Even if we leave aside its earliest fighting predecessor, Dynasty Warriors series has been around for nearly 25 years.
However, its development has not been smooth sailing, especially 2018 Dynasty Warriors 8, which suffered a huge drop in reputation due to various unreasonable factors, causing Omega Force team to not release any official works after the release of Dynasty Warriors 8 Empires in 2021.
It makes sense, after all, no matter how exciting the epic story is, it will inevitably make people tired after countless remakes. In addition, the overall gameplay of Dynasty Warriors has become fixed, and the open world innovation has suffered a Waterloo. This old series seems to be gradually fading from people’s sight.
Restart
However, to the delight of fans, the developers did not give up. At the beginning of 2025, the completely new Dynasty Warriors Origins made a shining debut. This game will be officially released to all players on January 17. Can this game, which is regarded as a “series restart”, successfully push the brand into a new development cycle?
Hero
The biggest difference between “Origin” and the past is that it abandons the game mode that focuses on controlling the famous generals of Three Kingdoms and uses the original hero Wuming. For most of the game time, players have to carry out activities and battles from the perspective of Wuming.
This is different from the custom character gameplay that has appeared before, because Wuming cannot make various image adjustments. He is an independent character with a complete background and story.
At the beginning of the announcement, this drastic change did cause controversy among the player community. Many people believed that the inability to play famous generals freely had lost the original characteristics of “Dynasty Warriors” to some extent.
The timeline of this game is planned from the beginning of Yellow Turban Rebellion to the end of Battle of Red Cliffs, and the content is concentrated on the first half of the history of Three Kingdoms that most people are familiar with. Although the story of Three Kingdoms could not be fully told, it left enough space to polish various levels of various sizes carefully, and some battles that were not included in previous works in the series appeared.
Of course, in addition to the hero Wuming, “Origin” did not forget to portray other generals.
Generals
Old players familiar with “Dynasty Warriors” know that whether it is “Dynasty Warriors” or “Samurai Warriors”, many of the famous characters depicted in it are mixed with Omega Force’s own creative settings and used from generation to generation.
This design logic will give people a refreshing feeling at first. But as time goes by, the original innovation has become an inherent impression that restricts the role’s space.
Considering that there are fewer and fewer high-profile generals and celebrities who have not yet joined the series, it is difficult for subsequent works to attract attention by adding new people. How to break through the bottleneck has become a problem that the development team must solve now.
Faced with the grim situation, the answer given by the developers is “reshaping”.
The great virtuous teacher Zhang Jue changed his state of “crazy demon” and became a leader of Taiping Dao with the ideal of saving the world and even a little tragic.
Although the evil Dong Zhuo was still a fat man, he had sufficient business strategies and ruthless means, and he was truly called the beast of the late Han Dynasty.
Yuan Shao, who was generally underestimated because of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, is no longer a negative image, and there are many performances that match his identity and demeanor.
After all, the comprehensive qualities of the princes and warlords who can leave their names in history books are much better than ordinary people. The adjustments made by Dynasty Warriors Origin to respect the historical atmosphere are very worthy of recognition.
Even for characters who have not made too many adjustments in character, the game has given young images that are in line with the development period of the plot, such as Cao Cao and Zhang Fei.
While breaking the image of Dynasty Warriors, the screenwriter also integrated the story lines related to Wuming, intertwined with the behaviors of many generals, and vividly performed a drama of the late Han Dynasty.
However, for some events, “Origin” uses a lazy pure text description without any performance cutscenes, which sometimes makes people feel that the jumps and turns between the plots are a bit stiff.
Combat
As traditional, the hero’s attack module will change according to the weapon used. Although the total number of types is less than before, the combat methods of each weapon are visible to the naked eye, and the gameplay is quite different.
In addition to the inherent attack modules of the weapon, the system provides an additional skill system called “Battle Arts”. Players can equip up to four Battle Arts at the same time, some of which are pure output skills, and some have displacement or defense effects.
Battle Arts require Bravery resources to activate, which are displayed as orange balls above the life bar, and can be accumulated by killing enemies or accurately dodging. In theory, the more powerful Battle Arts consume more Bravery. Battle Arts can be obtained by upgrading and adding points, and can also be bought in the store. There is also a chance to learn by encountering mysterious NPCs during exploration.
Battle Arts system has made up for the shortcomings of the weapon’s own modules, and can be combined with light and heavy attacks to play a variety of imaginative combos. The free allocation feature also fully mobilizes the player’s enthusiasm for matching moves, and choosing a combination that suits their style can be said to be a very successful factor.
As a new beginning, Dynasty Warriors Origins performed very well. It changed all the unreasonable aspects of the previous work, and at the same time broke the framework that bound it. It showed a very high level in terms of gameplay and plot fluency, but at the same time it did not lose the charm of the original work. It is better to say that this work shows more of the original feeling of Dynasty Warriors than its previous two works.
