## 2025-01-17 I have always preferred the **Dynasty Warrior** spin-offs to the mainline games - the **Hyrule Warriors** games have enough content in them to keep you going for literal months, the **Fire Emblem Warriors** games were a great blend of Musou and **Fire Emblem** gimmicks, and I will forever stand by my belief that **Persona 5 Strikers** is [[An Ode to Friendship - Persona 5 Strikers|vastly superior to Persona 5 proper]]. But I can't remember a **Dynasty Warriors** title I've finished since the PS2 era. All of this to say, **Dynasty Warriors Origins** will probably break that streak. I'm only a few missions in, but it's an absolute blast. It runs near flawlessly - a big deal if you're familiar with Koei Tecmo's PC ports. And it feels like it has managed to capture of vision of **Dynasty Warriors** ever since it came out back in the day, with an actual metric shit-ton of enemy units on screen at all times for you to blast through with cool combos while a guitar shreds in the background. **Dynasty Warrior** games have always had good mouthfeel, but not much sauce[^1]. **Origins** bucks that trend. There's a lot of depth that previous entries never had, with your character able to parry and use skills that expend resources. These sound like average Action-RPG things - and they are - but in a game like **Dynasty Warriors** which has always been a bit "turn your brain off," it's pretty much revalatory. Only two things bugging me at the moment. The first is that I find the cutscenes a little long and dry, but I've also experienced the Yellow Turban Rebellion about 8 million times in games, so maybe that'll change with time. The more annoying aspect is the MC - he's a silent protagonist with amnesia and the game puts a little too much focus on him. I feel like, if you're going to make a character like this, the least you could do is let me customize him or make him a girl. This is a **Nioh** situation all over again, which is wild, because I feel like the Kou Shibusawa-side of Koei Tecmo did learn there lesson after that game! Otherwise though, I'm locked in. [^1]: I'm not explaining what this means because it's hilarious out of context, but it reminded me to make a page about it later, so I'll do that