In Warriors Orochi, publisher Koei moves away from the ongoing retread of the story of the Yellow Turban Rebellion and adds in the cast from the Japanese based Samurai Warriors along with a new enemy in the demon Orochi; however the gameplay will feel all too familiar.
For those that love the modern day Koei games, this one will be right up your alley. For those tiring of the sameness in gameplay inherent in these games should probably bypass this one. The game isn’t bad and actually plays pretty well for a PSP version even when compared to the Xbox 360 and PS2 versions of the game. The only problem with the hack-and-slash gameplay is given how much it hinges on constantly hitting buttons to attack—your fingers may tire quickly, especially when using the analog nub to move your warrior.
The story is that the demon Orochi, taken from Japanese mythology, has come down to Earth and amassed an army to take on both the Warring States era warriors from Japan and the Romance of the Three Kingdom’s era warriors from China that he’s summoned together with magic. The whole idea of these two groups being put together is tough to swallow given their real world histories are centuries apart, but as long as you don’t know that, don’t think about it, or just plain don’t care about the narrative, you’ll be just fine.
The game is split into four stories, three from the Chinese side and one from the Japanese side. The Chinese side is split into the Shu, Wu and Wei (the Three Kingdoms) stories; the Japanese one is simply the Samurai Warriors story. In each storyline you start out with three characters to choose from. As you continue on in the story you unlock other characters that you can then choose to play. You take three characters to each battle and each person is a Power, Technical or Speed based warrior. There could be a bit of strategy involved, but since this is a hack-and-slash game strategy can be thrown out the door.
You can easily switch between your chosen characters by pushing the d-pad left or right. Base attack is the square button, jumping is done via the X button, a charged attack with triangle, a special Musou attack (that uses your Musou bar) via the circle button and a special move on the R trigger. That is basically all you need to know since most of the time in the game will be spent repeatedly pressing the square button with a few triangles, circles and R trigger pushes when you feel like it. Notably missing is the ability to move the camera horizontally so you can see people who are attacking from behind you, but outside of that this game will fulfill all your hack-and-slash dreams.
The graphics are actually not bad, but there is a plethora of pop-ups and a lot of fog on the horizon in order to keep the frame-rate going at a steady pace. The waves of enemies can number many dozen and the gameplay itself doesn’t slow down noticeably at all, which is quite impressive considering how many people are being processed at one time on the screen. Not sure if this game is a port of the PS2 version or not, but one has to be impressed by the graphics given the power of the PSP system versus even the PS2.
Once you complete everything you are able to choose from 77 (!) characters (48 from the Three Kingdoms, 29 from Japan) and you are able to go into Free Mode and play through all the story chapters in any grouping. You can also play this mode at any point, but will only be able to choose from the chapters you have completed and from the characters you have unlocked so far. Another addition is an ad-hoc online co-op mode where if you have a friend that also has the game and you are in the same area you can play the game co-operatively.
Warriors Orochi isn’t a bad game since it is another angle on the same Koei-based hack-and-slash games they have been working on for over a decade now. There are also some new things brought to the table, but the gameplay experience is becoming tiring.
