Vortex Gaming

From the moment I bought my first PS2 in middle school and the game shop owner in Dongincheon gave me 'Dynasty Warriors 2: Xtreme Legends' saying "Try this," I was forcibly made a fan of the Musou series. Now that there are so many action games, it's a bit faded, but back then, there weren't many games that were so refreshing. When Lu Bu shouted, everyone flew away, and there was nothing like it.

As new series came out, I was curious and played them, and as I got older, I played them out of nostalgia or loyalty, so I ended up playing almost the entire series except for a few oddballs like 'Warriors: Legends of Troy' that I just couldn't get into. I can't deny that the closer I got to the recent works, the more messed up it felt, but I still played while complaining. Because it's Musou. I even watched the movie. The sight of the locusts at Hulao Gate turning into grasshoppers because of the wind brought tears to my eyes in many ways.

As 2023 came, a 20-year-old Musou demon settled in one corner of my brain. I'm a common gaming demon who curses every time a series comes out, but still pays for it, and has a stricter, more solemn, and serious perspective than anyone else, but rationalizes even that as a way of expressing love.

One series that I didn't bother with was the 'mobile' version of Dynasty Warriors. I thought that the combat operation itself, which is the most important value of Dynasty Warriors, which is to fight against a large number of enemies, was too far from the mobile device. From the beginning, it seemed too obvious that it wouldn't fit, so I thought it would be better to avoid it than to touch it and hurt my heart. Of course, that was the plan for the future. Until I saw the new teaser video for Dynasty Warriors M.

The 8th installment as it is, is this possible...?

Following 'Dynasty Warriors: Unleashed', which was previously serviced, Nexon has brought in the second mobile version of Dynasty Warriors. In fact, I heard about this project a little earlier, but I wasn't very interested in it, and the reason is as follows.

The Dynasty Warriors series has two values. One is the game's near-fundamental nature of large-scale, many-on-one combat action, and the other is the character making that visualizes the characters in Romance of the Three Kingdoms in a modern taste. The influence of the characters in Dynasty Warriors is so great that it is difficult to compare with any other game. The coloring of Wei, Shu, and Wu being divided into blue, green, and red is also due to this influence.

In Yokoyama Mitsuteru's 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms', which was published in black and white and was difficult to distinguish between allies and enemies, the shapes of the helmets were slightly different to distinguish between Wei, Shu, and Wu, but Dynasty Warriors simply matched the colors, and this has become a common image used in today's Three Kingdoms-related media.

And, most of the Dynasty Warriors games released on mobile focused on the second of these two values. The character itself. It means that most of the works relied on Koei Tecmo's character making ability, with the Qiao sisters appearing as fan girls, Zhou Tai as a cleft-lipped samurai, and Zhang Liao with a catfish mustache.

However, the newly released 'Dynasty Warriors M' has implemented the original as faithfully as possible. Just looking at the direct combat video in the second half of the PV video, it looks plausible. It's a pity that the original is the beloved and hated 8th installment, but Dynasty Warriors 8 is in some ways the most suitable for the mobile environment. Thanks to the state combo system, where the battle continues no matter what you press, you can fight by just pressing anything.

And this 'original implementation' is not just about combat. From the intro video to the cutscenes in the story mode, and even the lines, they're just the same. Should it be called a position somewhere in the middle of a port and a spin-off?

So, is the most important 'combat' the same? Of course, it's not. Since the system is the same, it's internally the same except for the visual downgrade, but the controls can't be the same. However, this is when talking about a 1:1 comparison, and considering the physical limitations of mobile, it must be admitted that it has been ported very well. The graphics are a bit bland, but not to the point of being a problem, and the state combos and splendor unique to the 8th installment are still alive.

Among them, the most important point is that the 'exhilaration' unique to Dynasty Warriors is alive. Even if the Dynasty Warriors series is the same work, if the hardware performance is low, the number of characters or enemy soldiers that appear at the same time is reduced, so the level of exhilaration varies depending on the hardware performance. Dynasty Warriors M has given up on many parts, but this part is still preserved. It is common for dozens of enemies to appear, and there are often three or more enemy generals on one screen.

However, things get a little different when 'mobile-like parts' start to intervene. In the original, it was possible to clear by gritting your teeth with control even if the character's growth was not enough, but this game shows 'super armor' very frequently in order not to give room for that. It means that the character's hard spec has a greater impact than in the original.

Characters with different grades but still charming

'Dynasty Warriors M' follows the grammar of a typical mobile game. The main contents are three. The story mode that follows the flow of the 8th installment, the 'World Map' composed of stage forms, and the 'Musou Road' that includes daily dungeons (I don't know why it's a dungeon, but the actual notation is dungeon) and the Tower of Infinity.

Of course, all of these contents will face hurdles as you progress. And in order to overcome this 'hurdle', you need either proper billing or enough time. It's a typical mobile game structure where you build buildings at the base, raise your specs through research, or collect resources by clearing daily content, and then move on to the next stage when your combat power increases.

What's important in this process is whether the character you're going to spend money or time on to raise is charming enough to be attached to. Of course, the character making ability of the Dynasty Warriors series has already been proven. And in order to further strengthen this, the developers ruthlessly abandoned characters that looked unpopular.

When I first rolled 10 gacha pulls, I was reasonably satisfied to see 'Zhuge Dan' as the first character. He wasn't much in every series he appeared in, but he was a dog of the Zhuge family and had some character. The problem is that the R grade that Zhuge Dan belongs to can no longer be upgraded. You can't raise it even if you collect it, so you have no choice but to 'Haya (disassemble)', but the developers knew this would happen, so they made it possible to automatically Haya the R grade. So the many Liu Shan, Zhuge Dan, and Taishi Ci that I drew left only resources and scattered into history.

The unlucky Zhuge Dan, Liu Shan, Taishi Ci, Xun Yu, etc. will face the Haya ending, but thanks to them firmly laying the foundation, characters of SR grade and above can be upgraded without a ceiling. The SR grade is SR+ when two cards are collected, and SR+ is SSR when two cards are collected. Of course, there are also characters that are assigned to the SSR grade from the beginning, and these are the characters that Dynasty Warriors fans have all loved at least once, and are usually the characters that decorated the title shot.

And, the satisfaction of drawing an SSR grade character is high enough. I feel sorry for Zhuge Dan, but I honestly don't want to play as Zhuge Dan either. I've never liked using a fan or a three-section staff. In comparison, Zhuge Liang is an angel. How can I stand Zhuge Liang, who used to be called 'Gundam' more often than 'Kongming' because he used all kinds of magic such as wind and lightning and eventually shot laser cannons?

In other words, the character of Dynasty Warriors is still alive and well. If it suddenly came out as an SD character or the texture was broken beyond recognition, I would wonder what this is, but the image on the card is no different from the 8th installment, and the in-game graphics are not much different from the original. The graphics of the original are not that great, so there is some benefit, but it shows the visuals of playing at the lowest option in the original. That's something.

In summary, 'Dynasty Warriors M' is the most similar to the original series among the Dynasty Warriors series released on mobile so far. Of course, you have to keep in mind that it is a relative evaluation with other mobile titles, and it is not a title that has broken the limitations of mobile itself, but in some ways it is just another mobile game, but even so, it has preserved the 'exhilarating action' unique to Dynasty Warriors and at the same time maintained the character of the Dynasty Warriors series, which is the biggest weapon, so I think it deserves a good score.

Therefore, if you don't have a strong aversion to the mobile platform and the taste unique to mobile games, I think it could be a pretty good mobile Dynasty Warriors for series fans. Even I, a demon who didn't even pay attention to it in the first place because of the disharmony between the 'Dynasty Warriors' IP and mobile, was able to play with a certain degree of satisfaction, although not 100%. Of course, Zhuge Dan and Liu Shan fans are exceptions. Oh, and Taishi Ci one-pickers...

웹진 인벤정재훈 기자
2023-11-24