Review: Dynasty Warriors 7: Xtreme Legends

Posted by Brad T on January 20th, 2012 | 0 Comments | Tags: dynasty warriors

As a big fan of the Dynasty Warriors series, I thought I’d give Xtreme Legends a go.  This game does a great job in drawing the line between huge fan and die hard.

In today’s day and age, it’s interesting to see an expansion pack to a game be released on disc.  Most series would have gone the DLC route by now, but Not Tecmo-Koei.  DW7: XL employs an archaic disc swapping system under it’s “Remix Mode” that lets you use some of the new stuff from this game in vanilla Dynasty Warriors 7.  So you can pick right up where you left off in that in its story and conquest modes.

XL brings it’s “Legend Mode” along with a new Challenge Mode and the old gallery and encyclopedia from the previous title. Challenge Mode has different conditions such as endless waves and a bridge battle where you try and knock as many opponents off the bridge as you can until you yourself get knocked out.  Chris couldn’t survive the first wave…  These are great for honing your skills but get old kind of fast.

Legend mode is the meat of this title, with you choosing one officer and an adjutant.  After beating a battle, you begin to upgrade your home city with different people including a strategist who sells you scrolls to bump your stats up and a merchant that will travel to other provinces and bring you back expensive goods.  You can also affect the overall mood of your city to be it Friendly, Carefree, and Orderly which can buff certain aspects of the game like giving you extra scrolls.  The majority of the levels you partake in have you going through a particular character’s story which unlocks you a cutscene at the end of the level if you are controlling that particular character or if it is your adjutant.

Of the immense roster of people, it surprised me that this game only brought in three new players, all under the same faction: Pang De (who shouldn’t have been cut from the previous games anyway), joins new comers Wang Yi and Guo Jia.  Along with new characters there are new weapon types and weapons to unlock.  New weapons such as the Trishula, and Orb & Sceptor add to the already long list of weapons available.  Every character can still use any weapon, so I was able to level up Wang Yi’s different Trishula’s while also equipping my maxed out sword from the previous game to give her additional buffs.  I should mention, her aerial musou is truly devilish.  There are also two new tiers of weapons to be unlocked which are Chaos and Nightmare.  These correspond to the same difficulty levels.  Chaos is very challenging while Nightmare is exactly what the name reflects.  Reserve Nightmare difficulty to only your most maxed out characters.

Most battles reuse the same maps and songs from Vanilla DW7, so it isn’t a huge overall change.  Having said that, the maps are still awesome.  It’s also a great sight for fans of the series to see maps from earlier titles included.  I love how they employ abrupt music changes that echo the tone of the battle.  Executing a fire attack never felt so good.

I really enjoyed the Legend Mode, but there just isn’t a whole lot of new stuff here.  Dynasty Warriors 7: Xtreme Legends’ cheaper price is certainly a selling point, but like I said, this one is  only for True Warriors of the Three Kingdoms.

A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review purposes. For more info on our review policy click here. This review is for the PlayStation 3 version of the game.

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