I stumbled upon this little beautie earlier this week and been playing it since. There arn't many 3rd party efforts i'd go out of my way to recommend but i feel this one deserves a bit of attention. i won't go into many details about it but suffice to say that there is a load of content here from 3 seperate story lines 20 different stages and a load of characters to choose from each with their own weapons and move sets all of them upgradable via an rpg type exp system which is neat.

The characters are customisable plus you can create your own warriors and use them in the other modes besides the story mode like the historical battles , castle secrets or online battle modes. It also has the option of co op story mode in spilt screen and although i havn't had the chance of testing this one its nice to know its there.

The production is decent with quite a bit of cutscens and voice work , although I'm not a fan of the latter. Graphics are good enough but what is impressive is the crap loads of enemies on screen. Music is also good , not memorable but good enough. Gameplay wise its essencially a mission based slash em' up with  rpg elements, the enemy AI is on the dumb side with only the main commanders providing a challange but its undertandable seeing the ammount of enemies on screen. Difficulty wise it has 4 modes which i unlocked so far being, easy for very easy, normal for a bit less easy, hard for a challange and chaos mode for absolute insanity.

All in all if you happen to stumble on a copy try it out,rent it or whatever, its not perfect but if you like it there are tons of gameplay hours to be had here. Content wise there are not many 3rd party efforts i can say that about as i  feel like I'm just scratching the surface with this one. I will reserve my final judgment on this for now and see for how long it will hold my attention but so far so good.

p.s. from what i gathered it hasn't been released in america yet as i heard it comes out in november over there so keep an eye out for it.  In europe its been out for a while now (got the upperhand for once) so here is some gameplay footage;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEEKwz9Zxjw

I've been wondering about this... but the graphics look really bad(and trust me i'm no graphics whore)... I might as u say rent it and see how i goes :)

I love Samurai Warriors series! Unfortunately this third episode is a Wii exclusive. But is a wonderful game, at least for me.

Sorry, I'm going for Basara 3 instead.  Capcom!

This is a better game based on my experience, its very chaotic and funny as well.

Ninjas are better, so no.

THis game has online and SB doesn't.

Only for the weird Muramase mode.  The main game is local multi only. :/

Hmmm have you seen it live or on video? Its not that bad at all, in my opinion it works, sure the draw distance for enemies is crappy but in between all the action it doesn't bother. For me performance is the most important thing , if the game engine slowed down then yes i would have a problem but its not the case here. Rent or borrow, see for yourself ;)

A week in and i still can't let it go (good sign right there) . I completed 2 character stories so far with all missions, sub missions and all bonuses unloked 4th weapon etc..only 38 more characters or so to go :/  I also discovered that you can choose to retain the japanese voice acting over the english so thats really good for me.

I started the castle mode out of curiosity(and to get the bonus armor) and got stuck on that, this one is tough even on normal mode, then , there is nightmare mode........yikes! I can see how co-op would really help with this one. Stumbled on a new character in this mode (takamaru) and hes quite awesome so I dropped the ninja character i created and I'm leveling him instead.

So in short, I'm still scratching the surface of this thing.......money well spent indeed.