Unbored

Regular Unbored readers will know about Gundam already, with its success it was inevitable that it to be combined with something like Dynasty Warriors.

Dynasty Warriors is a series of games set in the three kingdoms era of China where you controlled a warrior running around a battlefield hacking through soldiers and taking over areas of the map one after the other at the head of a massive army. Someone in power asked if they could do the same thing with giant robots, so Bandai and Capcom teamed up to put the entire mythology into videogame form!

I’ve never played the Dynasty Warriors games before, but I assume a lot of neat features have been added to the games for this new instalment, unless a large number of battles in ancient China were fought in space.

In this game you run around as one of the many robots from the series cutting down enemy robots until your side has captured one of the territories on the map, once that is done you awkwardly fly over towards the next enemy territory and capture that as well. Lather, rinse and repeat until the level is won. The unfortunate thing about this game is that unless the enemies have names floating above their life bars, they will sit there like cattle that seem to have accepted their fate of you hacking them to pieces. I understand that for the game to have so many enemies on screen at once they would have to cut down a little on the AI, but when you notice that a peon from your side and a peon from the enemy side are standing right next to each other blankly staring at you instead of doing anything about the other’s presence, it gives the feeling that you are the only one here on the battlefield surrounded by several thousand cardboard cut-outs with glowy bits on them.

The game becomes a lot more interesting when you have a friend to play co-op with. Do you split up and take separate sides of the battlefield in a pincer motion? or do you stick together and use the fact your special attacks are amplified by each others presence when used together? This gives you an immense feeling of camaraderie with your friend as you steamroll through the enemy lines and many times have I had to make the mad dash from one side of the battlefield to the other because named enemies have ganged up on my friend, beating him to a pulp from several sides. You can play through all the main campaign modes like this, levelling up two characters for the price of one and making the game easier and more enjoyable for everyone involved.

The campaign modes come in two forms, Official mode and Original mode. Official mode follows the stories and battles of individual characters in their original series, cutting them down to awkward dialogue on a blank screen and terrible voice acting in the middle of play. If you haven’t seen any of the original series then you won’t get anything like the same effect or even any real idea what is actually going on because almost all the original dialogue and character development has been removed in favour of More Fighting. This is not such a bad idea in itself since it’s just cutting to the chase as quickly as possible, but don’t expect the game to act as a crash course to the franchise for the unitiated, just kill stuff until you’re bored and then watch whichever series you were playing through afterwards.

Original mode is a new storyline combining characters from all the separate series into one sequence of epic battles through the use of time travel and stuff since many of the series are set decades apart from each other. The story is pretty much an excuse to have unusual combinations of people fighting others, like mortal enemies Amuro and Char battling together against… a Gundam robot wearing samurai armour! It sounds so stupid as I write it down, but seeing it on screen made my jaw drop and a grin to play across my face… It plays so perfectly with the whole concept of the campaign, who cares about logic any more? You were skipping most of the cutscenes anyway, so here’s an excuse to start watching them again. Go beyond the impossible and kick reason to the curb, it’s not the Gundam way but here it suffices.

In single player the controls are awkward and ungainly, not in the hulking death machine kind of way, but in the badly designed game kind of way. The game also doesn’t really give the feeling of actually driving a giant robot since all the levels are inexplicably big enough to hold battles with hundreds of these machines with nary a normal tank, helicopter or jet fighter in sight. It feels more like Dynasty Warriors than Gundam, I have yet to play the sequel and I hope it fares better, but I won’t hold my breath.

That said, for all its flaws like the badly presented storylines, the cheap feeling controls and the terrible AI. It absolutely triumphs in the form of an excellent Co-Op mode that compensates for all of that. Play it with a friend or you won’t really be playing it at all.