The Dynasty Warriors series has been Koei’s most successful video game outing, with each of its six major instalments selling over a million units. In spite of its success and dedicated fan base, Dynasty Warriors always gets a stiff critical reception; some belittle the game’s straightforward action gameplay, while others berate how little the game’s scenarios have changed over time. It’s fair enough – we’ve fought The Yellow Turban Rebellion more times than I care to elaborate on. Koei seems to be listening now, as they’ve tried something quite different with Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce for the PSP.

Dynasty Warriors games always take place in the same historical period – the Three Kingdoms era. After the fall of the Han dynasty, the factions of Wei, Shu and Wu fought for the right of succession (at least until the Jin came and crushed the lot of them). There’s a lot of media dedicated to dramatising this era – a long running live action TV show, various animes and countless video games, not just by Koei, but also by Sega and Capcom. The games always start out at the end of the Han dynasty, with the three kingdoms still united, fighting against the Yellow Turban Rebellion.


Most mainline Dynasty Warriors games have a fairly straightforward campaign; one picks a warrior from the factions of Wei, Shu and Wu (or others, after being unlocked) and are set loose on a battlefield to cut down hundreds of warriors in the search for the leader. The other playable warriors on the opposing factions take the role of generals on the field, leading to some fierce encounters (just ask any fan what they think of Lu Bu). As the series moved on, Koei started to pump the game up with RPG-lite levelling systems, a deeper loot system and cooperative play. I’d argue that they got a little too change happy in Dynasty Warriors 6, giving characters completely different weapons, redefining their attributes from scatch and giving generals some crazy abilities.

Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce is based on the core systems of Dynasty Warriors 6, so if you’ve played that, you’ll know what to expect with regards to the main gameplay. However, Strikeforce takes a wild departure from the mainline Dynasty Warriors games when it comes to just about everything else. Players select a general – all of the usual suspects are there like Xiahou Dun, Dian Wei, Liu Bei, Sun Jian, Zhang Fei and about 20 others – and are dumped in a small fort that serves as their base camp. It’s from here that you launch your missions – Strikeforce follows a mission-based system much like the popular Monster Hunter series in Japan, rather than the simpler series of big battles in its predecessors. You can also upgrade your weapons, abilities and purchase armour and other modifiers at the base camp. The camp can also be upgraded as you grow stronger.

A few key changes have been made to the Dynasty Warriors formula to make Strikeforce seem fresher, and make it a bit more suitable to a portable machine. Rather than missions taking place on one giant battlefield, battles are now split into separate areas with minimal loading during transition. This has let them combat some of the deficiencies of early portable outings, putting it on more even footing when compared to the main console games. Your general now has access to a sub-weapon which can be upgraded and changed around like the primary weapon. Secondary weapons aren’t character specific either, so you’re not limited in your selection.


The most drastic change in Strikeforce is the Musou system. In all previous games, players simply built up the meter and unleashed a huge flurry of attacks to wipe out surrounding enemies. In place of the Musou system is the Fury system which works in a similar way, in that players build up their meter through fighting enemies. The key difference is that when activated, Fury completely changes the appearance of your character and drastically improves their abilities. Glowing armour, funky anime-inspired hairstyles and giant wings are par for the course. When you get sick of looking awesome, you can fire off your Rage attack, which works much like the old Musou attack, with the rapid, powerful hits and massive kill counts and such.

The standard combat style has been switched up a bit – the charge attack is mostly independent of your general’s standard attacks. This makes it more useful as an option to clear out surrounding soldiers, but limits the number of combos available. The AI has been greatly improved as most enemy soldiers no longer sit around waiting to die – they will attack you all at once. Useful AI makes Strikeforce a lot harder than previous games – players will need to spend a lot of time building their character up and getting decent equipment. That can be a little dull when playing alone, but fortunately, Koei has focused a lot of its attention on the multiplayer side of Strikeforce.

Multiplayer in Strikeforce is quite obviously inspired by Monster Hunter. It’s virtually indistinguishable from the single player experience – you can even carry your character between the two games. Given the high difficulty of the single player experience, playing with other people is virtually necessary – Koei even positioned this as a multiplayer focused entry of the series. Nothing really changes when playing with friends, but working together allows you to accomplish a whole lot more without overextending yourself, and is just more entertaining. The action can get a bit clogged with four players running around, though.


While Koei seems to have been looking for ways to break new ground for the Dynasty Warriors series with Strikeforce, they don’t go far enough. Players still need to have a strong love of the grind and a lot of cheap difficulty tolerance to get the most out of the game – novices and players looking for a bit of variety are going to hate the game. Strikeforce’s control scheme is quite lacking – the lock-on camera control is annoying, too many basic actions require multiple button combinations to work, and some actions just don’t register on occasion. The game has quite lengthy load times too – fortunately, Koei included the option for players to install a portion of the game onto their memory card to speed these up. It takes about 300mb, so owners of early PSP models may be out of luck.

The Dynasty Warriors games have never been recognised for their visual prowess, and Strikeforce is no different. While it looks more in line with Dynasty Warriors 6, obvious concessions have been made to cut it down to size for the PSP. The art style is still strong, perhaps even more enhanced now with the Rage mode characters. Technically, it’s still lacking; the muddy textures, identical looking enemies, a chuggy framerate, and that cat-strangling guitar music won’t affect fans of the series, but newcomers will be turned off by them. It is worth noting, however, that the game worlds are no longer completely flat, so Koei has made some progress after all.

While Koei has made significant changes to the series formula with Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce, few players will really appreciate them. If you get a few likeminded friends together, don’t mind heavy repetition, a high level of challenge and a lot of grinding, then there’s a lot to enjoy here. It feels like Koei is onto a good idea with this direction for the Dynasty Warriors series – they just need to go a bit further in the future.