Dynasty Warriors 9: Empires Review

For almost every Dynasty Warriors mainline game, there inevitably comes an Empires standalone expansion a year or so later. Dynasty Warriors 9, whilst not receiving the best reviews on its release back in 2018, is of course no different. Developers Omega Force are back once again, this time with DYNASTY WARRIORS 9 Empires, a game in which you’ll split your time between recruiting and strategising to build an empire, and slaying thousands of enemies with flashy, over-the-top combos. A series not exactly known for diverse and ever-changing gameplay, can Dynasty Warriors 9: Empires reignite players' love for a long-stale franchise?

Starting out it’s instantly noticeable that the game has a lack of variety. The main menu only offers one game type, not counting the short tutorial: Conquest Mode. Now, this is where the majority of time would be spent playing anyway, but the option to have a Free Play mode to just jump into a battle and decimate an army would have been nice. Thankfully Conquest Mode is robust, and gives you a number of selectable stories (the ones found in every Dynasty Warriors game) to jump into and change the course of history as you see fit. The main objective here is to unite all regions of China, either by brute force or diplomacy, although you are never limited to solely focusing on one of these options, providing a decent mix of gameplay. Within each scenario you’re given the option to pick any character in the game — with a specific list of recommended ones for each particular story — so even though you may repeat a narrative, depending on the character chosen, it will play out in various ways.

Those poor guys were probably simple farmers before you conscripted them to fight

On one of my playthroughs, I decided I wanted to be top dog right off the bat, so I went for heavyweight bruiser Dong Zhou, a character already ruling over a sizeable army and in control of his own territory (if you’ve played a Dynasty Warriors game before, Zhou will be all too familiar to you as the main villain from the early portion of the games). The main narrative of each scenario is threadbare however, and whilst this is understandable considering you can select any character — or create your own! — it would have been nice to have some cohesion and reason to do what you set out to do. Each scenario starts out with a basic paragraph to explain what the current turmoil China is in during that time period, accompanied by an opening cutscene, which in my case had absolutely nothing to do with the character I’d selected, and then it’s off you go, with no rhyme or reason to your objectives. I know it would have been a colossal undertaking to give each playable character their own unique opening scene for each scenario, but just a small bit of text to set the stage would have been nice.

Scenes will play seemingly at random during the course of your conquests, with my absolute favourite being one where you see your character jumping in front of a speeding wagon to save a defenceless puppy. What I assume was supposed to be something that solidifies your character's heroic traits (these random scenes will level up certain character traits which help in recruiting new officers into your ranks) ends up as being unintentionally hilarious, as big bad Dong Zhou stood smiling at the puppy he had just saved, despite having just moments ago executed the enemy officers I had captured.

There is a bucket-load of lore though for those interested. In the game's encyclopaedia you can find information for every character in the game, with details on famous battles they took part in, when they died, who they had children with, and so on. It’s an expansive section, and quite an interesting history lesson based on actual people and events in China's long history, obviously embellished by the game to create more drama and action — although I’d like to imagine a Chinese tyrant with a soft spot for adorable doggos!

Fighting beside a flaming tiger is not something I knew I needed

Graphically, Dynasty Warriors 9: Empires would be passable as an early PlayStation 4 title at best. The series has never been known to wow players with incredibly detailed character models or environments, but it’s still such a huge disappointment to be playing on a PlayStation 5 and seeing that my selected character’s weapons look like they’ve been ripped straight from a PlayStation 2 title, with any detail the models should have being reduced to nothing more than a blur of colours.

The barren, lifeless, open world fares no better and I quickly decided that after travelling through yet another arid wasteland with nothing to do, interacting with officers and recruiting new soldiers is best done through the in-game menu or fast travel system. Never has an open world been more shoehorned into a game than it is here. You’re given the option once a month to take a stroll, allowing you to roam the world interacting with any recruited officers, or with unaffiliated ones that you wish to join your ranks. With the abysmal draw distance and the longest (and most frequent) loading times I’ve seen on a PlayStation 5 to date, wandering around fighting small groups of enemies for no reason at all makes the whole thing a massive waste of time.

Thankfully, Dynasty Warriors 9: Empires has a lot of redeeming qualities to it that somewhat make up for its lacklustre narrative and graphical prowess (or lack thereof). Of course I’m talking about the gameplay, and whilst not exactly a grand strategy title that will have you flanking enemies and rallying the troops, it’s still a decent amount of fun!

After selecting a character to control, you’ll begin as either a high ranking lord, an officer in an army, or a nobody with aspirations of becoming a leader. Every few months you’ll host a council with the officers you’ve acquired to plan strategies for bolstering your ranks, improving a region's defences, increasing the amount of food produced, and so on. These are just menu-based selections and offer no gameplay, but can be essential to repelling an enemy invasion or giving your side the upper hand in an upcoming skirmish.

You'll be seeing this screen a lot!

Battles are where the heart of the gameplay lies, and though little has changed over the years, it’s still very much an enjoyable, if repetitive, experience. Combos are a breeze to pull off, with light and heavy attacks being your standard moves, as well as four abilities to launch foes into the air, stun them, smash them to the floor, or unleash a special rechargeable attack — that each character has a unique version of — leaving enemies vulnerable to attacks.

And let’s not forget the all-powerful Musou attacks; a stalwart system of the franchise that lets players unleash a far-reaching attack that is guaranteed to kill off weaker enemies and deal a sizable chunk of damage to officers. These moves — unique to each character — are flashy, insane, and often gravity-defying moves that look fantastic. Playing as a new officer for the first time always had me excited as I built my Musou gauge up to see what devastating move I’d unleash.

Also included in Empires are cards that you can unlock which unleash various different effects mid-battle. These can range from simple unit-healing abilities, all the way through to unleashing fireball-based Armageddon upon the poor opposing army. They can be swapped out between battles and I often found myself trying new cards I’d unlocked just to see how effective they would be.

Marriage gives no additional story or interesting events

Unfortunately, two main things made the fighting feel stale after a while: the A.I., and the lack of mission variety. Now the A.I. is, quite simply, stupid. Opposing peons will stand around whilst you mow them down in their hundreds, with only the occasional higher ranking officer putting up much of a fight (and most of the time that's just because of the high amount of health they have). Your army also lacks a certain intelligence, and I constantly had to go into the pause menu and direct each officer towards a goal, or to defend an area as they stayed stationary as if the 10,000 soldiers on the other end of the map were just tourists coming to marvel at our lovely crop fields. Being a game more focused on tactics, this normally wouldn’t be an issue. But there is no way to issue general commands such as “capture all siege towers”, and the lack of any quick options in-game adds to the fact that this quickly becomes a chore. Missions will crop up during every invasion or territory defence, and completing them will turn the tide of battle, but when the only variety of these is to kill a specific character, or capture a certain encampment — things I would need to do anyway — it comes off as an afterthought. At the very least, focusing on missions will net you more rewards once the battle is over, and they give the player something to focus on specifically, rather than running from camp to camp decimating every poor soul stationed there.

After playing through a few of the campaigns — each one taking around 6–8 hours — I asked myself, “Am I enjoying this?” The answer was a surprising yes, I genuinely was! Is it a game I’m likely to spend the next few months going back to, trying every playable character in different scenarios? No, not likely. That said I will be playing for a while longer, especially with my created character that I stuck with for the majority of the stories being an absolute force of destruction!