This game is set in feudal China. You play as an officer of one of three armies. You lead a small troop through your kingdom's campaign, which grows in number as you preform better.
Something which I thought was very innovative was that you lead the battle from the field. You're down in the thick of things, cutting enemy grunts up like so many cheap rolls of Christmas wrapping paper.
The characters are all slightly different. Some are faster, some are tougher, some are more powerful, some have narrow powerful attacks and broad weak attacks, some have the reverse of that, but for the most part all the characters are the same. The strategy you use in any situation is basically going to be the same no matter what character you use.
While I tend not to care about graphics and sound, I simply had to comment on them for Dynasty Warriors 2. While recent games such as FFX have far superior graphics, for its time (a year ago), The grunts, yells, and taunts of you and your enemies are crisp clear.
The game obviously gets harder as you go on. The beginning is very easy, the end can actually be quite hard. You do become more powerful with time, but your enemies get stronger much faster than you; you can, however, go into Free Mode and replay a stage to get more powerups, to help you beat the later stages.
One thing that I simply have to mention simply because of the incredible amount of coolness it contains: if your character is more powerful than an enemy, and he is riding a horse, he can plow over the enemies and knock them about 50 feet back. It's like stepping on ants. It rules.
The plot is simple, but it works; it, and thereby the locations and situations that you fight it, change based on how well you do. Always nice to see some non-linearity.
The play control in and of itself is easy to learn, though the enemy AI is kinda cheap at times(it blocks a lot).
Due to the similarity of the characters, there is very little replay value.
And now, for the edit that warranted a re-submission.
I've gotten a few e-mails about it, and apparently the storyline, and the characters' names, are based on historical fact. This war really did happen 2000 years ago, there really was a guy named Lu Bu. . .et cetera, et cetera.
Not a bad game, but you should rent it first, even if you really like this type of game.
5/10
//Paragon
