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At long last, after decades of similar-feeling sequels, spin-offs, and licensed side games, Koei Tecmo has finally rebooted the venerable Dynasty Warriors game franchise. Almost every aspect of Dynasty Warriors: Origins is completely new, from overhauled combat to a unique angle on the iconic Three Kingdoms story, and the result is a stunningly good single player action game that I can’t believe I love so much.
I’ve been a fan of this series and its many adjacent games since 2000’s Dynasty Warriors 2, and it has gone through a ton of ups and downs since then. The last time it came close to any sort of full overhaul was probably Dynasty Warriors 6 way back in 2008, which controversially threw out a time-tested combat system in favor of flashy animations that tried to mimic movie fight choreography. That game’s director, Tomohiko Sho, took a break from the core franchise to work on Koei’s other games after the tepid reception to DW6, but he has returned for Origins to apply all his learnings for a shot at redemption.
The last main release in the series was Dynasty Warriors 9 in 2018, and it got so focused on delivering a vast open world full of content and parting its content out into microtransactions that things like “fun” and “depth” got a…
