Warriors Orochi 2

Platform(s): PSP, PlayStation 2, Xbox 360
Genre: RPG/Action
Publisher: KOEI
Developer: KOEI
Release Date: Sept. 23, 2008

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PS2 Review - 'Warriors Orochi 2'

by Matt Olsen on Oct. 10, 2008 @ 2:13 a.m. PDT

Warriors Orochi 2 takes place after the events of the original, featuring an overwhelming lineup of over 90 playable characters from both franchises including Samurai Warriors 2 Xtreme Legends, plus new characters from Chinese and Japanese history.

The long-running Dynasty Warriors by Koei is infamous for its repetitive hack 'n' slash gameplay. Each entry appears to be no different from the previous one, aside from playable character additions and alterations to the story line. Koei even went on to make a couple of spin-off series, Samurai Warriors and Warriors Orochi, the latter being a fusion of the two other series. Despite the unfavorable critiques, these games still manage to sell very well. The latest entry is the sequel to last year's Warriors Orochi, aptly named Warriors Orochi 2.

Warriors Orochi 2 features many modes of play, but the main focus will be the story mode. Here, you'll play through five different stories that take place during the Three Kingdoms era of China, the Warring States period of Japan, and a separate campaign involving the demon army that follows the serpent king, Orochi; this story line actually predates the plot of the previous game. With the exception of the last story, all of the campaigns involve different armies forming alliances to thwart the resurrection of Orochi.

Each campaign consists of eight missions of increasing difficulty, but the gist of each mission is to fight your way from one corner of the battlefield to the other. It may just be me, but it seems as if the exact same map is used in every mission. Sometimes you start in a different corner, or the stage takes place in a mountainous region as opposed to the grassy plains of the previous stage, but with the exact same geography. You'll control three officers, each with unique abilities. Officer types come in three forms: power, speed and technique. Power characters are my personal favorite because they can kill several enemies at once, at the cost of speed. Speed characters are weaker than the other two, but they're very quick and are good for pursuing fleeing troops. Technique characters are more balanced and are good for novice players. You'll control one officer at a time, but you can switch officers at any time by pressing the R1 or L1 buttons.


As you defeat enemies, you'll earn experience points and levels, but that only reflects the current officer you're controlling. If you want to level all of your characters evenly, you'll have to give each character equal playing time. The problem I noticed with leveling is you'll tend to focus on the character that kills the most enemies, such as the power character who will be much stronger than the other two by at least 10 levels. After each stage, you'll recruit a handful of new characters, and you can choose to switch up your roster for a fresh character … except that character starts out at level one. The experience points you accumulate throughout the stage become growth points, which are essentially free experience points that you can allocate to any character between stages. You'll also pick up new weapons that may be more powerful or contain special properties, such as emitting fire and ice, being more effective against enemy officers, and so on. Additionally, you'll earn special abilities that increase your attributes, regeneration rate, and things of that nature.

The controls for Warriors Orochi 2 are pretty solid. You run around with the left analog stick, jump with the X button (completely useless), and you have three attacks. You have a quick, horizontal slice with the Square button and a strong attack that can hit multiple enemies with the Triangle button. Finally, you can unleash your Musou energy with the Circle button. Typically, it's an area-of-effect attack that hits all of the enemies surrounding you, but you have to wait for your Musou gauge to refill to use it again. Switching out a character will recharge his gauge over time, as does picking up a power-up that automatically refills the gauge.

No matter how you play Warriors Orochi 2, it'll eventually come to this conclusion: You kill hundreds of enemies nonstop until you defeat the opposing officers. The officers can be distinguished as the enemies because their names appear in red lettering appearing above their heads, and they're typically larger and/or more powerful than other enemies. If you kill all of the officers, you'll eventually complete the level, even if you didn't pay attention to the mission objectives. In general, the game is really repetitive and dull. By the time you get through the third mission in one of the campaigns, you'll become bored. Occasionally, the mission will throw in a mandatory side-quest, such as escorting a supplies cart.


The other modes of play include Free mode, where you can choose to play through an unlocked mission with any unlocked character. You've already been forced to play through these tedious missions in the Story mode, so why would you want to play through them again? Another mode is Dream mode, where you play through various extra missions with a given group of characters; this is mainly used for fleshing out the story. In Versus mode, you and another player can fight each other in the same gameplay style as the main game. Finally, there's Survival mode, which was my favorite. You have a team of characters who fight other teams in a SoulCalibur-style fighting game. The mode uses the same controls as the main game, and I was quite impressed by how well it worked. If they made the Survival mode a stand-alone fighting game, it would be pretty darn good.

On the graphical side of things, Warriors Orochi 2 is what you'd expect from a PS2 offering. It's not quite up to par for today's standards, but I was pretty impressed that it runs fairly smoothly, even when dozens of enemies are on-screen at once. I noticed some frame rate hiccups late in the game, when there were over 50 on-screen enemies, which got in the way of my button-mashing and combo accumulation.

When you're slashing away at swarms of enemies, the title offers a broad soundtrack of Asian-based technopop and rock music. It doesn't seem quite appropriate for the setting, but it helps drown out the grunts and screams that echo throughout the game from your attacks. The character voices are pretty good. While the story isn't the most interesting feature in the title, it's amazing to see the variety of voice actors in the cast of over 50 characters.

Overall, Warriors Orochi 2 is a solid game, but the repetitive gameplay and missions that make up the majority of the game prevent it from being anything more than a rental. Most other players will grow bored with the monotony after the first campaign or so, but if you're an overachiever or a completionist, the diverse selection of modes, in addition to the number of characters you can play as and level up, will keep you busy for a long time.

Score: 6.5/10



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