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Dynasty Warriors 4 Xtreme Legends

Fighting for the domination of China, you’ll find that Dynasty Warriors 4 Xtreme Legends is a near non-stop action game. Your allegiance is a choice left to you, with four selections available : Kingdom of Shu, Kingdom of Wei, Kingdom of Wu, and Other, each group having a decent variety of characters to choose from. With Xtreme Legends, you essentially get all the characters from the original Dynasty Warriors 4, new stages and some new gameplay possibilites that have never been utilizied in previous titles. There are over 50 missions and 42 playable characters, not including the ones you create in edit mode.

So, what about the new stuff? Firstly, there’s Xtreme Mode, a mode which challenges you to play through as many missions as you can before meeting your end (it’s basically a survival type game). Doing so will allow you to gain experience and become stronger overall. Your weapons will also gain experience and evolve into new, more powerful forms. Throughout the game, you’ll be collecting allies, such as additional soldiers or archers, to add to your elite group of warriors. This is done by either purchasing them or gaining their trust by helping them out during a mission. Since your health isn’t replenished every mission, you’ll have to use the gold you collect to refill your health gauge or buy items that might be useful during the next stage. Certain items increase your stats whilst others can allow you to skip missions, increase the difficulty or even help you find stuff like a secret supply group in a mission map.

Legend Mode, which contains about 42 stages, allows you to recreate the historic events associated with each of the Dynasty Warriors. This mode even features a two-player cooperative mode, though there are some exceptions where you’ll instead be competing against each other.

Returning from the last game is Arena Challenge, a collection of combat challenges. These include Endurance, which pits you against an endless stream of enemies and Time Attack, a time-based mode that expects you to defeat 100 enemies as fast as you can. Demolition has you destroying all the breakable objects, including boxes, pots and siege weaponry, within a time limit and Bridge Melee requires you to knock approaching enemies off a bridge.

Thanks to the disc swap feature, you’re able to remix Dynasty Warriors 4 with Xtreme Legend’s new content. Owners of the previous title can load up their saved data to use here, with past modes like Musou/Free being transferrred between games. They’ll also get to use the character edit feature and create personalized chracters or bodyguards.

Extreme Mode allows you to build up your character’s various stats such as power, defense, life and musou and enables you to collect items that also improve certain abilities (for instance, a Tiger amulet will give you more power in your attacks). After every five missions, you can choose to create an empire or defend your current empire. In order to create an empire, you merely need to fight a chosen empire and defeat all their officers. As you progress, you’ll earn a higher rank and gain new weapons and colors of clothing or armor. This is probably the best part of the entire game – it’s fun and it’s challenging. You’ll have to save often, as being defeated results in the loss of all the items and junk you’ve garnered up until that point.

Getting into the basic gameplay, it’s easy to see that this title is a must-own for Dynasty Warriors fans and at least worth a try from newcomers. The action’s fast, contains loads of variety and features customizable and easy to handle controls. It’s nice to have some variation in both gameplay as well as character choice, not to mention some real challenge that makes the game last.

On the multiplayer side, the game only supports up to two players and two modes. Legend mode, a cooperative endeavor and Versus mode which pretty much speaks for itself. The latter mode contains four different sections, the first of which is Showdown Mode, essentially a one-on-one battle. Encounter mode is similar, only the action takes place in the dark. Escort mode has you protecting a carriage from being destroyed by the oposing team (and vice versa) and Influence mode sees you fighting against each other withing squads. If you can find a certain crest, you’ll be able to turn your enemy’s forces against them.

A consistent problem with all of these modes is that it seems a little too easy to beat your opponent. It just depends on who can get the first couple of combos in and then it’s all over. If you just attack the other player head-on, you’ll have a good chance of winning. Being able to respawn in these modes without restarting would have made the modes last longer overall. In both Escort and Influence you should rather have been forced to either destroy the carriage or opposing army entirely to win. Another problem lies with the not all that smart AI (both in single- and multiplayer) – if you go up some stairs the computer isn’t always intelligent enough to follow you up. Furthermore, while the horizontal split-screen works decently, the game’s camera should have been adjusted to accomodate the resulting size of each player’s screen. The enemies in multiplayer also seem to disappear spontaneously, even if they are within two feet of your character.

Graphically, the game has some nice detail, though there’s definitely room fo improvement. The environments are enshrouded by fog – very disappointing given how far console technology has come. The weapons are nice, in the sense that they contain a lot of historically accurate (though some tend to be a bit more unbelievable) detail rather than being bland and boring. Clearly, Koei have been doing their research.

Though rock music kind of throws off the experience of being in ancient China, the game’s sound is pretty good. The voice acting isn’t all that great, however, and often sounds like a badly dubbed film with very little variety in terms of wording.

To sum up, this game provides nice combos, weaponry, and decent storylines. It’s an appropriate game for people who don’t like a lot of dialogue slowing them down. The backwards compatibility from the original game is a nice feature for the fans of the series and Challenge Mode is recommended those who enjoy one-on-one fighters. The game will challenge experts with new ways to play and in turn further increase their skills. If you’re into cooperation as opposed to fighting against your friends, you’ll find that the two-player feature in Legend Mode is just what you’re looking for, though the multiplayer in general could have used some more work. All in all, this is a decent game to add to your collection. Newcomers to the series should try it out first and then make a decision but fans can jump right in.

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Tags: Dynasty Warriors 4 Xtreme Legends

Posted by Adam on Aug 2nd, 2004 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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