Lunatic Arrow Key Turners

Warriors Orochi is a hack and slash action rpg game from Koei, makers of the Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors series. Fans of both series would be familiar with its game play and cast.

The story is about Orochi, the serpent king, transporting the Three Kingdoms era from China and the Warring States era from Japan together to test his own might. For each faction, Shu, Wei, Wu, and Samurai Warriors, you start off with 3 characters and unlock characters as you go along for a total of 79 characters including Orochi himself.

Characters are separated into 3 different types, Power, Speed, and Technique, each has a different special attack/abilities they can perform. Power types get Hyper Armor and an Attack Strength boost type special attack, Speed types get double jump and special attack that doesn’t use musou (for most), and Tech types get counterattack and increased effect on your charge attack, both using musou. There’s really no best character in the game, so it really depends on your playstyle.

The voice acting for the characters in the game is all over the place, some are quite good and comical like Magoichi and some are just bad like Zhou Yun. However, once you’ve played the game long enough, you’ll learn to block out most of the voices if you havn’t turned the voices off already.

You can use keyboard or controller to play the game, and since this is a port from the console version, it is better to just use a controller.

The only problem i had with the game is dealing with the event/chat lag. The lag is caused by the game unable to go through its queue because the chatboxes doesn’t go away right after the voice acting has finished. Supposedly the way to fix it is to pause the game when the voice acting starts, unfortunately for me, that didn’t work. Since many of the game’s unlockables requires some form of time based requirement, this lag can pervent you from unlocking characters and chapters in the game.

Warriors Orochi brings together the heroes of Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors, the game offers lots of replayability through its four different campaigns, and unlocking characters and their items. As of writing of this review, I’ve only completed the Shu and Wu campaign and about half way towards completing the game. Some people might find the hack and slash gameplay to be repetitive, but the feeling of defeating 4 enemy officers together and clearing an entire screen of enemies never gets old. This game is must for fans of DW and SW, and also to action rpg fans who would like a different setting from the traditional Tolkien view.

Cover Image Courtesy of IGN.com