DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS

I went into Dynasty Warriors: Origins half-expecting a nostalgia product, the kind that coasts on franchise goodwill while delivering the same button-mashing loop I have memorised since the PS2 era. What I found instead is the most mechanically honest entry Omega Force has shipped in a long time, and one that earns genuine attention from anyone who cares about how combat systems are constructed. The single-playable-character decision sounds like a downgrade on paper. Gone is the roster of nearly 100 generals that Dynasty Warriors 9 flaunted. Instead you control Ziluan, a wandering amnesiac, and the game commits completely to that framing. Because Ziluan is neutral early on, you interact with officers from all three factions before picking a side, and the branching storyline then locks you into Wei, Wu, or Shu. Each branch splits further into two endings, one that follows the historical arc of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and one that demands difficult bonus objectives to rewrite outcomes. That is actual replayability with structural consequences, not just reskinned cutscenes. The combat is where Origins separates itself. There are nine base weapon types, each with their own proficiency tracks, combo strings, and Battle Arts that consume a Bravery resource you build up by attacking, parrying, and perfect-dodging. Swords are forgiving starters. Wheels are a timing-based mid-range gamble with enormous payoff. The Staff launches officers airborne for juggle loops. Crescent Blades sweep crowds but punish impatience with slow charge animations. Gauntlets, to be blunt, are a mess of awkward stance transitions and most experienced players bench them quickly. Completing the main story unlocks a tenth weapon, the Halberd, which starts at Grade 3 and is the reward for players willing to clear the campaign and push into New Game Plus. Weapon traits add another layer: up to six perks per weapon let you tune for crowd clear, fortitude damage, or drop-rate farming, and the post-game Reforging system lets you strip traits from sacrificed weapons to reinforce others. That is a genuine build loop, not a cosmetic one. Morale is the strategic wrinkle that stops this from being pure spectator combat. Enemy officers in a high-morale state carry extra fortitude bars and hit measurably harder. Pushing morale down requires fulfilling Grand Tactic objectives during the large-army battles, meaning you cannot simply sprint to the enemy commander and ignore the wider battlefield. Couple that with a proper parry-and-counter requirement against officer attacks, orange-aura unblockables that demand you dodge rather than block, and a Fortitude-bar system that rewards focus-fire before opening Assault windows, and the game actively resists the mindless mashing that defined every entry before it. On the flip side, a checkpoint rewind feature means the difficulty ceiling rarely turns into a frustration wall, which is the right call for a game trying to rebuild its audience. There are real complaints to log. The levelling system, which ties progression to weapon proficiency ranks rather than a clean XP curve, can feel opaque to newcomers. Graphically the title is uneven: hero models look sharp, but environment textures occasionally look like they were borrowed from an older generation of hardware. The absence of the classic free mode that veterans used for grinding will sting longtime fans. And the NPC ally babysitting that appears in escort-adjacent objectives is genuinely annoying when ally AI decides to be heroically stupid at the wrong moment. None of those issues collapse the experience, but they are worth knowing before you commit. For strategy and sim players drawn here by the Three Kingdoms setting, Origins is more approachable than it looks. The tutorial rolls out mechanics in stages rather than front-loading everything, the difficulty options are generous, and the branching faction structure gives you a reason to read bond conversations and actually learn why Cao Cao and Liu Bei ended up on opposite sides of history. It will not replace a Paradox grand-strategy game in terms of decision depth, but as an action game that respects your intelligence and rewards mastery of its systems, it is a much stronger argument for the genre than anything the series has produced in a decade.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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