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| ughhhhhhhhh |
I've played a fair amount of Dynasty Warriors in my life, but I never got super into it. I can remember playing Dynasty Warriors 3 on the PS2 with my brother. As far as I was concerned it was a pretty fun game loosely based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Who doesn't like to decimate hundreds and hundreds of enemies with a single Asian general without taking a hit? My brother and I had a lot of fun with the game, so when Dynasty Warriors Gundam came out we picked it up. At that time we didn't have a whole lot of multi-player games for the PS3, so we picked it up and played it for a bit.
We had an average time playing the game together, same as we did with Dynasty Warriors 3. The only difference was that I was controlling a single giant robot, while decimating hundreds of other giant robots. When Dynasty Warriors Gundam 2 came out was when things got bad. It was summer and one of my friends convinced me to rent it from a now defunct video store, which I did. 5 days later it was time to return the game and I had somehow managed to put in 60 hours of gameplay. It was a dark time. At first I loved playing it, but by the end of the 5 days I hated almost everything about it. For a brief moment I thought about renewing the rental, but decided that my life would fall into disarray if I did.
Luckily I managed to steer clear of the series until shortly before Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 came out this past June. The same friend who made me rent the 2nd game in the first place was getting excited for the 3rd game. Somehow, despite my hatred, we ended up playing the 2nd game even more. The craziest part was that I ended up buying it a week before the 3rd game came out... The third game came out and I ended up getting that too. As you know, I played it a whole bunch. Somehow my sheer hate for the time I spent with the 2nd game morphed into an even deeper hatred of the series, while adding in a little bit of love...
It looks cool at first, but then you play it.
Why I hate it
Dynasty Warriors games are all basically the same. To be overly reductive you push the square button repeatedly in order to achieve victory. If you want to get a little wild you can do some combos by throwing in triangle at certain intervals. It's mind numbing and extremely simple. All of the maps are basically the same thing. You have to kill enough robots in a zone to take it over. After a certain point you can take over the enemy HQ and win. Alternatively, there are specific maps where you will have to defeat certain enemies. There is never anything different to do. You go through the same maps over and over, while mashing the same button repeatedly.
For the first 10-20 hours of gameplay, this is fine. Ironically this is how long the story goes on for, so any normal person would stop at that point. I like to unlock everything in games, or at least try to, so I couldn't stop. This is where the problem arises. It's almost like there is too much content and most of it's bad. In order to do everything you have to play through a stupid amount of missions. In order to unlock all of those you have to play as horrible characters and make friends with every character in the game (There are a ton of them). Making friends takes so long, because there's a certain amount of luck to it. In the end I had to play through the same missions designed to boost friendships over and over until I wanted to smash the disc.
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| Banagher Links launching in the Unicorn Gundam! (If only I had a dollar for every time I heard that...) |
Speaking of wanting to smash the disc, the voice acting in this game is horrendous. Maybe I would have felt better if I changed everything to Japanese, but I didn't. To go along with the repetition of everything else the characters like to repeat their lines constantly. There are at least 4 pilots on every mission and they're all saying things quite often. I'd say a normal mission takes 5-10 minutes, which isn't long at all. Somehow a pilot will end up saying the same line at least four times in that short span. This got to be so annoying that I began to play with the sound off.
Playing with the sound off helped make everything less enraging, but somehow the game managed to piss me off even more. I mentioned that the game was easy, but later on it takes a ridiculous difficulty spike. Challenge missions force you to play on the hardest difficulty. Judging by the rest of the game you wouldn't expect them to be anything crazy, but you'd be horribly wrong. It was common for me to die in two or three hits if I wasn't careful. There were so many times when I was near the end of a mission, but got blindsided and had to start all over. I don't get how a game can go from being so easy to so frustratingly hard in seconds. It's either off or on and there is absolutely no in between.
These games could easily get away with their repetitive nature, because they're fun at first. However, for some reason they're hell bent on making everything overstay its welcome. The repetition becomes maddening and I don't understand how this series sells enough copies to warrant sequels. I can't be the only one who finds everything in this game/series crazy repetitive.
Why I love it
Dynasty Warriors: Gundam may be a spin-off series, but I think there are certain ways that it's superior to the games it's copying. Plain old Dynasty Warriors is beyond unrealistic. As I've mentioned previously you're an Asian general who cuts through hordes and hordes of enemies. That just doesn't happen. I'm not saying that giant robots made of gundanium are realistic, but I am saying that they're much more believable from a gameplay standpoint. If you've ever seen a Gundam anime, then you know that all the gundams are practically invincible. They use their crazy robot beam swords to cut through everything like butter. Gundams annihilate hundreds of other giant robots without a scratch and this series reflects that.
In the anime gundam pilots say a whole lot, but this game takes it to a whole new level. I previously mentioned how I hated the voice acting, but I also loved it. The repetition of their lines is maddening, but it can also be funny. Their lines are so annoying that it's kind of funny. When playing co-op with someone it's commonplace to mock everything that everyone in the game says. Sometimes we'd even bet how many times they were going to say a certain line. Athrun's line "Enough foolishness" has found a great deal of life outside the game for me as well. Seabook's "Color me impressed" is pretty great too.
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| Six kills before this screenshot was taken someone said something annoying. |
A majority of the time I played with the sound off. I often listened to podcasts while playing, which worked out fairly well. I didn't need to focus very much on the game, so I got in a whole lot of podcast time. I guess this was one way the simple gameplay paid off.
To be honest I have absolutely no idea why I love this game, but I know that I do. At first I thought it was just a guilty pleasure, but now I don't know. It's like I get some perverse pleasure from subjecting myself to this series of gundam games. At first I thought that I was alone in my love for this series, but my recent quest to achieve all the trophies has shown me otherwise. The online mode in this game is lame and it doesn't have a long life span, because you're just doing even lamer missions of the main game's missions. Despite that, there were plenty of people for me to play online with. I had to play 100 missions and somehow I was able to do that almost a year after the game's release with a ton of people. I can only assume that these people are true gundam fans, unlike me. While I may not be the biggest fan of the anime I still love this game for some unidentifiable reason.
While I could never bring myself to recommend this game to anyone, I will certainly be picking up the 4th game when it inevitably comes out. Somehow these games continue to make enough money to warrant a sequel and I'll continue my love-hate relationship with them as long as they continue to exist.
-Manny
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