by:	March 29, 2006

KOEI struck gold with its Dynasty Warriors series, originally launching on the Playstation game console in '97. This is now actually the 11th installment of the game since then, and they continue to make a few more additions to milk the name for all it's worth. It's not a bad game, especially if you were already a fan of the series, but the leap to the 360 held a grand potential and they fell short.

DW5E has an interesting premise. You essentially pick the ruler you want to play as and the region you want to begin from and then "unify the empire" by invading all the other rulers' regions. You've won an empire scenario when you're the only ruler that still has land. Once you've completed a scenario, a new one is unlocked and you get to do the exact same thing again on the same map. You pick a different region and different officers and do the same thing again. There are cut scenes that basically insert your ruler and main officers into the same cheesy, “Braveheart” style, weapon-raising pep talk or your ruler saying how impressed he is at his officers. One fight in each campaign is "custom-made" for that campaign but it's all basically the same fight with different names. These empire-specific fights provide several of the 360 achievements, and most of the others involve employing officers in increments of 10 all the way up to 250. The remaining few are just specific battles in DW5E's free mode.

Being a hack and slash game, Dynasty Warriors 5: Empires is very full of repetition. There are, however, several elements that keep the game interesting. You can use a variety of officers, including all of your favorites from past DW games or even a character you can create in the game's Edit Mode. They all have different weapons that have different combos but they, too, are actually all almost the same basic movements. The game, again, creates an illusion of variety in that you can pick which region to start in and which officers to have fight beneath you.

What can you say about gameplay in a hack and slash? Well, a little more than you'd think, actually. In the battle aspect of the game, the fights tend to get pretty repetitive. In order to not get tired of the game, I had to abandon the officers that became my favorites just to see new weapons.

As far as fighting, mashing buttons is almost as efficient as the series of two-button combos DW5E provides. You can hit X anywhere from 1 to 5 times and then hit Y. There are your combos. Like I said, all the characters have slightly different looking combos, but there is a set of types of combos that's basically the same for each character. One knocks them into the air, one is a crowd-clearer, and one knocks they opponents back away from you so you can run away if you're close to death on one of the harder difficulties. You get the idea.

In between battles is the "Policy Phase." This is where KOEI made a few more additions. Most of your policy responsibility is gold. You can do all of the following (long list):
train officers and pay to put more troops under them; develop, upgrade, and produce products; improve your smiths in the three separate crafts of spears, swords, and other weapons (fans, clubs, boomerangs, etc.); research tactics such as charming an enemy officer to join you, poisoning troops of the opposing army, speeding up your troops, and other weapons of tact; and deal with issues of commerce like taxes. They basically beefed up several of the policy options. There is also a two-player mode, but the two-player mode is fairly limited, although you will probably get some more out of the game as it gives you some more options to do special attacks. Still, it would have been nice if KOEI made an effort to differentiate the game from the PlayStation 2 version far more, as you don’t have any sort of online mode, other than the fact that the game has Xbox 360 Achievements that can be displayed online.

The only way I can describe the quality of the graphics is to say that they fall somewhere between good for Xbox and bad for Xbox 360. Since it's a 360 game, you can deduce that the graphics are sub-par. The cutscenes and battles look only a little better than those of Xbox's Dynasty Warriors 5. The graphics are DW5E's downfall. We, the consumers, should expect more from 360 titles. It is hard to even take the visuals as being serious when KOEI is showing upcoming titles like Ni-Oh with visuals just as good if not better than the FMV in Empires, and another company is creating a similar style title that will be hitting shelves soon (at least in Japan) for Xbox 360 by the name of Ninety-Nine Nights with equally impressive visuals to KOEIs upcoming PS3 offerings.

The in-game music is possibly one of the game's redeeming qualities, especially if you like DW's progressive style of "traditional" oriental sitar music behind electric guitar solos. The music is great, but the cheesy dialogue is very limited and borders on pathetic. One interesting quality about the audio however is listening to the audio tests in the options and the grunts, moans, and so forth are just too funny.

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A good game if you ignore the disappointing graphics, this game could possibly be worth the $40.00 that it is selling for. Personally, I say it's a pretty good candidate for rental. If anything, the game is a sure buy for those Dynasty Warriors fans out there who may not have a PlayStation 2, would rather have the 360 Achievements, or would like to play the game at a better resolution. Still for the rest of us, the game really only warrants a rental.

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