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| Meh, here's my new long short review of it by curst 07/04/2003, 3:12am PDT | ||||
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| The more I play DW4, the more I think DW3 (with the XL exp. pack) is noticably better. I should probably revamp my list of negatives and postives because the more I read my original post, I start wondering "WTF was I thinking"? I realize I'm going all Fag/CounterFag on myself here, but DW4's just been bugging me too much to let it go unpunished. I still like it in an overall sense, but:
- The improved AI... fuck that. Pretend I never mentioned it. The new AI is more frustrating, and nothing more. Yeah, you get knocked out of combos more often by a pesky peon who'll stab you in the back. No, it won't actually amount to anything other than it taking longer to kill everyone. With almost anyone in any level on any difficulty setting, you can still wade into crowds and press square a bunch of times and get at least moderately good results. - The game is just way too easy. WAAAAAAAY too easy. It's a joke now. And I'm not even talking about the hilariously unbalanced Ma Chao when he's riding on the Shadow Runner horse, since that's actually sort of fun. I mean in an overall sense. The problem is that while they included this slightly better AI that attacks you more often, both you and your enemies do a lot less damage. Therefore everyone takes about ten times as long to die. The tension of DW3's harder battles, where you knew you had to constantly remain on your guard if you wanted to survive the confrontation with this particular really tough general, is completely gone. - Cao Ren sucks. Okay, he's sort of cool with that funky sword/shield weapon, but he's pretty awful otherwise. Okay, so he has good defense and is very hard to knock out of combos, but oh well, it's not like his combos pose much of a threat. - The new level design is average at best. Holy shit I have no idea what kind of zombie weed I was smoking when I said that it was great. A lot of the levels are merely tiny portions of the large battles. The most glaring and awful example is the new Battle Of He Fei. It sucks so incredibly badly compared to DW3. In DW4, first you'll fight at Shi Ting. What is Shi Ting? A level that's IDENTICAL to He Fei except that it doesn't have these two narrow outdoor areas on the outer edges. That's the only difference. And the He Fei castle that was perhaps the greatest battle in DW3? Incredibly tiny, basically one staircase and a roof. The huge maze of nasty traps filled with shitloads of enemies is completely gone now. This *alone* makes DW3 better. - On that note, I don't like the new Musou campaign mode. In DW3, it followed the novel at least somewhat when it came to various characters dying in mid-campaign, and those deaths had some nifty cutscenes accompanying them. In DW4, that's all gone too, because the idea is that your army's entire roster of generals stays alive from beginning to end. So the ambush of Taishi Ci by Zhang Liao at He Fei? Gone. Sun Jian falling for Liu Biao's trap and being crushed by the boulders? Gone. Dian Wei's fighting off a bunch of guys unarmed and only dying after swallowing about 100 arrows? Gone. The only one that's kept in DW4 is the ambush of Pang Tong. Maybe this is nitpicking, but this adds to a huge overwhelming DREARY factor in the Musou mode. With every character you play, you fight the same 15+ battles over and over and over again. At least in DW3 each character had their own path of seven missions to follow. - And another thing about level design - DW4's levels are not as chock full of enemies as DW3's were. So it takes longer to kill everyone, but there's far less people to kill. This removes a huge part of the pure visceral thrill that was DW3, where you waded into ungodly large crowds of enemies and slaughtered them all with the quickness, but probably took a few nasty scrapes in the process. Ugh. - The siege engine is ker-GAY. Well, actually it's not bad, but it's really almost no different from DW3, other than the fact that you can now destroy siege weapons (or alternately, have to protect them from the enemy). They really don't add much since you can't control them in any way. Those great Tiger Tanks are not quite so great once you realize that you can't actually use them yourself (the only time you see them is when you fight against the Shu kingdom for your campaign's final battle, and then only THEY get to use them, you never do). Koei could be on to something with siege weapons - really, how cool would it be to be able to scoot around in a tank setting fire to everyone or plugging them with a medieval machine gun? - but they're not implemented in a meaningfully different way. - Some of the new movies suck. The dialogue is just pathetic, aside from the rare moments when Zhang He gets the limelight. It's not like I'm expecting Koei to rewrite the novel here since it's just a beatemup game, but they didn't even try. It's not intriguing, and it's not nearly as funny as DW3 (which at least boasted humorous quotes such as "This invasion by Cao Cao is just an excuse to attack us!"). - I already touched on this a bit but oh well: the cutscenes in this game are almost universally bad. The pacing is awful, the dialogue sucks, they're not funny... they don't get anything right. There might be one or two exceptions. DW3 not only had a LOT more cutscenes but just about all of them were far cooler. - The new combo moves that everyone got ARE better, but you're not rewarded for using all your moves the way you were in DW3:XL. So you will still just rely on the one or two attacks that are best for your character and ignore all the others. - Horses... okay, I really can't complain here. Again, if you want to see how hilariously easy this game can get, pick Ma Chao, give him the Shadow Runner saddle, and just run around pressing square all day. It might take you about ten minutes to beat the most challenging stages on hard difficulty. - I hate the English voicework more than ever, partially since it's not like I have a choice to switch to Japanese. I will never stop grumbling about that. - DW3's soundtrack is still a million times better for a Dynasty Warriors game, even if it doesn't have quite as much guitar shredding in it. - I'm still bitter about what they did to Zhen Ji. They may as well have removed her entirely. New worst character ever. - Screw Lu Bu - the entire dueling system is weak. If you haven't noticed there's a nasty glitch with all duels - when you opt to fight a duel, the game momentarily takes away all the bonuses you get from your items, so as to ensure that you're on a level playing field with the enemy general, right? Well, WHOOPS, it's not a momentary loss. The game forgets to restore those bonuses to you once the duel eneds. Luckily you can save/quit after the duel, reload, and you'll have your bonuses back. That's still annoying, though, especially if you're not aware of what's going on and then are wondering why it's taking you FIVE HOURS to kill an enemy private instead of just the usual thirty minutes. Even worse is that despite that supposed "level playing field" I just mentioned, there really is no such thing. Your enemy will get to heal himself in mid-duel, while you cannot. And I mean he'll go from being one pixel away from death to having a full fucking health bar. Having said that, why doesn't the game just say "YOU LOSE, GO BACK TO KING'S QUEST YOU FAG" when you decide to participate in a duel? Simple, because they're STILL too easy since the AI is so easily exploited (and that's assuming you don't exploit the bug where you aim your bow outside the dueling arena and the enemy decides to never attack you again) and basically what I'm trying to say is that Koei's style is at half-mast because their effort was only half-assed. DW's fighting system is perfect for letting you battle hordes of enemies, but one-on-one battles are NOT DW's strength by any means, and the duels only emphasize all the more why that is. I'd like to see Koei find a way to implement a more fighting-game-ish system for the duels - it'd help break the monotony of the regular battles - and I'd like to see them not slap it on as an afterthought. - And I can't stand the new weapon levelling up system. I mentioned it the last time DW4 was brought up but it bears repeating: why would you take out an element of the game that made DW3 as stupidly addictive as Diablo - finding randomly generated weapons that could potentially match the power of your unique weapons - and replace it with a levelling up system, when you already have to level up your characters?! It'd be no different than if Diablo forced you to keep only one weapon, and the only way to improve its power was to land special attacks on enemies, and then when it levelled up the only thing it did was add to the damage, not providing any other benefits. But DW4 does exactly that. Crap crap crap. I still think DW4 is a fine game, don't get me wrong... I'm only going off like this because I love the basic idea of the game SO FREAKING MUCH. I just had the misfortune of playing the superior DW3 first - I can definitely imagine that if I had never played DW3, then hell yes I'd be totally in love with DW4 to this day. mark wrote: Heh... in retrospect, there was no real reason to get DW4 since I already had DW3 and DW3:XL. Wish I had known about all this beforehand. Only a very few people from Japan were willing to say anything negative about the game - most of them were fanboys to the extreme!!! and couldn't shut up about how EVERYTHING was improved upon. I guess I got caught up in that at first because I hadn't spent enough time to notice all the tiny fucked up details. Buuuuuut... I will admit that I'm still very interested to see if they'll do an expansion for DW4 like they did DW3. DW3:XL honestly added a LOT to that game. It was an expansion pack whose quality was definitely on a par with Starcraft's Brood War. It added a great deal more challenge with the patently unfair new difficulty setting, it included lots of new unlockable items, one of which is just gloriously cool, the new campaigns were really well done (at least compared to DW4's "Other Kingdoms" campaigns, indeed there is no comparison to be made), the combo bonus point system was great since those points contributed in a vague sense to the quality of the items and weapons you found... Actually, all you *needed* to know was that it turned an already challenging (well, at times) game into a nightmarishly tough one in order to be intrigued, but it also made lots of other tweaks to the basic game formula, and unlike DW4, all of its tweaks were good ones. My basic wishlist for a DW4 expansion pack would be: increase the damage you do to enemies, increase the damage you sustain from enemies, abandon or vastly improve the duelling system, provide nothing but new and *unique* levels - don't make me fight in those square buildings at Jian Ye for four/five different battles, ditch the weapon levelling up system and return to the Diablo random-weapons system, reinstate the combo bonus point system, JAPANESE VOICE ACTING PLEASE, and let me set shit on fire with the Tiger Tanks myself. I thought the game was generally on the easy side (played on normal for the first mousou, then switched to hard) with a few freakishly more difficult levels. Yes, I could have played crappier generals, but that seemed counter to my goal somehow. I also haven't finished all the campaigns, so maybe the others are much harder. They aren't. DW4 really never gets challenging. At least not after you've tried to beat the tougher stages of DW3:XL on Very Hard difficulty. It's impossible to even compare the two - they're simply worlds apart in terms of difficulty. I did find The Nanman Campaign and The Battle Of Jian Ye to be tough the first time I played them, but not because I died or anything... rather it was a matter of keeping my commander alive. Once I figured out the easiest way to do so in each stage, well, they became no more challenging than The Yellow Turban Rebellion. Bah. In DW3, there's a greater sense of tension because you generally only have to worry about keeping YOU alive... it's not only much easier to kill the average enemy but also easier to be killed since you sustain noticably more damage in a general sense, and the end result is that I only lost battles when I died, and I died a lot. |
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