Dynasty Warriors

In order to understand what Dynasty Warriors is really trying to tell us, let’s first get back to basics. Why is a video game series adapting the history of the Three Kingdoms, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms in particular, called musō (“unrivaled”) in the first place, and why would this be the game to pioneer “1 vs. 1000” combat mechanic it is so (in)famous for?

 

The mascot character for Dynasty Warriors has always been Zhao Yun, and I do not believe this is either accidental or arbitrary. Zhao Yun is known as one of the Five Tiger Generals, who were famed as the most loyal and revered generals of Shu. It is Shu’s emperor, Liu Bei, who is generally considered to be the actual protagonist of Romance of the Three Kingdoms (if you had to pick one) at it’s his exploits and deeds that are depicted in the most positive and sympathetic light. However while Liu Bei is certainly not a supporting character in Dynasty Warriors (especially if you choose to play as him), it’s Zhao Yun who appears on the box art of all the mainline entries and who is oftentimes used as the series’ representative in crossover works and publicity materials. He is also tacitly implied to be the default player character.

 

Zhao Yun’s feats are sometimes seen to have been exaggerated, but again, Romance of the Three Kingdoms *is* historical fiction. We have to think of the book as being kind of like the Robin Hood tales, except very much older. In Romance of the Three Kingdoms and other Chinese folklore, Zhao Yun is depicted as a warrior of unmatched strength, but also boundless humility and loyalty who never boasted of his achievements, did not seek out conflict and refused to draw attention to himself: The epitome of the perfect martial artist who never started a fight, but would always finish one swiftly and decisively if he was threatened or saw someone come to harm.

 

Historically Zhao Yun was known as an uncompromisingly just, loyal and honourable man who was driven by a desire to bring peace to the common people, and the stories emphasize this part of his character to a great extent. Dynasty Warriors shows this as being the ideal he sees in Liu Bei and the reason he is drawn to serve under him. The game even assigns as his signature weapon the Dragon Spear, an unpretentious implement dating back to the Paleolithic era whose beauty is in its elegance and simplicity (indeed, it’s for these very reasons spears have long been favoured by warriors the world over in place of bulkier swords, including by the Vikings, whom pop culture has made almost synonymous with gigantic swords) and also references his auspicious Dragon associations and motifs (his style name even literally means “Little Dragon”). After his death, Wei Yan remembered Zhao Yun as “A gentle, affectionate, wise, miraculous being who called the land to order” and that “With him, neither accidents or disasters could disturb the peaceful balance he created.

Each numbered Dynasty Warriors installment comes in a set of three games. This is also true of Samurai Warriors, and the collaboration games (Gundam Musō, One Piece Pirate Warriors, Hyrule Warriors, etc.) will often have a variation of it. The three versions of Dynasty Warriors are as follows:

These are the core numbered releases, and the ones that tend to see all the major changes. They will often appear at the start of a new hardware cycle to take advantage of graphical and processing enhancements made since the last main entry, will offer significant gameplay changes (while the base combat of course always remains comparable, things like modes, story progression, RPG elements and other features can and do change quite frequently and dramatically). This is when the vast majority of new characters will be introduced and existing characters will be completely redesigned from the ground up, oftentimes both aesthetically and mechanically. Some characters will lose former signature weapons and gain new ones (or in the case of Dynasty Warriors 9, get shifted into a different weapon class).

 

You might see new areas of China rendered and new parts of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms story included that weren’t before, or parts that were previously skimmed over for time and resource constraints will now be explored in greater detail (this oftentimes goes hand-in-hand with a particular new playable character). These are the games that receive the lion’s share of Koei-Tecmo’s resources and publicity, building lots of pre-release marketing hype. In recent years they also tend to get supported for several months afterward with a barrage of premium downloadable content, including special pre-order exclusive costumes, new weapons, stages, music tracks, and sometimes even new entire characters.

Starting with Dynasty Warriors 3, each numbered entry has received a secondary release within 12 to 18 months of the game’s original launch, subtitled Moushouden. “Moushouden” means “Mighty Legend”, and gets appropriately localized into English as “Xtreme Legends”, spelled precisely that way. The name is in reference to Lu Bu, known as one of the fiercest, most powerful and most bloodthirsty warlords in Chinese history, and it’s Lu Bu who usually appears on the box art of Moushouden expansions in lieu of series mascot Zhao Yun.

 

Back in the olden days, Moushouden/Xtreme Legends releases were actual expansion packs: Secondary discs you would buy and that would interact with previous save data you had from the current base Dynasty Warriors game. You could also compare them to the myriad of revisions Street Fighter games tend to get over their lifespan as they bring with them gameplay tweaks and balancing, except in this case there’s only one instead of ten gazillion. But Moushouden expansions also bring with them a wealth of new content, often in the form of new game modes and revisions to existing ones.

The latest entry in my favourite video game series is out this week in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea and will release in the United States and Europe next week. And I won’t be buying it, at least not yet. Allow me to elabourate.

 

Some might say my taste is suspect for picking Dynasty Warriors as my favourite video game series, but that would be saying nothing as my taste has *always* been suspect. Furthermore, I believe Dynasty Warriors, and the larger musō genre it gave birth to, is frequently misunderstood and sadly underrated outside its core fanbase (at least in the West). It is a deceptively accessible series with what I find to be a profound amount of hidden depth and meaning at both a mechanical and symbolic level. Furthermore, at the stage of life I am now at, Dynasty Warriors and its ilk are basically everything I’m looking for in a video game. Consider this series, written in honour of the release of Shin Sangoku Musō 8/Dynasty Warriors 9, an attempt at putting some of that right…And perhaps explaining myself.

 

While a major series in the East, Dynasty Warriors has an unpleasant reputation for being shovelware in the West. There are, to my mind, a number of different reasons why it has been misconstrued this way, only one of which is mild racism of the sort that would plague a knowingly-flamboyant, dramatized retelling of East Asian history to find a degree of overseas popularity. I will perhaps address those issues in a later post, but for now I want to focus on objections raised at the gameplay and industry level. Western audiences, and especially Western critics, tend to look down on Dynasty Warriors as being “the same thing over and over again” released far too frequently. Although one could question the logic behind this argument by pointing out the entire first person shooter, crafting-survival and open-world crime genres exist and are readily accepted by everyone, that’s not a line of thinking I want to pursue because (as I will discuss more later), it’s actually better to think of Dynasty Warriors as occupying a unique niche somewhere between annual sports releases (Madden NFL, NBA 2K, WWE and especially FIFA, the biggest video game in the world) and Nintendo games. Instead, it’s worth looking at some historical factors connected to the series itself dating all the way back to the first entry: Dynasty Warriors 2, a launch title for the PlayStation 2.

 

[Before I go on I should naturally explain that admittedly interesting titling choice. The original Japanese name for Dynasty Warriors 2 was Shin Sangoku Musō, which is still the official name of the series on the whole. “Musō” means “unrivaled”, which has gone on to be the unofficial name of the genre the game spawned, while “Sangoku” refers to the historical period during which the games take place, the Three Kingdoms period of ancient China. The telling part is “Shin”, which means “new”, “true”, “pure” or “god” and was chosen to distinguish this game from the first Sangoku Musō.