Dynasty Warriors 4
Dynasty Warriors 4 is an action oriented role playing game with a real time combat system. Play through the Asian setting and bring glory to your army.
|
Developer: Omega Force Publisher: KOEI Release Date: March 25, 2003 Platforms: PS2, Xbox JustRPG Score: 86% Pros: +Fun combat system. +Easy to pick up controls. +Good cast of characters. Cons: -Very repetitive. -Outdated visuals. |
Overview
Dynasty Warriors 4 Overview
Dynasty Warriors 4 is an real time action role playing game set in an Asian war between rival clans. With an easy to learn combat system and clearly defined goals Dynasty Warriors 4 is a fun action game that pretty much anyone would enjoy. Although the combat system is fun and easy to pick up it gets repetitive very fast considering you are doing the same attacks over and over continuously through every game mission.
Dynasty Warriors 4 Screenshots
Dynasty Warriors 4 Featured Video
Full Review
Dynasty Warriors 4 Review
By, Jason Ferguson
Backdrop
.hack Part 1 Infection (Dot Hack) begins with a bang. Something disastrous happens to your character‘s real world friend, while innocently playing a 20 million-subscriber base, wildly popular online RPG game (MMORPG), The World. To unravel the mystery of your friend’s misfortune, you become an online, ingame rogue hacker, exploring every corner of The World, even some virus-infected ones.
The hero is armed with the special skills of Data Drain and Gate Hack, and some colorful, talented fellow adventurers to fill the two other available party slots. Different adventurers must accompany you depending on the plot‘s development. You have some control over the others in your party, including upgrading them through trades or gifts. You can play only a single class, Twin Blade. Other characters are from different classes, with varied strengths and weaknesses, from a mage type (Wavemaster) to a bully (Heavy Axeman).
Gameplay
Gameplay takes place in three principal areas – towns, fields, and dungeons. Towns house The World’s servers. There, the player can save the game, buy magic scrolls and useful and unique items, store items, buy equipment, and talk and trade with lots of other players in character online. One town has an unusual ranch to check out, a patent homage to an enduring feature of just about every Final Fantasy.
The town’s Chaos Gate provides instant teleportation to a particular wide-open Field, containing monster encounter hotspots, a mystical spring, treasure, and lots of mysterious food. You enter three distinct keywords, some known at the game‘s onset, and others learned through play. Whatever keywords are entered, the difficulty level of the destination is helpfully revealed. This prevents a low-level party from being massacred. Once the keywords are entered, you travel through the Chaos Gate. (You can enter specific keywords learned to continue the plot, do side quests, or do unlimited exploring. Or, you can instruct the Gate to enter random keywords, and take your chances. There‘s also an option to enter any keywords you wish from a word list.) Every Field houses a single Dungeon. The dungeons, where you spend much of the game fighting for your life, are not overly large in size, and always range between three and five average levels.
Many have compared Dot Hack to Phantasy Star Online Episode I and II (PSO) on the Gamecube. Let us gently discredit this. We feel Dot Hack has far better graphics than PSO. The Fields and Dungeons contain many colorful, over stylized backdrops and settings, including weather effects. Dot Hack’s monsters resemble the beautifully-drawn monsters of the later Final Fantasy’s. Dot Hack’s world is gigantic with a seeming infinite number of locations to explore. PSO’s world is relatively small, and plot is threadbare, with meaningless, though fun, side quests, which instill no enthusiasm in the player. Dot Hack’s plot is deep and complex, with each subplot advancing the story just a little bit further. (Remember though, the end of this game in no way comes close to wrapping up the story, to be completed in the three games to be released later this year.) One visual treat, however, was lifted directly from PSO – the cascading rings that accompany the teleportation of characters to and from different areas.
Combat
Dot Hack’s combat engine can best be described as modified real-time. Much like the action-RPG, Kingdom Hearts, button mashing can be effective to beat monsters. Monster combat icons appear as large yellow twirling landmarks. As you approach, the landmark dissolves, monsters come at you big-time, and, undoubtedly, players will feel a healthy adrenaline rush. Some of Dot Hack’s many monsters do not stand around waiting to be pummeled, rather some you need to catch. Dot Hack lets you turn combat almost into a turn-based affair. The player needs only to hit Triangle in the middle of battle to pause the game instantly. From there the player can give orders to the others in the party, anything from healing someone, reviving another, casting a spell, designating a target monster. Without jeopardizing your party from the hailstorm of monster blows, combat becomes a calmer, more strategic, experience. This will help the many action-challenged. Camera angles play a big role in successful combat. You must be facing a monster to do any damage. As in many games, manipulating opposing environmental elements, like fire vs. water, is a key to successful monster combat.
Dot Hack’s cyberspace setting provides a wealth of Wow-inducing outbursts. The Data Drain option in combat is a great example. When a monster’s approaches zero, the player can Data Drain to reduce a horrendous, gigantic steel robot, for example, into a sniveling, puny monster, easily defeated with a single blow. Data Drain always results in a nifty, rare item or essential Virus Cores so you can Gate Hack areas of The World now closed, but needing investigation. One bad side effect – if you defeat, a Data Drained monster, but a single experience point is earned. One REALLY bad side effect – if you Data Drain too often without giving the skill a rest, you may overload and explode. Game Over. In the case of Boss monsters, Data Drain works the same, but what remains is no sniveling puny monster, but a full-blooded slightly less tough monster. All of this makes for interesting and captivating combat, a large part of the game.
Fresh Features
Dot Hack is replete with new and interesting features that kept us riveted.
To start, the entire background and story of a real world gamer becoming a rascal hacker, penetrating deep into a virus-infected online game, is quite novel. Combine this with Dot Hack’s emulating the look and feel of an online game universe. (Message traffic on the web shows many gamers mistakenly believe Dot Hack is a real online MMORPG, along with monthly fees! No real Internet connection is required.)
Just like in the real word, Dot Hack replicates your excitement level when “New” appears before a popular forum or on your email screen. Some of the game involves receiving emails as the plot develops, as well as new, crucial information surfacing on The World’s Board. (Look out for emails challenging you to a strange game of Tag.) The online game world looks very familiar with a bunch of characters wandering around the game’s towns, with the ubiquitous balloon icons talking typical “trash” to each other, even criticizing “newbies“.
Combat grippingly called for surprisingly strategic decision-making to succeed, not related to the usual attack or defend choices. Do you go for experience and upgrade your character or try for some special equipment or a Virus Core, vital to Gate Hacking? The innovative control of other party members became second nature to us after some practice. The game rewards a player taking chances, like entering a Field or Dungeon rated 5 levels above the player’s current level. On the other hand, the game scoffed at players entering areas much lower rated the their current level, by awarding negligible experience points for victory.
Dot Hack takes progress reports to a new level, by slowly unlocking books that contain much in the way of statistics and information. There’s even a monster compendium with tips for defeating them.
Some might complain about the minimal “Save Game” ability, but we thrived on it. You explore a very hostile cyberspace environment without the facility to save. Only in a server-hosting town is saving possible at the local Recorder. We may be a solitary voice in the Wilderness, but we like this throwback to the good old RPG days. Those of you old enough to remember the Wizardry series, may recall those fingernail-biting multi-combat treks back to the Castle just to save the game. In case you’re really stuck deep in a dungeon, a common item will teleport you to the outdoor field, from where you can simply gate back to town from the command menu.
Many pieces of equipment come with distinctive powerful attack, healing, and status skills, essential to combat dominance. The player must tradeoff whether to equip something that will raise defense or offense or something less vigorous that lets you use a powerful skill. Trading is the most successful way to upgrade equipment.
In a first, Dot Hack comes with a 45 minute anime video. This gives some great background on what’s going on in The World, as well as provide clues for completing the game. In a nice twist, voiceovers for game speech can be set for Japanese or English presentation. Listening to the authentic Japanese voices really keeps you glued to the game.
Though some may scoff at what follows as meaningless, we liked the game’s unlocking of some nifty new “toys” to like, some only available when the game is cleared. You can unlock many different background music play lists. Tired of creepy tunes, just switch to something more upbeat, or futuristic. Just like real world gamers, who constantly change their desktop wallpaper, new and different wallpapers are unlocked along the way. Some are concept art of characters, while others are full blown anime renditions of the characters. This makes for great fun, and seems to pump additional energy into the game. As you progress over a dozen special cut scenes or movies will become viewable after defeating the game.
Though Dot Hack’s extras and new wrinkles enhance the RPG game experience, much of the gameplay will ring true to those who enjoy RPG‘s. Expect plenty of exploration in a huge 3D world, frequent monster combat, tons of treasure to earn and discover, upgrading your character’s weapons and armor, and needing to level before tackling pivotal story dungeons. The status screens for the characters and all equipment are well laid out and easy to grasp.
Time for Completion
Game length in hours always concerns many purchasers. A short RPG normally takes a lot of flack, and many online are asking about Dot Hack‘s time for completion. (Some have questioned whether Bandai should have released a single 80 hour game for $50, rather than four 20-hour games for $200 for a single story. This matter is beyond the scope of this review, but our high opinion of this game as a standalone is obvious.) Our experience, playing the plot without doing side quests or extra exploration, is in the 12 to 15-hour range. Players side-questing and extensively exploring, aside from the main plot, can expect to spend 25 hours to complete the game. You can even continue to advance your character, after game completion, to get a jump start on Part 2 due in May. In the next game, your character can be imported from Part 1.
Furthermore, imagine trying to explore every nook and cranny of the fields and dungeons accessible by a large number of 3-word combinations. Doing that would put the game in the 50-hour range, if not more. However, at a certain point, new items dry up, and a single experience point is earned for any defeated monster, no matter how tough.
Shortcomings
While, as is evident above, there is much to recommend in Dot Hack, certain concerns to varying degrees deserve mention.
From the “Why oh why did they leave this out?“ File. Pregame game board traffic and information about the Japanese version released months ago had many salivating for replaying the game in “parody” mode. This mode apparently converted all Dot Hack’s game world characters into satirical comedians. Sorry to say, this highly-anticipated feature is missing from the version released here.
The game requires massive amounts of button pressing. Every item or treasure uncovered from combat victories or exploration (opening chests, searching expired adventure remains, collecting food for Grunty’s, as examples) must be confirmed with a button press. When there could be 50-100 such occurrences in a single dungeon or field, over the course of the game, finger cramps seem inevitable. Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance also required lots of bashing for buried treasure and chests, but the items literally flew into your inventory, a much better way to handle this.
The manual is woefully terse and lacking in some crucial information and guidance. While the ingame tutorials fill in many of the gaps, one extremely important gameplay feature is missing from both the manual and tutorials – instructions on control your characters directly during combat.
Final Word
We got a kick out of Dot Hack. The feeling of “just one more dungeon” dominated our lives for the 3 days to completion. The engaging environment held our attention without much effort. The strategic nature of combat, plus the convoluted plot kept us going for hours on end. The constant unlocking of both frivolous and important gameplay features created a “what’s next” anticipation. Now, if I could only read Japanese better, Dot Hack Part 2 is already out in Japan!
Final Grade: B
| The fourth installment in KOEI’s popular Dynasty Warriors series saw a release this March, and fans of the series will likely find themselves pleased. With all the fun of the previous Dynastygames and some cool new additions, Dynasty Warriors 4 makes for an enjoyable, action packed experience! |
 |
Like the other Dynasty games, Dynasty Warriors 4takes place during the Romance of the Three Kingdoms era in China. This is a period of great unrest, and war is breaking out all over China. You can play as one of three dynasties (the Wu, the Shu or the Wei) all of which have their own agenda, with different characters. It’s a story that’s basically been told many times before, but it’s still interesting. Besides, the real draw to a game like this isn’t the story… it’s the action. |
| There are a lot of different characters to play as, and you’ll unlock more as you progress throughout the game, each with distinct moves. Each dynasty has different missions to battle your way through with new objectives and enemies. |
|
Gameplay is pretty straightforward, and pretty much the same as previous games in the series. You’re equipped with a charge attack, a basic attack which allows you to do combos, and you can jump. You can also perform a special attack once your special meter fills up, and can fire arrows as you pick them up throughout the game. As you kill enemy officers your weapons will level up, and on occasion you’ll find weapon upgrades and equipment spread throughout the battlefield. As you level up your sword will gain in strength and you’ll be able to do more combos. You’ll also be able to equip more items to yourself and will be able to recruit more bodyguards. |
 |
| You’ll sometimes find yourself hugely outnumbered in battle, so your bodyguards can be pretty key. On top of that, the enemy AI is actually pretty good, and because of this you’ll see a lot of variation throughout the battle and you’ll rarely see the exact same events unfold twice. When all else fails and the enemy starts to overwhelm you, you can jump on a horse and bash into crowds of enemy soldiers and smack them down with your sword. Yes, it’s actually as fun as it sounds. |
 |
A new feature to the 4th installment of the series is the new duel mode. When you come across an enemy officer who is a foe of the character you’re controlling you will have the option to fight that officer in a 1 vs. 1 fight. This gives fans a taste of something new when they’re tired of fighting on the battlefield, but for those who’d rather continue their 40 on 1 fight, the duels are totally optional. |
| Probably the biggest downfall to the game would be the simple fact that, admit it… hack and slash gets dull. On top of that, most aspects of this installment aren’t exactly groundbreaking over previous installments of the series, although many are noticeably improved. Fortunately, the RPG-like upgrading was done very well, and gives the game a dimension outside of “mindless hacking”. On top of that there’s the option for multiplayer where you and a buddy can team up on the battlefield and fight off entire armies of enemies. It’s a lot of fun, and will make things a lot more interesting without losing much of the challenge. Another thingDynasty Warriors has going for it is the amount of strategy involved. Although the game is certainly a hack and slash, you have to coordinate a massive battle, and there’s a lot more to worry about than simply the 30 guys currently fighting you. You’ll need to protect certain allies or kill certain enemy officers while killing off as many baddies as you can and keeping your allies from getting overrun. |
|
The game’s graphics are nice, with beautiful character animations, detailed backgrounds and smooth cinematics. The immense size of the battlefield and the enormous amount of characters on the screen will amaze those who have never played a game in the series, although at times the framerate will drop significantly in the highly populated areas. Overall though, the framerate remains consistently good throughout the game. |
 |
| The music is a crazy collection of heavy metal stuff. It may not seem like heavy metal music would be very fitting for a game that takes place in ancient China, but somehow it works and the game has an enjoyable and addictive soundtrack. The sound effects are also of good quality, with explosions and clanging swords being heard all over the battlefield. On the negative side, the voice acting is awful. Well, awful may be an understatement. Just ignore the guys when they start talking because you’ll lose respect for the game. Not a single character in the game even pulls off a decent Chinese accent, and the voices are a huge disappointment. |
 |
All in all, Dynasty Warriors 4 promises a solid gaming experience for fans. The gameplay can get a bit repetitive, but the game’s other strengths more than make up for this and will have you coming back for second and third playthroughs. |
| Final Grade: 86% |
Screenshots
Dynasty Warriors 4 Screenshots
Videos
Dynasty Warriors 4 Videos
Dynasty Warriors 4 Trailer