Blog Archive

Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Dynasty Warriors 9 actually has 94 Characters:

Hua Xiong, Dong Bai, Xiahou Ji and Yuan Shu are playable characters if you buy the digital deluxe edition.  (which I didn't.)  Presumably they'll become ordinary downloadable content in the future, and then everyone can get their hands on them.  But if there's any way to play the character, that's a playable character, so that makes 94.

In my awesome post http://diamed-the-road-less-traveled.blogspot.com/2014/05/which-characters-should-be-added-for.html discussing my hopes for new characters in Dynasty Warriors 9, which I wrote four years ago, I asked for these very characters.  Hua Xiong and Yuan Shu were on that wishlist.  It's great to see Koei-Tecmo agreeing with me and adding these characters in just like I asked for.

In the end, out of the wishlist I made for DW9, 6 of the characters were actually added.  That leaves 17 left to go.  Maybe Dynasty Warriors 10, right?

Out of these 94 characters, though, there are only 36 unique weapons.  In Dynasty Warriors 8 everyone had their own unique weapon and fought in their own unique way.  Now we're back to square one.  The difference is this time everything looks better and the world is bigger.  I guess you can only ask your programmers to do so many things at once.  I'd like to see, for downloadable content, everyone getting their own unique weapons again, though.  Games should be improving on their previous edition, not going backwards.

Dynasty Warriors 9 is going to be amazing, but there's still a ton of room for improvement.  DW 10 should have all unique weapons and the remaining 17 characters I asked for that they still haven't added.  It should also include the Jin conquest of Wu, which is the actual ending of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel, something they've stubbornly refused to do all this time for who knows what reason.

Meanwhile, the Saki Biyori manga is ending.  One of the four pillars of the Saki manga world has crumbled.  But that's okay.  There's still Saki, Toki, and Shinohayu to keep us company.  And it's still one of the best manga franchises ever.  Only 13 manga series come out at all regularly in the fan translation world, and out of those 13 Saki, Toki and Shinohayu are three of them.  That's like 1/4 of all good manga in the English-speaking world all directly attributable to the same person.  Saki Biyori was a nice addition to that ridiculous record, but hardly necessary.

1 comment:

Matthew Jonas said...

Wow, it really DOES seem like you'll enjoy "Dynasty Warriors 9" which, if you haven't noticed, is going to be released in the U.S. next Tuesday!