I heard some of you guys like to read these long posts about the games, so last winter when I was bored at work I wrote and wrote and gushed about my top 5 games. Be careful though, I could write a book about my #1 game. Anyways here is my #5.
#5 Dynasty Warriors 3
Why does this game make my top 5. Even I don't understand how other games can't get a battle right in games. Sure you are incredibly strong and capable of killing over 1000, but every K.O. is earned unlike in other Warriors games. Every soldier has the capability of doing significant damage to you. The damage scales with rank, so a private would just do one slash, Sergeant 2 or 3 hit combo, Major has 4 hit combos and the Lieutenants and Officers have full combos. The aggression also scales, a private is usually scared to fight a god of a warrior like you but another officer doesn't care at all. You can do combos/block and shoot arrows. Again unlike other Warriors games, you definitely have to block certain things. For example, if you don't dodge or block a volley of crossbow bolts, you could die instantly from full health. I spent many of the later levels ducking and weaving through groups of crossbowmen, even at max level. They are easily killed and if you really need help, you can equip bow defense items to counter them.
Musou attacks make you invincible and my favorite character Gan Ning has musou that makes him run large distances while decapitating anything in his path. When you get low on health, true musou is activated and the musou gauge automatically fills. So getting rekt by the enemy can also end up badly for them. True musou adds fire element and extra attacks to the end of your regular musou. For example, for Gan Ning his musou normally ends with one extra slash, but true musou adds fire adds 2 more extra slashes. For my 2nd favorite, Sun Quan, his regular musou ends with a pathetic short range slash that could only hit 1 or 2 people. His true musou though ends with a wide slash that clear all enemies in the area.
Character design is also best in DW3 and Gan Ning looks like a beast, in DW3 he is a shirtless pirate with a ton of tattoos and he carries bells on his waist. The bells on his waist are for letting his enemies know that he is coming. That combined with his unarmored look lets you know what kind of warrior he is. He uses a long sword like scimitar one handed. I really like his final weapon too. It adds lightning element to his special attacks. His longest combo ends with him shooting airwaves from his sword into the ground which is unstoppable and hits multiple people, they all get affected by the lightning element which creates massive area of effect damage. Of course he is just one character of 38 in this PS2 game, all the other characters also have something fun about them. They all have secret quests for unlocking their final weapons, so there is a lot of extra content to max out. Every character in Wu/Shu/Wei also has unique ending in musou mode, making replayability a nice thing. This is impossible in the newer games due to having so many characters. Even though the characters in the Other factions don't have a musou, at least you can play them on their own level and have fun in Free mode. Speaking of Free mode, every single character has their own unique voice lines for all of the scenes involving the player. This can lead to hilarious voice lines like Guan Yu being confused about having to fight himself or Zhang Jiao (a magician) telling everyone he doesn't believe in magic, or Yuan Shao telling Cao Cao about his own supply depot being exposed. So if you particularly like a character like me you will play every stage to hear what they have to say.
Officer vs officer battles can be very interesting. If you combo them, of course they will faster, but if they block the start of your combo and you charge a special attack, they will just attack you mid combo with a faster attack. Another aspect I enjoyed is the bodyguard system. This is not just about the 2-8 bodyguards everyone gets, but also the groups of troops that follow high ranking officers and emperors. The 2-8 bodyguards start out as private level, which as established don't contribute much to the fight. But eventually they become as strong as lieutenants. When you have 8 lieutenants as bodyguards, they can easily kill a minor officer by themselves while you watch and laugh. You can level them up and set them up with different weapons. They follow you closely and everywhere. But the other bodyguards are more interesting, no other game has something like this. If you play as an officer with troops, you are followed by a retinue. If you are a normal officer, you might have 2 of these groups following you nearby and fighting the enemies troops. 2 groups equate to 10 extra men fighting by your side. But when you play as Ruler, there is a huge mass of troops that follow you around. For example as Sun Quan at He Fei Castle, 5-10 groups of elite troops follow you around. That's 50-100 elite troops just smashing the enemy around you. It felt super realistic that a Ruler had such an escort wherever they went on the map. Those guys could easily beat lesser troops and mop up crossbowmen in the distance, allowing you to be safe and fight your own battles. They can't heal though and aren't the replenishable type, so when they are used up, they are gone.
All troops and officers are affected by morale except you and the boss. Morale is from 0-8 stars. An officer, ally or enemy, with 0 stars will be wiped out easily by anyone. While at 8 stars, an officer will be unstoppable by the ai. However you can lower the morale by killing 100s of troops or being successful with battle events like fire attacks, or flanks. For a lot of battles, I simply experimented with doing as little as possible and seeing if the ai could win. They would lose without interference, but you could do an event or 2 and they could win by themselves. Every battle has an amount of troops that makes sense historically with minor differences to make it more difficult for the player.
Of course you want to kill as many as possible early on for the stat boosts. Because simply leveling up will not get you to max stats. You need to pick up life/musou up items from jars and attack/defense up items from officers. After that you can search for rare drops with interesting bonus stats like bow defense or always true musou.
I could legit write a lot more about this game, but that's all for now because I ran out of space on the piece of paper. One last thing I will type up here on the spot is the music is absolutely wonderful, brings tears to my eyes to this day. Here is a sample.
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