Was Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires Worth It?

It’s yet another musou spinoff game from Koei. Ancient China is yours for the taking, if you’re intrepid enough. Was Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires worth it?

Background

Koei has been cranking out these games for over twenty years, and at this point we’ve learned a couple things. First, all the work goes into the spinoff games, and second, the mainline franchises are dead horses.

You might think “surely at this point they’ve perfected the formula and each title is just a little bit better, right?” and you would be wrong. Koei nearly killed the franchise outright with Dynasty Warriors 9, which was reviled by both fans and critics. I personally passed on 9 because the prerelease buzz was so bad, and it was the first Warriors title I had passed on in nearly a decade.

The last Empires title released in 2015, so there was definitely a demand for another one, especially since Koei has essentially abandoned any pretense of quality for the main games.

Keep in mind that this game has Dynasty Warriors 9’s movesets. I prefer the older movesets, but your mileage may vary. As far as movesets go, it’s not terrible compared to other changes they’ve implemented (renbu system in DW6, for example).

What does Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires do well?

I’ll give it this: it hasn’t crashed, which is more than I can say for a lot of Switch games.

Running a country is busy work

You have to hustle in this title. If you putz around and waste time, you’re going to find yourself on the backfoot, as you’ll constantly be fending off invasions. Focusing on increasing my harvest yield early on bit me in the ass when an internal rebellion took over the same provinces that I had built up. Make sure you quell those internal rebellions before the defense level reached zero, or they’ll be taken over.

Huge cast

DW9E has a big cast of unique characters (as opposed to generic officers). I haven’t tried all 94 uniques, so I can’t tell you how many have duplicate movesets. Variety is nice, but it takes time and exposure for you to even remember new characters, much less want to play as them. Unfortunately, older characters have much more distinct designs and themes, while newer ones feel like they were ripped from the latest flavor of the month anime.

Aggressive Enemies

In previous Empires titles, you could absolutely style on the AI. Not the case in this game – the AI is aggressive and coordinated. If you try to go into a battle where you are outnumbered by the enemy, you’re going to have an extremely bad time. The fact that the AI actually takes initiative and methodically goes for objectives was a bit of a shock for me, but I welcome it. The game is also less forgiving when it comes to invasions. It seemed like I was constantly having to fend off upstarts, sometimes from within my own kingdom. You best believe I was executing anyone who didn’t join me; I wasn’t taking the chance of them trying to start a vagabond rebellion.

Winning friends and influencing people

The game really put effort into developing a “personality” for your ruler. There’s a lot of depth to how you shape your ruler through your actions. It’s interesting to see how your personal administrative style is represented through titles and accolades within the game.

What could Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires do better?

I hope you brought supplies for this campaign, because we’re about to go to war.

Artificial Unintelligence

I mentioned earlier that the enemy AI is on you like white on rice. Contrast your friendly officers, who can’t path find to the inside of the enemy castle.

Actions

I wasn’t a big fan of the stroll function. When the choice is “take Xiahou Dun out on a date” vs “prepare for next month’s invasion” you can guess which one I prioritized. I have to waste my entire turn wooing a single officer and it isn’t guaranteed?

Map

Gone are the different types of maps. Every map has different terrain, but it boils down to the same strategy each time. If you’re invading, grab the weapon bases so you can breach the castle. If you’re defending, capture the weapon bases.

Visuals

I’m not a graphics person. I reviewed a pixel based game recently (Vampire Survivors), and I play mostly on the Switch. However, this game is hard to look at. I initially tried to play on the Switch Lite and had trouble making out what was happening. After playing in docked mode, I realized it was just hard to tell everything apart. The game looks awful. How did they release this after Samurai Warriors 5?

Create a Warrior Woes

One of the draws of these titles is creating your own character or team to unify the land. The CAW function is barebones in this title. The limited selection of customization pieces that are in the game aren’t great.

Is the Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires DLC worth it?

We know that Koei loves to flood their games with recycled assets for DLC. Don’t buy the DLC for this game.

Closed World

Dynasty Warriors 9’s whole shtick was the open world, which is absent from this title. They could have at least gone with a feature like the map in Age of Calamity. It’s odd that there are so few activities.

Was Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires fun?

I didn’t enjoy it. If anything, it’s sad to see the franchise in its death throes like this.

Was Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires worth it?

Definitely not. Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires is not worth it. Stay clear of this title. Of all the Empires spinoffs, this is definitely the weakest. Koei can make great games; Persona 5 Strikers was fantastic. Even Samurai Warriors 5 wasn’t bad, just incomplete. Just about any other musou game is better than this (except vanilla DW9).

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