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Dynasty Warriors 9: Empires Seems Like a Mess
Way back at the start of 2018, Dynasty Warriors 9 came out. It was the most polarizing entry ever released in the long-running franchise, and that’s saying something since “critical acclaim” and “Warriors” so rarely appear in the same sentence.
The game was an ambitious attempt to start completely over, from a hack-and-slash franchise that usually plays things very safe. The development team at Omega Force built a whole new engine platform and threw out all of the classic Warriors design tropes in favor of a vast open world. It still had combat against large groups of enemies and over 90 characters with unique stories. However, it also had long stretches of riding a horse through nothing, crafting and loot systems that feel under-sized compared to the vast landscapes and long game running time, and English voice acting from an inexperienced cast used as a workaround for the union strike going on during development.
It also just didn’t work that well on launch, and it took months and months of patches for the game to reach a playable state. I still loved it, but it was far from being a new bold path forward for the series, and instead seemed more like a dramatic failure of an experiment.
I hoped that an Empires edition of the game would come out someday and that it would try to fix things up. The Empires titles are unique standalone spin-offs that add a layer of strategy and management on top of the hack and slash action.
I didn’t expect that DW9 Empires would take four years to come out, or that it would feel somehow worse than its predecessor, but here we are. The game launches this week in Japan, and in mid-February worldwide with a variety of language localizations. A demo came out two weeks ago in Japanese, and keen fans figured out that if you change your region to Japan on the Xbox web site, add the demo to your favorites, then download it on your US console, you can play it in English right now.
