dungeons have three battlefields and the third one is a fixed battlefield with fixed characters; you'll face off against Nobunaga, Cao Cao or Susano'o and Orochi. The escape point is unlocked only after defeating the stage's boss. At the final barrier, you'll face off against Hundun, who summons a whole bunch of mighty officers for you to fight. Defeating Hundun here clears Gauntlet Mode and allows the worlds to be separated as Hundun goes back into his slumber. As stated, you can replay Gauntlet Mode from the beginning, which allows you to unlock the next keystone tier.

Gauntlet Mode can also be played with two players online and offline, but both players share the same five characters to switch from. All in all, Gauntlet Mode can be a fun, yet challenging mode that milks the characters and battlefields for all their worth. Character growth and weapons are reflected between Story, Free and Gauntlet Modes.

A new colour edit function akin to SW3 is available after clearing Chapter 8 in Story Mode or from the start in Gauntlet Mode. Only the standard costumes can be colour-edited and the editing of some parts are limited on Team NINJA collaboration characters.

Ultimate-exclusive DLC is available, and it's more recycled content as the fantasy costumes, original school-themed costumes and the 5 DW1 character costumes, taken from DW7's DLC, are among those included. New alternate costumes for characters who were added in ports are added (interestingly, Xu Shu gets a "disguise costume" instead of a Fury form costume).

Instead of new Story Mode scenarios, the new stages in the Ultimate DLC are 10 new dungeons for Gauntlet Mode. Three of them contain stages where you can obtain mystic weapons for all members of your team when the requirements are fulfilled:

Koshi Castle: Lower all four drawbridges in an anti-clockwise direction starting from the north, then defeat Orochi within 3:30 minutes.

Liaodong: Achieve 2000 KOs before defeating Diamondback, Dodomeki and Gyūki for the first time, then when they reappear, defeat them again within 10 minutes. The player must not be defeated at all during this.

Heavenly Emperor's Palace: Defeat Hundun.

Normally you can only have one mystic weapon in Story Mode, but this allows you to bypass that limitation.

There are also three more dungeons set in Mt. Xingshi, Koshi Castle X and the Wuhang Mountains that are available on the PS4 and Xbox One as "cross-save bonuses", but are unlocked after clearing Gauntlet Mode once. For some reason, they are not included on the Switch and PC ports that came out later on. Speaking of which...

Around the time this game was released in the West, people were begging Koei Tecmo on their socials for PC ports of games, particularly with DW8XL being their first PC port to be released on Steam. Even with the hate from opinion-neutrals and the requests for a PC port being forgotten for years, Koei Tecmo would port this game to the Nintendo Switch in 2017 (exclusive to Japan) and on PC via Steam in 2022. Both these ports were released as DX/Definitive Editions (though not marked on the Switch port) with most, if not all of the DLC included, like DW7 before it.

Thanks to this, I can use a trainer on the game so I can steamroll my way through Gauntlet Mode without dying. For those of you who are about to accuse me of cheating or being a l337 hax0r, one, I don't give a fuck, and two, I played the PS3 port of Ultimate for 9 months and unlocked Hundun in Gauntlet Mode without cheats before I decided to get the PC port.

Also, I wish I knew that I could transfer my save from RPCS3 to the PC port, but at least by starting from scratch I could experience the game in full, even if for a second time. You can also decrypt and transfer your PS3 and PS4 data to this game as well and continue your progress from where you left off. It's honestly a miracle that this is even possible and it makes me wonder how some games are built for different platforms and consoles.

A protip when playing the PC port, courtesy of worldbolding: If you have a monitor with a higher refresh rate, then you might get glitches like this when activating some attacks with some characters. The screenshot shows it happening on Ma Chao’s Musou Attack, but in my experience, this also happens on Huang Gai and Sophitia’s Musou Attacks, all three of which are targeted attacks.

To fix this glitch, you need to change the refresh rate to 60 Hz (or lower) in Advanced display settings, which can be accessed (in Windows) by right clicking on the desktop and going to Display settings, then scrolling down to under Multiple displays.

The game is available in English, Japanese and Chinese (Traditional/Simplified), and unlike DW7XLDE, the language is set through your Steam client, but for me, all I have to do is change one line in an .ini file. Take note, however, that changing the game's language means that whatever messages you entered for Musou Battlefields or party names in Gauntlet Mode will be erased. Keep this in mind for DW9E.

Now that all is said and done, there is still one more topic I've left for last, because it's the reason why I started the Koei Warriors Rant Series back in 2014, and by extension, why I started the Koei Warriors Retrospective ten years later in 2024. That topic is, of course, the subject of Western localisation and English dubbing.

A few months ago, after the DW6 retrospective, I sent my assistants, the Tandy Computer Whiz Kids Alec and Shanna, on an assignment to find out why Koei Tecmo stopped dubbing their games. I even called in a favour from the Kwisatz Haderach (who I previously pissed off in an unseen adventure and had to be on his beck and call to atone for my offences) to see if Alec and Shanna could find anything that I didn't know since starting the Koei Warriors Rant Series. And if I'm right, they should be coming back to the studio right... now.

*KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK*

"Come in," Azuma said. It was Alec and Shanna, who had just returned from their research assignment with the Kwisatz Haderach. "Ahh, you're back. Is all your research in that file?"

"Yes, my lord," said Alec and Shanna, handing over their files of research to Azuma.

Azuma spent the next few minutes shuffling through their research, looking for anything that was significantly different enough from his past view and opinions to interest him. Unfortunately...

"Are you sure this research is independent?" Azuma questioned. "You didn't just go through my old rants from 10 years ago and grabbed whatever links were in there?"

"My lord, we can assure you that this research is independent," Alec replied.

"Yeah. We followed all the leads and a lot of them said the same things. Even the Kwisatz Haderach got in contact with some people who worked for Koei Tecmo or other Japanese gaming companies and they said similar things too," Shanna added.

"Are you sure those people actually worked where they said they worked and they weren't fanboys thinking they knew better than the companies themselves?" asked Azuma.

"My lord, why would you doubt the power of the Kwisatz Haderach? He stands above this world and has connections we could never get close to having," said Shanna.

"Exactly. If the Kwisatz Haderach couldn't get the truth out of those people, then who could?" said Alec.

Azuma grumbled, "Great. I've wasted three months trying to prove everyone, including myself, wrong and all I got was the same things I got 10 years ago. Listen guys, I need some time to process this. You're both dismissed."

"Yes, my lord," said Alec and Shanna as they left Azuma's studio.

Rant: English dubbing and Western localisation (Addressing the Rant Series)

As stated at the start of the last post, Warriors Orochi 3 was the first mainline game to be localised to the West without English dubbing. Samurai Warriors Chronicles was the first Koei Warriors game to receive such treatment, followed by Dynasty Warriors 7 Empires.

The first time I noticed something wrong about this was back in 2013, when I watched gameplay footage of WO3 and noticed that there were no English voices anywhere. I let it pass for a while, then when I learnt that Ultimate wouldn't be dubbed, I wrote the initial rant that started the Koei Warriors Rant Series.

Despite the 2.5 year gap between the release of the vanilla game and Ultimate, or the subsequent 8 year gap between the release of Ultimate on the PS4 and the PC, Koei Tecmo have made no effort to make up for it by redubbing the game in English and releasing the dub as (paid) DLC. Hell, even if the PSN stores on the PS3 and Vita are essentially on life support, or dead in the case of the Xbox Live Marketplace for the Xbox 360, they could still make the DLC available for the PS4 and Xbox One, which would also make it available to PS5 and Xbox Series players due to backward compatibility. By extension, if the English dub DLC were published years ago, then the Definitive Edition would have come out with dual audio. And frankly, why not? If Koei Tecmo could rerelease their old games on PC, then anything's possible.

One of the consequences of Koei Tecmo's decision not to dub their games is that they could only be sold digitally (on PSN) in the US. This is because, apparently, SCEA tends not to approve games for physical release if they don't have an English voice track. "But then how could Ultimate on PS4 be released physically in the US?" I'm guessing that this rule or whatever only applied up to the PS3 and PS Vita, then SCEA decided to scrap the rule for the PS4 and beyond, because a lot of sub-only Japanese games on the PS4 have received physical releases in the US since then. Mind you, this is the same SCEA who, apparently, refused to let WOZ, SW2HD or SW3Z be localised because they refused to publish games that were already released on other consoles first or they refused to sell two updated games in one package at full price. SCEA really hated money or sub purists for some reason back then, didn't they?

The most popular reason that people tend to parrot as to why Japanese gaming companies don't dub their games when localising to the West is... money. People will claim that they don't have the budget to produce voice dubbing in other languages, let alone English, and while I can understand an indie or amateur publisher going the sub-only route, when it comes to bigger companies like Koei Tecmo, what's the science- I mean, finance behind it? How much budget did WO3 receive compared to other games and how much of it went into publishing, localisation or other things?

One cause that I associate Koei Tecmo's money issues to is their exclusivity deal with Nintendo to publish SW3 in the West. Presumably because of this deal, SW3 ended up being a Wii exclusive in the West and Koei Tecmo could only localise games in its generation that were released on Nintendo consoles. The poor sales of Samurai Warriors Chronicles in the West ultimately led to Koei Tecmo deciding not to localise its expansion. These two factors ended up crippling the reception of Samurai Warriors in the West and likely led to Koei Tecmo deciding not to dub their games, including future Samurai Warriors games. There's also the Koei-Tecmo merger of 2008-09 that happened because Tecmo spent a lot of money fighting lawsuits from former employees and Koei spent a lot of money to merge with them as a result, so that's also a factor there.

Another likely cause of the money issues is the nicheness of their games and the lack of advertising. Everywhere I look, there is advertising and promotions for various Western games and some major Japanese franchises like Mario Bros, Sonic or Pokemon, but I rarely see a lot of other Japanese games being advertised in the West, especially Koei Warriors games. With games adapted from popular media franchises, including anime and manga franchises, their appeal and marketing is normally targeted to fans of those series, meaning that people become aware of those games because it's a series they know and love. With Koei Tecmo, all the promotion they do for their games is usually on their social media pages and on gaming news websites by gaming journalists. Maybe they have targeted ads on YouTube but what the hell would I know, I use an adblocker. OK, that's for the desktop, but even on my phone, I've never seen an ad for a Koei Tecmo game EVER.

Throughout the course of my rants, two possible solutions to alleviate the budget issue came to mind; reuse voice lines from source games, and crowdfund an English dub. There's a bigger case for the former considering Koei Tecmo's autoerotic assetflipsiation, but unfortunately, not so much for the latter, and to explain that, we need to go on a tangent about crowdfunding.

In July 2011, Capcom announced that production on Mega Man Legends 3 was cancelled. Despite a fan campaign petitioning Capcom to continue production on the game, Capcom quashed the fanbase's hopes by confirming that there were no plans to resume development. The idea of using Kickstarter to fund the development of the game was floated around, the OP bringing up how Tim Shafer of Double Fine Productions crowdfunded the game that would become Broken Age as an example, however then-Senior Vice President Christian Svensson, aka Sven, disagreed with the idea. He stated that Double Fine was able to pull this off because they didn't have the capital to self-fund, but if a publisher that had the capital - like EA, Activision or Capcom - were to try it, there would be backlash of some kind (but then again, when does anything not get backlash anyway?).

The person who told me about this back in 2016 also pointed out how crowdfunding has potential for misuse, citing the Mighty No. 9 Kickstarter controversy as an example of it. My rebuttal to them and suggestion to Koei was that they crowdfund only the dub and localisation - the game's already done at this point - but despite this, I actually agreed with him regarding the potential for misuse. Looking back though, I've realised that while my crowdfunding idea seems good on paper, it may not go the way I envisioned it to.

The two main models of crowdfunding are the all-or-nothing model utilised by Kickstarter where a project is only funded if it reaches the goal set by the creator, and the flexible model seen on other sites like Indiegogo where creators can keep whatever money is raised regardless of the goal. If Koei Tecmo wanted to gauge the interest for an English dub, they would probably go with the all-or-nothing model and it'd really be just a paid survey. At least if the Kickstarter fails then fans will better know who to blame. But here's something I never realised back then - if the Kickstarter succeeds, who's to say that Koei Tecmo won't hire Voicegroup to do the dub? Who's to say that the quality of the dub won't be as good as other games?

In regards to my point about reusing archived voice lines, someone replied to my initial rant something on the lines of "no, you can't just do that," and I want to clarify that this would be a cost-cutting and time-saving measure to reduce the need to rerecord generic system lines. Hell, even I said that I was okay with a partial dub, whether the new lines would remain in Japanese or be silent; if that's what creating your own lines in Musou Battlefields is, then why not just make that the entire game?

Speaking of Musou Battlefields, I made a little joke earlier about how it would be a golden opportunity to implement AI voices. The subject of AI never came up back then because the most that AI got up to was chatbots like Evie or Cleverbot; even Siri was in its infancy back then and you couldn't replicate people's voices as perfectly as you can nowadays. Hell, the most that people ever got was kichiku (鬼畜) videos on Bilibili were people remixed memes into Vocaloids. That takes more effort than setting up AI models for people to use, amusing though it may be.

To restate a post I made back in March 2023, given the discourse around AI voice acting which has come up following the discourse around AI art and development of text-to-speech software to the point where it is conceivably possible to imitate the voice of literally anyone in the world as perfectly as possible, I find myself wondering if, in 2014 when I started the Koei Warriors Rant Series, I would support AI voice acting being used as a cheaper alternative to hiring a studio, especially one that uses union voice actors.

This topic opens many cans of worms, particularly in regards to ethics and paying voice actors for the use of their likenesses. To be honest, I probably would have found myself conflicted on both sides of the argument; I would support AI voice acting if it meant we could get a dubbed game, but I would also want to see the actors being paid in some way as well, meaning that I couldn't support it. Then again, the subject has never come up back in 2014 because back then, we only had synthesised voices in text-to-speech programs.

In the end, however, I don’t believe AI will be a perfect replacement for the real thing and while AI voice acting may seem like an adequate stopgap, it will end up being a disgrace to not only the voice actors whose likenesses are being used, but to the fans, particularly dub fans, who would expect better from Koei Tecmo with their laziness. Between using AI to dub a game or leaving the game with the original Japanese voices, it’s a lose-lose situation for Koei Tecmo and dub fans; the only people who win are the sub fans and opinion-neutrals who wouldn’t care either way.

Since July 2024, SAG-AFTRA union voice actors have gone on strike against the same 11 companies they struck against in 2017 after failing to negotiate protection agreements for the use of AI to replicate the likenesses of voice actors. Since November 2024, SAG-AFTRA has managed to lock down a deal for minimum rates and AI protections in game localisations.

So why exactly did I begin the Koei Warriors Rant Series (and Dub Logistics) to rant about the lack of English dubs in localised Japanese games anyway? Was it because I couldn't read? No, I'm fully capable of reading subtitles while focusing on the action, especially since despite the amount of enemies on the screen, the AI is easy enough that it's a joke (though DWOrigins may beg to differ). Was it because I hated the Japanese voices? No, I've played games that have only Japanese voices because that was the only version I could get. Was it because I was an entitled fanboy who kept begging for dubs without understanding why they weren't possible?

If you assumed it was for any of those reasons, you would be wrong. As I would later come to realise, I started the Koei Warriors Rant Series because I wanted to play the games in English, dubbed by Voicegroup and the union voice actors who had been dubbing Koei Warriors games since Dynasty Warriors 4. I wanted to hold Koei Tecmo accountable for their decision not to dub their games and get an answer from them as to why. After seeing the toxic discourse from sub fans and opinion neutrals who would seek to shut people down, cancel them for having controversial opinions or even celebrate the fact that games wouldn't be dubbed, I wanted to expose them and hold them accountable for their comments, turning their own toxicity back on them. I also hated how people brushed off the lack of English dubs as a small or insignificant issue because it clearly wasn't to me, and it's clear that the issue has snowballed over the years and that the problem is deeper than I initially thought.

As much as Koei Tecmo themselves are to blame for splitting the fanbase, the sub fans and opinion neutrals in the fanbase are just as much to blame for not standing with dub fans, hence why I said that they were selfish and they dragged the dub fans down with them. Sure, maybe I'm guilty of being entitled or having toxic nostalgia, that I've constantly ragged on games not having English dubs that I never stopped to realise how great these games could be, but that was because back then, I had no way to play these games and when I did find a way, I took the chance to course correct and create the Koei Warriors Retrospective, a revived Rant Series that actually talks about the games themselves. Regardless, I did what I had to do because I'm a fan of Koei Tecmo and Koei Warriors games and I wanted Koei Tecmo and their fanbase to do better, even if it meant becoming toxic myself to call out the toxicity within the fanbase.

Chin Soon Sun, aka inspchin, was the community manager at Koei Tecmo Europe from 2008 to his resignation in 2016. In 2005, Chin founded the Koei Warriors website and forums, which become so popular and influential to the point that he was scouted by KTE in 2008 to be their sales and marketing executive before officially becoming their community manager in 2011. Chin was an influential figure in the Koei Tecmo fanbase to the point where even fans in the US considered him their community manager as well.

I've blamed Chin for not fighting hard enough for English dubs in Koei Tecmo games or not explaining why it couldn't be done. Over the past few years however, I've come to realise that maybe I was wrong to blame Chin and that he did what he could despite me thinking back then that he didn't do enough. What I've also realised is that Koei Tecmo Japan are entirely responsible for the development, publishing and localisation of their games and their American and European divisions are only responsible for sales and marketing (they also had a Canadian division that assisted in development but they shut down in 2013).

That being said, Chin was only a community manager and as much as I love to hear stories from fanboys about how he helped get this game and that game localised in the West, I think these people give him too much credit. In my opinion, there was only so much influence Chin had over things as most decisions were made by their head office in Japan (and presumably still are) and knowing Japanese companies, the opinions of their fans, especially the West, wouldn't matter after their decisions were announced. Also, Chin was probably under some NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) as well which meant that he couldn't reveal the details behind the decisions of head office, or maybe he was just in the dark about everything and he can only speculate like everyone else. If Chin isn't under any permanent NDAs then I invite him to give some insight into this whole debacle if he wishes.

While I acknowledge that I may have been a bit hard on Chin during the Rant Series days, I'm not going to let him off the hook that easy for his attitude towards the fanbase. He never answered everyone's questions or concerns, he fuelled the toxicity between dub and sub fans when he mistakenly reported that DW8E would have dual audio then corrected himself to say that it would only have Japanese voices, and he even brushed off fans in a deleted tweet complaining about the lack of English dubs, Vita ports or physical releases. And all the people who worshipped Chin like he was the god of the Koei Tecmo fanbase needed to wake up, realise that he wasn't perfect and hold him accountable for his bullshit. He was just as complicit in this debacle as the sub fans and opinion-neutrals were.

So in spite of the lack of English dubbing, is the English translation in this game good? Well, it's passable if this was a set of business documents, but it can feel a bit off if you say the lines out loud (and in context with the original scenes). I used to do my own English dub for undubbed games like WO3 as a bit of a placebo to fill the void. In recent years though, when I see how Koei Tecmo have translated their undubbed games, I've had this feeling like... if I were doing the translation, I wouldn't have translated some lines the way they were. Sometimes there's no contractions, sometimes there's contractions in lines which would sound better without, sometimes sentences are a bit wordy when they could be expressed better, and sometimes the way some characters' lines are translated makes them feel out of character compared to the original games.

And that's not counting the translation errors as well. Even in this game alone, I've called out how "Mirror Realm" stages should be "Divine Mirror" stages, plus there's the Charm/Curse Sorcerer mixup in Gauntlet Mode. Look, I acknowledge that older games have made mistakes here and there, even with non-English translations, but for some reason, the lack of English dub in modern era games has made me focus on translation errors. I don't think it's a coincidence that the translation quality of a game drops when Koei Tecmo decides not to dub a game, and aside from myself, Sex Gravy is the only other person who called it out. Or maybe I'm just being petty over translation errors because I'm butthurt over the lack of an English dub, who knows.

At first I thought that Koei Tecmo were dubtitling their undubbed games and I said that they shouldn't do that. Oh, they're dubtitling the generic officer defeated and 1000 KO lines alright, even the ones for the newer characters, but on closer inspection, it's clear to me that the translations are sub-par and they are lacking in quality control or understanding of the characters' characterisation in the English dubs. Heh, look at me. I was ragging on Koei Tecmo for dubtitling their games and now I'm ragging on them for not dubtitling them enough.

So if Voicegroup was in charge of the dubbing and localisation of their games since DW4, and WO3 didn't get an English dub, then who was in charge of translating the text in this game? I dug through the credits, and the answer was... Rubicon Solutions Inc.

Rubicon Solutions are a Japanese company providing translation services in all kinds of languages and industries, including the gaming industry. I think Koei Tecmo began to outsource their translations away from themselves or Voicegroup after the classic era, because DW6 and Empires had the involvement of Babel Media Ltd, which was acquired by Keywords Studios in 2014. Rubicon Solutions has been credited for localisations (really they were just in the list of companies) since Dynasty Warriors Strikeforce in 2009. The last game Rubicon was involved in was Warriors Orochi 4 Ultimate in 2020 before they changed to Digital Hearts Co. Ltd for Samurai Warriors 5 in 2021 and beyond. Rubicon has even been credited alongside Voicegroup in dubbed games during the modern era as well.

My theory is that Rubicon Solutions did the translation, then the translated text went to Voicegroup because they had to produce the English dub, and so they made their own changes to it. But when Koei Tecmo decided not to dub WO3, Voicegroup wasn't there to correct the translations, and despite Koei Tecmo having their own staff in charge of localisation (or Western divisions who could have contributed to it), the English text turned out the way it is. And yet the company claims that their translations "are handled by experienced native speakers". "First rate translations" my ass.

Despite Koei Tecmo releasing subsequent updates, patches and rereleases for their games (even over a decade later), not once have they bothered to scrutinise and correct their translations. It's because of this that I've elected to play Koei Warriors games in Japanese or Chinese (particularly for the purposes of this series), because Koei Tecmo's treatment of their game localisations has made me bitter towards them and I would rather not be constantly reminded why I am.

So after all these years, have I ever come to something that is close enough to an official explanation? Well, yes. Back in 2017, some wrestlefag named Sangre Muerte Guerrera (which has to be a fake name lol) claimed that Koei Tecmo actually said that it cost them too much money to dub their games; I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but he said "If you want proof, find it yourself" and then blocked me, leading me to believe that he was just talking shit. But after doing some digging some time back, I realised that someone did talk about it, and that someone was Chin.

Credit for the below screenshot needs to go to NautoAis. He is another small-time content creator like myself who has also made rants and rambles on the topic of English dubs, even if they are admittedly hard to follow. Apologies for the blurry screenshot, but in it, Chin (and another fan) basically implies or confirms that it's sales and budget issues behind Koei Tecmo's decision not to dub their games. That doesn't mean the wrestlefag is forgiven though, he still responded rudely to me even though I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Look, I'm sorry, but I don't believe that money is the reason, if not the only reason that Koei Tecmo aren't dubbing all of their games, and even if it was, I want to hear it from Koei Tecmo themselves and not some fanboys who think they know better than the Japanese gaming company they idolise. I do believe, however, that Koei Tecmo doesn't care about their Western fanbase; the only things they seem to care about are either money or their Japanese fanbase. To quote Jim Sterling:

For a series already facing criticism of laziness, the Warriors games would continue to recycle its content endlessly for a spinoff after a spinoff and do a half-arsed job of localising it at the same time, and while I'll freely admit that getting 120 English voice actors to redub 120 characters in Warriors Orochi 3 is an expensive prospect, when most of your assets are being reused and you're not even releasing a physical edition (in the US), when you're rereleasing and rereleasing the same fucking game, […] I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest you're either in deep financial trouble or you are a stingy fuck if you can't finish the localisation job.

Obviously, my ideal scenario with these games is that they come with Japanese and English voice options from release and on the disc. In the end, the situation with English dubbing and Western localisation is but a microcosm of bigger issues at Koei Tecmo that the issue has snowballed into; this dismal degradation of the Koei Warriors series that people like Jim Sterling, Sex Gravy and DrakeVagabond have called out is something I like to call the Koei Tecmo New Normal Copium, because us fans weren't happy with the direction that Koei Tecmo was taking and we're clearly crying and coping harder about it, something that the fanboy cucks clearly love to see from us.

Going back to my earlier point about my fears with a crowdfunded dub, given the treatment of the English dubbing in the postmodern era games (DW9 and Origins) I'm unironically glad that Koei Tecmo didn't bother to go back and dub their modern era rereleases because I fear that the potential dub would never live up to the quality of the Voicegroup dub. I'm still playing the games in Japanese or Chinese because I'm still disgusted with how they didn't get an English dub in the first place or how Rubicon Solutions fucked up the translations, let's get that right.

So to answer my questions from the start of the last instalment; Have my opinions changed over the past decade? Do I still stand by my statement telling Koei Tecmo and their fanboys to commit seppuku (I said sudoku then because it was before the break)? Is Warriors Orochi 3 still a good game despite the disgraceful localisation treatment? For the first two questions, yes and no. Yes, I've reflected on my opinions and made them clearer and more nuanced. No, I've seen how Koei Tecmo treats their fans and how their fanbase treats people with different opinions, so yeah, I still stand by my extreme comment. Until I get a hard confirmation from Koei Tecmo themselves, I'm willing to be the guy who insists on being wrong even when other people say they're right or that I guessed right. That was the whole reason why I sent Alec and Shanna off to do research on this topic.

Because when you have a company that's clearly spinning and burning itself out by recycling content, cutting corners by not dubbing their games or doing proper quality control, refusing to advertise their games, grubbing every cent they can from their fans by releasing tons and tons of expansions, ports, spinoffs and DLC, and neglecting feedback from anyone but their shareholders, hardcore fans and the Japanese fanbase, and you combine it with a neglected Western fanbase who are too spineless and short-sighted to support other people's opinions and stand with them instead of shutting them down and cancelling them because their problems don't affect them, along with a community manager who only listens to #KTFamily fanboys and only does the bare minimum of engagement with the rest of the fanbase on social media, do you know what you get?

Spoiler alert - you get Dynasty Warriors 9.

This rant has honestly taken longer than normal for me to write because I wanted to get as much as I could into this. I've called out a lot of problems and suggested a lot of solutions over the years, plus I've learnt more and more about these issues over time. I've worked on the retrospective for WO3 since the start of January and I've frequently revisited it to add or correct things, so you'll forgive me if I've neglected to mention or correct something.

If you want to look further into this, you can take a look at the Koei Warriors Rant Series and Dub Logistics, but keep in mind that those posts were written from 2014-2018, so circumstances, facts, views and opinions may have changed over the years. I've also slipped a few rants about Koei Tecmo or localisation in other posts, particularly in regards to Koei Warriors games, so those are things as well. Of course, there is still more to talk about as we continue towards and get to DW9, so look forward to that.

By the way, if you went "tl;dr" at any point in that rant (especially if you go out of your way to tell me about it), you are part of the problem.

To answer the third question, Warriors Orochi 3 is an amazing game. It covers the consequences of humanity's battles with Orochi and the Ultimate expansion also covers Orochi's tragic backstory. There's a diverse range of characters (and movesets) not just from the Koei Warriors series, but from other games as well, and there is just so, so much you can do in this game, even if you just play Story Mode. The release of the Definitive Edition on PC is icing on an already-eaten cake too. It's just a shame that all this awesomeness is marred by a disgraceful, seppuku-worthy localisation and most people don't seem to have a problem with it.

Anyway, I've wasted enough of my time and yours with this game. Now that I've got most of what I wanted to say off my chest, we continue riding the peak of the modern era and the New Normal Copium next time as we cover Dynasty Warriors 8.

#dynasty warriors #samurai warriors #warriors orochi #warriors orochi 3 #warriors orochi 3 ultimate #koei tecmo #koei warriors #koei warriors retrospective

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yeonchi · 22 days ago

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Koei Warriors Retrospective Part 19: Warriors Orochi 3

Warriors Orochi 3 (無双OROCHI2) Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 Release dates: Japan: 22 December 2011 USA: 20 March 2012 (PS3, digital only)/27 March 2012 (Xbox 360) Europe: 6 April 2012

Months ago, Azuma Yeonchi gave Alec and Shanna an assignment; to find out why Koei Tecmo localised Warriors Orochi 3, Samurai Warriors 4 and other games without English dubbing. He called in a favour from the Kwisatz Haderach to help Alec and Shanna with their research. His goal was to see if their research would be any different from his research ten years ago...

This is the first game where Koei Tecmo went woke. OK, it's not the kind of woke you were expecting, but it is a different kind of woke that happened before the whole idea of wokeness started being called out. This game is the reason why I began the Koei Warriors Rant Series back in 2014, the reason why I've been huffing the Koei Tecmo New Normal Copium, and the reason why I'm doing the Koei Warriors Retrospective today.

When Warriors Orochi 3 was localised to the West in 2012, it was localised without English dubbing, the first mainline game to receive such treatment after Samurai Warriors Chronicles and before Dynasty Warriors 7 Empires. After letting it pass for two years, I learnt that its Ultimate expansion would be localised without English dubs as well, and I decided to write that infamous post that kickstarted the Koei Warriors Rant Series. In it, I blamed Koei Tecmo for disgracing their Western fanbase and their fanboys who supported this move for dragging the fanbase down in their selfishness, even going so far as to tell them to commit sudoku, to considerable backlash from opinion-neutrals who would prefer that fans like me be grateful instead of pointedly calling out Koei Tecmo's anti-consumer bullshit and the fanboys who are okay with it.

Have my opinions changed over the past decade? Do I still stand by my statement telling Koei Tecmo and their fanboys to commit sudoku? Is Warriors Orochi 3 still a good game despite the disgraceful localisation treatment? If you're one of those people who go "tldr+didn't ask+not reading all that+ratio", then tough shit+get forcefed+get educated+stay ignorant. All will be revealed after the break.

Warriors Orochi 3

Warriors Orochi Z was originally meant to be a one-off series that ended with the defeat of Orochi (X), but due to fan demand, a sequel was commissioned, with development beginning in the fall of 2010.

The story of this game takes place several years after the events of Warriors Orochi 2. Instead of the story being divided into individual forces like it was previously, there is one united Story Mode that follows the activities of three groups working under the banner of the Coalition.

It's said that the story picks up from the end of Wei's story in WO2. There is debate over which endings are canon in the first two games, but my theory is that the timelines were split into four at some point either by Orochi following his escape from the mystic realm or by the mystics after their confrontation with Orochi at Hinokawa, then they were merged again following the resurrected Orochi's defeat.

The combined world of Dynasty and Samurai Warriors was at peace following the defeat of Orochi when suddenly, eight dark shadows loomed across the land; it was the Hydra, an eight-headed monster that ravaged and swallowed all in its path. To make things worse, Kiyomori Taira had been revived as well, becoming immortal and gaining the power to brainwash humans into becoming his puppets. Many warlords and warriors were defeated, eventually leaving only three main survivors, Ma Chao, Sima Zhao and Hanbei Takenaka.

The three of them gathered what little troops they had and charged into the Hydra's lair in an attempt to defeat the Hydra, but even with the ballistae on the battlefield, they are unable to make a dent in the Hydra or the Demon Army. The three are forced to retreat, but just as they are cornered by the Demon Army, about to be swallowed by the Hydra, they are saved by the appearance of a mystic, who introduces herself as Kaguya and takes the three back in time to before their camp was destroyed.

Ma Chao recounts that he and his friends were attacked at Yiling on their way to Odawara Castle and pleads with Kaguya to take him back in time so he can save them. Ma Chao successfully saves Ma Dai and Pang De from Kiyomori and the Takeda cavalry, but is unable to save Huang Zhong, who had sealed the gates into the Stone Sentinel Maze.

Following this battle, Ma Chao asks Kaguya if there is some way to save Huang Zhong, but she tells him that it is beyond her power and that they need to find someone else with something in their past that could help. Later, Pang De recalls that he had passed by some of the Demon Army's siege weapons at Tedorigawa and goes back with with Ma Chao to find something that they can bring back to Yiling. They eventually find a portable catapult and they transport it to Yiling, creating a redux of the same battle where Ma Chao is able to save Huang Zhong. This is a recurring theme that would continue throughout the story, with some battles containing a warrior the Coalition couldn't save, leading them to rely on the intelligence of others to change history and save them.

Meanwhile, Sima Zhao and Hanbei are able to reunite with Wang Yuanji and Kanbei Kuroda, adding them and numerous other allies to the Coalition. They would also gain the assistance of Taigong Wang, Yukimura Sanada and Hideyoshi Toyotomi among others, then they would head onto Odawara Castle, where they meet up with Sun Shangxiang and Kai and repel both Da Ji and Kiyomori's attacks on the castle.

Moving onto the second chapter, Taigong Wang has Ma Chao, Sima Zhao and Hanbei's groups follow Kiyomori, Shuten Dōji and Da Ji respectively. He intends for them to free the humans under Kiyomori's control, obtain what could be the key to defeating the Hydra with Shuten Dōji and conduct more investigation about the current happenings by seeking information from Da Ji. Through this chapter, the Coalition encounter battlefields that have had some strange elements merged with them, as if they came from worlds other than the Dynasty and Samurai Warriors universes. It is through this that the Coalition encounters more allies from other worlds on top of their old friends.

Eventually, Diamondback, who had been harbouring Shuten Dōji ever since he was found, abandons him in Xuchang and escapes, allowing him to be taken in by Taigong Wang and the Coalition. Shuten Dōji knows nothing about himself except his name and Taigong Wang offers to help him know more about himself in exchange for his help, believing that the answers lie within himself.

After conducting research, Taigong Wang constructs a weapon that channels Shuten Dōji's spirit and fires it as a concentrated beam of energy or in twin blasts like a ballista. The reason why that works is because, as he would recall later, Shuten Dōji is a fragment of what was Orochi and his power, likely also containing some of the reason that was holding back the full brunt of his destructive power (the Hydra), and thus, could be used to oppose it.

The weapon, known as the Yashio'ori, is transported to Luoyang just as a head of the Hydra appears there. The Yashio'ori's preparations are completed and the Coalition uses it to defeat the Hydra head, which retracts into the earth and spits out its power, which forms into Orochi, or rather an empty shell of the Serpent King itself. The Orochi shell is defeated and Masamune Date and Keiji Maeda, who had sided with the Demon Army in the hope that the Hydra's appearance would herald Orochi's second return, but they defect to the Coalition upon seeing the truth for themselves.

Meanwhile, while escaping from the Coalition's pursuit, Da Ji was attacked by another mystic, the cyborg Nezha, and Himiko, who the Coalition had let go in an earlier pursuit, escapes and goes to them for help. As a result, Da Ji ends up joining the coalition as well.

At this point, you can decide to fight all eight of the Hydra heads again at its lair. You'll only have one Yashio'ori and not enough allies, but it is doable. Each of the Hydra's heads will change position and appear in front of you as you defeat them. Clearing this battle will unlock Into the Fire, the normal ending of this game. After the Hydra is defeated, eight Orochi shells emerge inside its lair and the Coalition defeats them one by one. Following this, the Orochi shells disappear and the main trio remark that they can finally rest, albeit acknowledging bittersweetly that they have lost so much along the way. There are two more endings to this game, but first, let's go to the third chapter.

After the battle in Luoyang, Da Ji suggests to the Coalition that they go back to before the Hydra appeared and prevent it from appearing. Normally, they could not go past when the Hydra appeared because its appearance created a time rift that prevented Kaguya from sending humans to any point before it, but with Da Ji being a mystic, they could pass through the rift.

Now that the Coalition are in the past before the Hydra appeared, they aimed to gain the support of the other lords and warriors, but with Da Ji on their side, the Coalition find themselves being antagonised by their own comrades, unwilling to listen to them until they were defeated and made to listen. On top of that, the Coalition would encounter Nezha again (with Lu Bu having a raging hate boner for him) along with his lord, the mystic leader Susano'o.

Eventually, Da Ji's true colours are revealed at Yamazaki; after defeating Nezha, Susano'o goes to confront Da Ji, but she sneaks off to retrieve a coffin. Susano'o finds her and shoves her to one side before revealing to the Coalition what they were protecting; the remains of the defeated Orochi. Da Ji teleports away with Orochi's body, but when Susano'o and the Coalition catch up to her again, Da Ji reveals that Orochi's power, which is still contained within his body, is running wild and that reviving Orochi is the best way to stop it. Susano'o disagrees, but it is too late; Orochi's power explodes from his body, transforming it into the Hydra.

Susano'o explains that Orochi created this world so that someone could destroy him, hence the world is also yearning for its own demise. When Orochi was alive, his destructive power was restrained by the presence of reason and in my theory, was dormant before his resurrection, Himiko being the catalyst to awaken it. After the resurrected Orochi was defeated, his reason was no more and his destructive power, amplified by the merging of the four separate timelines in my theory, merged with the will of the world, creating the Hydra, which sought to destroy the world as it was effectively destroying itself. Susano'o says that mankind is not strong enough to defeat the Hydra and that only the mystics can deal with it alone.

Now that they have enough manpower for it, Taigong Wang orders the Coalition to increase production of the Yashio'ori. All the resources are gathered and the Coalition successfully defeat the Hydra again with 8 Yashio'ori, and the Orochi shells with it. The eight Orochi shells merge into one, forming Orochi X and three Hydra heads with it. Of course, this Orochi X still isn't Orochi; his destructive power has turned him into the God of Destruction.

As the Coalition prepare to march on the new Koshi Castle X, one army remains standing in their way; Susano'o and his army of mystics, with Nezha among them. Challenging the humans to overcome him to see if they are worthy of fighting for the fate of the world itself, Susano'o's army puts up a stand against the Coalition, who eventually overcome him. Impressed with their unity, Susano'o accepts humanity's worthiness and allows them to advance into Koshi Castle X, with the mystic leader himself providing his assistance.

Together, the Coalition advances to the summit of Koshi Castle X and defeats the God of Destruction. There are two endings after this; the good ending sees humanity (maybe with a few people still mising) going back to living their lives in this merged world; the true ending, which is available after having unlocked every character, shows the merged world beginning to collapse thanks to the endless use of Kaguya's time-travel powers or the world becoming unstable after the death of the God of Destruction. The mystics combine their power to separate the worlds and send everyone back to their times, allowing them to live out their lives as if it were all a dream. Thus ends the story of Warriors Orochi 3.

Later on in the camp after being unlocked, Susano'o would admit that he was the one who revived Kiyomori upon becoming aware of the Hydra's appearance, thereby indirectly contributing to the tragedy and the humans banding together to stop the Hydra. So much for wanting the mystic army to deal with the Hydra alone, huh?

Where the first Warriors Orochi games used characters and battlefields from DW5 and SW2, Warriors Orochi 3 now uses characters and battlefields from DW7XL (and by extension DW6) and SW3XL. Carryover elements from WOZ do exist, but for this game it's mostly in terms of characters. The whole feel of this game (in terms of battle mechanics) is similar to DW7 compared to how WOZ felt similar to SW2. Story Mode (and Free Mode in vanilla/Hyper) is set in a camp with some facilities and characters to talk to as you play the game.

A funny thing about the battlefields; the Battle of Kyūshū stage uses the Ishigakibaru/Kasai-Ōsaki Uprising map because the Conquest of Kyūshū map was already used for the Battle of Hasedō.

Here are the original characters debuting in this game:

Kaguya

Susano'o

Nezha (cyborg)

Shuten Dōji

In addition, there are also collaboration characters from other Koei Tecmo franchises making appearances in this game, something that producer Akihiro Suzuki has wanted to do since the merger:

Ryu Hayabusa (Ninja Gaiden)

Ayane (Dead or Alive)

Joan of Arc (Bladestorm: The Hundred Years' War)

Nemea (Zill O'll)

Achilles (Warriors: Legends of Troy)

All in all, the game boasts a total of 132 characters.

Each stage has a set of recommended characters for it, but of course, you can play with whatever characters you've unlocked. The battlefield selection screen gives you the option to choose either set, similar to Dream Mode in WOZ.

Dynasty Warriors characters use their EX weapons from DW7XL and Next. Since there are still characters with cloned movesets, one character using a particular weapon will maintain the exact same moveset from the original game while the others also using that weapon have their Charge Attacks changed to homage their pre-DW6 movesets; the Charge Attack leading into their EX Attack remains the same for familiarity. Jump Charges are also reintroduced for DW characters, with some characters Jump Attacks from the original game being reassigned to it.

Only one Musou Attack, which uses up part of the Musou Gauge, is used for Dynasty Warriors characters (and original/collaboration characters of non-Japanese origin) in this game; for characters that had aerial Musous it is definitely the normal Musou, but for others, some of them use their R1 Musou by default. The unused Musou may be homaged in their Type Action (or Aerial Type Action in Ultimate). Details about this can be found in the Dynasty Warriors Weapon Moveset Power Rankings.

(Interestingly, Dynasty Warriors characters have four Musou voice lines in the Gallery, including the line for their unused Musou and one for the True Musou even though there's nothing extra to it.)

Samurai Warriors characters can now use their C5 and C9 attacks from SW3. Some characters (particularly those with the Special Skill moveset) retain the use of one Special Skill for use in their Type Action. The Musou Attack kanji appears in full screen like the True Musou Attack kanji just so they can have a lead-in pause like everyone else, but it appears as normal when triggering a Musou on horseback. The True Musou Attack for SW characters uses the Ultimate Musou Attack as the finisher. Musou Attacks for SW characters (and original characters of Japanese origin) continue to work similar to how they did in previous games.

Zuo Ci did not return in DW7 and Goemon, Musashi and Kojirō did not return in SW3, but they do make a return in this game. Their movesets have not been updated to fit with their origin games' characters, which means that their movesets remain the same as they were from DW5, SW1 and SW2, with no C5s, C9s or Ultimate Musous for the latter three.

All the other original characters from WOZ don't have updated movesets either, meaning that Orochi, Kiyomori and Himiko et al don't have C5s and Da Ji, Taigong Wang, Fu Xi and Nuwa et al retain their C3 Charge Rushes and Evolution Attack strings. It's only the original/collaboration characters debuting in this game that get EX Attacks (non-Japanese characters) or C5s and Ultimate Musous (Japanese characters, the Ultimate Musou finishers for the characters debuting in this game don't have the special camera movement used for SW characters but characters debuting in expansions do).

The original Chinese characters from WOZ have had their Musous reformatted to be like the DW characters. Zuo Ci, Da Ji and Sun Wukong use their normal Musous while Taigong Wang, Fu Xi, Nuwa and Sanzang use their True Musous.

The Power, Speed and Technique character types continue to be used in this game, plus a new character type, Wonder has been introduced. All characters' Type Actions are changed to be similar to Power characters' Power Attacks from WOZ, using a portion of the Musou Gauge every time it is used. Nearly every characters' type has been reassigned, most likely due to weapon changes in the case of Dynasty Warriors characters.

Technique characters are now able to sidestep by pressing X and moving the analog stick in a direction while guarding. Characters are invincible briefly while making sidesteps and they can be cancelled into Dash Attacks instantly. Also, critical hits can be performed on airborne enemies when Charge Attacks hit them.

Wonder characters are able to perform Spirit Charges which use up a small amount of the Musou Gauge like in SW3. They can also perform critical hits on enemies that have been staggered/knocked back, whether by a Spirit Charge, guard breaking/counterattacking, winning a deadlock or whatever attacks make them stagger.

How do counterattacks work? When you're guarding and an enemy hits you, you can press Square and perform a counterattack that breaks guards and makes enemies stagger. It's akin to parrying attacks in DW6.

Support Attacks continue from WOZ. In addition, switching characters after landing attacks will allow the other character to perform a follow-up attack which uses a portion of the Musou Gauge. This is known as a Switch Combo.

Triple Attacks are now known as True Triple Attacks. At the bottom of the HUD is a gauge; when the gauge is filled, you can press L2 and R2 to activate a True Triple Attack. Both inactive characters will join you in attacking enemies until the gauge runs out, then all the enemies you hit will gather in one spot so all three characters can attack them before ending in a final blast. There seems to be a limit as to how many enemies can be captured in the attack as I've been in situations where enemies I've tagged end up being untagged when I hit over a certain amount of enemies. Enemies defeated in the True Triple Attack will drop gems and sometimes crystals.

Characters are assigned a skill that will benefit their team by buffing their stats, increasing damage dealt on enemies, decreasing damage dealt by enemies or recovering a bit of health/Musou/True Triple Attack gauge every 100 KOs. Skill proficiency starts at G rank and levels up backwards to A and then maxes out at S rank. Having the Industry (習熟) attribute on your weapon and the Mystic's Brace item (仙気環) allows you to level up your proficiency a bit faster.

Each character has 4 star levels of weapons that are obtainable throughout the game on any difficulty. For DW characters with cloned movesets, their 1-3 star weapons share the same names with the 4-star weapon getting a unique name. Like in WOZ, each weapon can have a maximum of 8 attributes out of 32. The Upgrade Skills from the last game are merged into the other attributes so skills like Verity (天活) and Brilliance (天舞, formerly known as Almighty) are now rare attributes that take up a slot on the weapon. Multi (分身) is now a rare attribute and Echo (誘爆) and Typhoon (旋風) are new rare attributes that act as balance breakers, as if having Fire/Ice/Bolt/Wind/Slay altogether isn't balance breaking already.

Weapons can be purchased and merged at the Blacksmith in the camp. The only way to obtain attributes to merge is by obtaining weapons that have them; there is no way to obtain attributes individually like Upgrade Skills in WOZ (at least for now). Also, when adding attribute slots from other weapons, only the blank slots are added to your weapon instead of all of them. For example, I'm upgrading a weapon that has two slots and the weapon I want to upgrade with has six slots, three filled and three blank. If I were to add slots to my weapon, I would end up with five slots, not eight, which would be the case in WOZ.

All weapons have a compatibility gauge that increases the more you use it. Extra attack power and critical hit chances are granted the more the bar is filled, from +7 for 1-star weapons to +18 for 4-star weapons. Having the Harmony (調和) attribute on your weapon allows it to increase more quickly.

Rare Big Star weapons are also obtainable and can be purchased from the Blacksmith for at least 20,000 gems and several crystals. These weapons start off weak, but maxing out the compatibility gauge gives you +54 attack. Many characters also share Big Star weapon types, meaning that in a way, a character can use the weapon of someone else who uses a similar weapon to them (eg. Guan Ping could use Ranmaru's weapon or Lu Bu could use Keiji's weapon). Most Big Star weapons are recycled from DLC weapons in DW7 or rare weapons from SW2/3, but some weapons from DW6 can be found as well.

Characters can give you lottery tickets after battle, which you can redeem at the Blacksmith for ten random weapons.

Similar to DW5/Next, up to two items can be equipped per character. Each battlefield has 2-3 places where you can find boxes that contain items, plus having a weapon with the Providence (奪取) ability gives you a chance to obtain an item upon defeating an officer.

Rare items are also available and are obtainable on all the main (non-Redux) battles in the first three chapters of Story Mode. To obtain them, you need to have at least one of six specified characters in your party and you need to obtain 1000-2000 KOs (depending on the stage) on Hard or Chaos difficulty. Once you do, the valuable item message will appear and you can obtain the rare item. You can also obtain the Matsukaze, Red Hare, Bear and Elephant Saddles this way (they only need to be equipped on one character for them to be usable).

Under the Officer Info section in the Camp Pause menu, you can hear your team complimenting their own efforts after the last battle and you can also hear characters complaining or lamenting that they haven't been deployed for a while.

This game also introduces a Bonds system where characters can work to build friendships with other characters. There are three levels of bonds for every character duo combination, but characters will have special relationships with four other characters and increasing their bond levels will change the conversations they have in the Camp. Increasing bonds between characters is also the key to unlocking some characters in this game.

Fighting with other characters, whether in your team or as allies, allows bonds between you and them to increase. For each playable character that appears in a battle, they will have a mission that can be accepted and completed, usually involving achieving a certain number of KOs and officers defeated within a certain amount of time, with your health above a certain level and without using anything that consumes your Musou gauge. Successfully completing the mission increases your friendship with them by 80 while failing the mission decreases it by 40. When your friendship with a character is in the green (level 3), you can perform a Double Musou Attack with them. Maxing out your friendship with a character may also allow them to gift a weapon to you.

In the Camp, there is also a Teahouse (unlocked after clearing Chapter 1) where you can spend gems to invite all officers to parties and increase your friendship with them, or you can invite a single officer to a moon viewing and greatly increase your friendship with them more than you would with a party.

In the vanilla game and Hyper, there is also a Network Assistant where you can create or join online matches. Apparently this section is where you can obtain DLC as well but I can't confirm it. The Network Assistant has been removed in Ultimate.

Aside from Story Mode and Free Mode, there is a new mode called Musou Battlefields, where you can change elements of battles and create new versions of them. You are given 50 points to change elements of battles as you wish; changing battle dialogue and BGM doesn't cost anything, changing a character to another costs 10 points (changing them to tigers or wolves costs 5), and you can make all ally/enemy/third party troops into any type of troop for 5 points a piece. You can even change the time limit of a battle, change the attack sound effects to those from another game or even buff or nerf your enemies for 1 point each.

When changing battle dialogue, you can pick a line from each character's generic dialogue or take it from another battle. However, it should be noted that even if you change a character's appearance or line to that of another, they will still appear under the original officer's name and whatever lines the changed character says will still be credited to the original, whether it's the original character's dialogue from the stage or the changed character's generic lines.

Musou Battlefields can be shared to others via the PSN and you can play Musou Battlefields created by others as well.

Onto the gallery now and aside from the usual sections, there is an Orochi World section where you can read the opening narrations of each battle in WOZ and 3 (just the main battles in this case). Also, in the voice lines for the characters, it's interesting that Wang Yi's officer defeated line is "Enemy officer cut down." when it should be "I will not stop until vengeance is mine." This is a complaint I'll get into when we get to the rant for this game.

Let's talk a bit about the costumes included in this game. Dynasty Warriors characters have their main and alternate costumes from DW7XL, then characters that debuted pre-6 get their DW5 and 6 costumes as well (analogues for those who were cut in 6). For some reason, Sima Shi has his costumes duplicated, but I suppose it's easier for people who want to edit his costume in Ultimate even though it's redundant, but more on that later.

Samurai Warriors characters have their costumes from SW3Z along with a recolour (which, for some of them, also appeared in the DLC for SW3ZSpecial) and characters that were in SW2 receive their costumes and a recolour as well. Now, in Asian versions of this game, the costumes are credited to the games they originally came from, but for the Samurai Warriors characters, their alternate costumes are credited to this game instead. Wow, so Koei Tecmo aren't just lazy towards their Western fanbase, they're lazy towards their Asian fanbases too.

Original characters who were in WOZ (except for Orochi X, Dodomeki and Gyūki) receive all four costumes from that game. Original characters debuting in this game (along with Orochi X, Dodomeki and Gyūki) only have a main and alternate costume. Collaboration characters will either have an alternate outfit from their series or a recolour original to this game.

Once again, DLC is available for this game, and there is a lot of it. In terms of costumes, DW characters get their costumes from DW3 and 4 (plus analogues for characters debuting in 5), then they get their Fury forms from Strikeforce, with original Fury costumes made for newer characters. SW characters get their costumes from SW1 or their alts from WOZ, then they get "disguise costumes" where they dress up as DW characters. It's actually really creative all things considered. Remember this for WO4, especially the Strikeforce costumes.

There are 23 DLC stage packs available, and a lot of them come bundled with DLC weapons which are obtainable upon completing those stages. Most of the packs use stages that were not used in Story Mode, such as Kawanakajima, Wuzhang Plains, Chibi and the original stages from WOZ, namely (original) Koshi Castle, Yamatai, Itsukushima, the Wuhang Mountains and Hinokawa. Those stages would be put to use come Ultimate.

There are also wallpapers dedicated to the collaboration titles that are exclusively available in Japan but not the West. Putting aside the potential copyright issues (which I seriously don't see any of), this is a decision I really need to question particularly considering that we have a Definitive Edition release of Ultimate and those wallpapers are only available when playing in Japanese.

Warriors Orochi 3 Special (Musou Orochi 2 Special)

Warriors Orochi 3 Special (無双OROCHI2 Special) Platforms: PlayStation Portable Release dates: Japan: 19 July 2012 Taiwan: 19 July 2012

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to farewell the PSP for good with this port. 2012 was the year when PSP releases would begin to taper off in the West, while in Japan, that wouldn't be for another three years yet. Developers and publishers were already focusing on the next generation by this point, meaning the PS Vita. For Koei Tecmo, their Western PSP releases already died with Strikeforce in 2009; they've come quite a way since the first Dynasty Warriors PSP games.

So anyway, another modern-era game on a portable console means considerable quality cuts to accommodate graphical capabilities. Like with DW7Special, swimming is removed and faces don't move during Musou Attacks. The Camp is presented as a menu as well with all the same functions (as if there were any to begin with).

The KO requirements for obtaining rare items are 40% that of the vanilla game, while the KO requirements for missions are a third that of the vanilla game.

Two new characters are introduced in this port; original character Seimei Abe and collaboration character Rachel from Ninja Gaiden. Seimei appears in a new Ueda Castle stage while Rachel appears in Jiangdong, which is new to this port.

Everything else is the same as in the vanilla game, except there is one new mode called Battle Royale Mode, which is similar to the multiplayer modes of DWVS or the showdown battles of Conquest Mode in DW7Special. This mode can be played in ad-hoc multiplayer or against the computer and the objective is to have your team reach first place by defeating enemy troops or officers from other teams. Matches can be either 3, 5 or 7 minutes long and they take place in a section of a stage. If one character in a team is defeated, they can't be used again until all characters are defeated and you keep respawning until the match is over.

You can pick up orbs that will trigger effects when activated using L + left/down/right. Up to 3 orbs can be carried and they are held until they are used even if your team is defeated. Red orbs allow you to attack your opponents with fireballs or lightning, yellow orbs allow you to wear down or paralyse opponents, green orbs allow you to recover health or turn invisible, and blue orbs briefly buff your team's stats or makes you invulnerable to damage for a few seconds.

Stratagems occur randomly and are triggered when a player completes a mini-mission. The stratagem stops after a period of time has passed or if another player completes the mini-mission as well.

Battle Royale Mode is pretty nice, but it's a shame that it didn't get carried over to Hyper and Ultimate because it could still work with some additional variations. Consider this mode an intermediary mode between Duel Mode and Gauntlet Mode.

In the control settings, you can set the R button to do different things. Configuration 1 uses the R button to change character, the left/right buttons to move the camera and Square + Triangle to activate the Type Action. Configuration 2 uses R + Square/Circle to change character, R + Triangle for the Type Action and R + Cross for the True Triple Attack. Configuration 3 is the "normal" configuration, with the R button to activate the Type Action and the left/right buttons to change character.

DLC is also available in this port and it's mostly the wallpaper, BGM and stage packs from the vanilla game. That's it.

Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper

Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper (無双OROCHI2 Hyper) Platforms: Wii U Release dates: Japan: 8 December 2012 USA: 18 November 2012 Europe: 30 November 2012

Wait, Wii U? What the fuck- *checks dates* oh, it's another launch title. So yeah, Koei Tecmo chased another console launch, but at least it's a port and not a separate game altogether. I mean, it's not like they had anything else going on around that time -

Dynasty Warriors 7 Empires - 8 November 2012 (Japan)

Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper - 18 November 2012 (USA)

Dynasty Warriors 8 - 28 February 2013 (Japan)

I WAS KIDDING!

Anyway, this game contains the Story Mode content from the vanilla game and Special with two new characters, original character Shennong and collaboration character Momiji from Ninja Gaiden. Shennong appears in a new Yangping Gate stage while Momiji appears at Wan Castle.

When playing in single-player, you can have the game on the Wii U Game Pad or on your TV. If you have the game on your TV and you play on the Game Pad, the Game Pad just displays the mini-map and the time remaining. In the Camp, you can just touch on the Game Pad and it will directly take you to the specified facility. When playing with another player, one player can use a Classic Controller (Pro) and play on the TV while the other plays on the Game Pad. Or you can both play split-screen on TV, no biggie.

Considering that Nintendo's consoles are a step down in terms of specs and performance compared to Sony or Microsoft, this is a pretty nifty feature, I have to admit.

And for performance issues? Well, from what I've read, the performance of this Wii U port is just what you would export a Nintendo port of a predominately Sony game to be - slower framerate and lower draw distance. Overall, it's not as bad as SW3 on the Wii, and I think the Wii U's improved hardware supporting 1080p helped.

The Hyper port replaces Battle Royale Mode from Special with Duel Mode, a rehash of VS and Survival Modes from WOZ. Strategy Cards are a new gimmick introduced in this game; as you land hits on your opponent or take damage from them, you gain Battle Points (BP), which you can use to activate one of four Strategy Cards and trigger various effects on yourself or your opponent.

There are four types of Strategy Cards (Attack, Impede, Support and Special) and all characters have two tiers of cards they can unlock. The standard tier card is unlocked with the character, but there are four ways to unlock the rare tier card; play Survival Mode and win many times in a row (max 70 for Hyper, 85 for Ultimate), clear a specific stage on Hard or Chaos difficulty (usually the stage they are unlocked in or the stage that triggers the Redux stage), win against the character in Duel Mode or max out their skill proficiency to S rank. It all depends on the character.

All the DLC from the vanilla game is also available to purchase in Hyper. The DLC train never stops.

This is the only main Warriors game to be released on the Wii U; other Omega Force games on the Wii U are Hyrule Warriors and Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage 2. Clearly the Wii U wasn't popular then and I don't blame Koei Tecmo for going back to the PlayStation. It's clearly their bread and butter, after all.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to split the retrospective here for Ultimate because there is just so much to talk about with this game and there's still the rant to cover as well. If I kept going like this, this post would become longer than my review for The Giggle or the Content Cop (hehe remember that old throwback lol?), and I've written some pretty long posts, particularly with this series. So keep your eyes peeled, because Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate won't be too far away.

#dynasty warriors #samurai warriors #warriors orochi #warriors orochi 3 #warriors orochi 3 ultimate #koei tecmo #koei warriors #koei warriors retrospective

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