The demo for Dynasty Warriors: Origins is now available, and I was able to get my hands on it! I hold the Dynasty Warriors series close to my heart, and getting a new entry always feels like Christmas time for a kid waiting to see what Santa left them. With that, let’s get straight to the Dynasty Warriors: Origins demo impressions.
Si Shui Gate
The demo takes you to a cinematic with Yuan Shao gathering volunteers to take down Shi Shui Gate. They need to get through Si Shui Gate to reach Dong Zhuo who has taken over the capital. Cao Cao then comes to your character, the Wanderer, and asks you to do a special task to lead a group of soldiers not currently serving a kingdom’s Lord. The models and the character designs are all impressive in these cinematics. The voice acting looks like they have a mix of the overdramatic voice acting of Dynasty Warriors 6, and the grounded one of Dynasty Warriors 9, It’s A good approach honestly. Dynasty Warriors 9 felt so monotone and boring. With the slight addition to make it more dramatic, the voice acting felt a little cheesy but fun.
After the cinematic is done, you get into a war council conversation that explains the plan to siege and overcome Si Shui Gate. There is also a fun bit of riffing that Sun Jian and Yuan Shao do to Yuan Shu. If you are someone who knows what happens on the map, it makes sense why that turns Yuan Shu into an angry spiteful leader. He is notorious during this battle for not giving food and resources to Sun Jian. This little interaction just makes that part of the battle make more sense.
The war council ends and you are taken to the menu. It lets you change companions and look at the objectives of the map. We get maps back! Goodbye open world nothingness, hello complex and large maps! Your companion kind of serves the role bodyguards did in the older games. They will follow you and aid you in battle. If their Musou gauge is full at the same time as yours is, you can join together to do a massive extreme Musou attack that combines your attacks.
Combat is interesting in Dynasty Warriors: Origins. The old game system of using square as a normal attack returns, as well as combos with triangle for certain moves.Holding R1 on the controller to brings up a skill plate that houses four skills with your character. You can use your action gauge to activate these skills; It can be in a combo, or you can use it in response to an enemy’s combo to stun or hurt them.
Instantly my favorite thing about entering the giant armies of Si Shui Gate is the aggression of the enemies as they charge towards you and all your allies. This is an actual war of two armies going at it. The more recent titles in the series had a problem where enemies didn’t care about attacking the enemy force unless there was a captain they could follow nearby. Otherwise, the giant army of forces was just extra numbers to your K.O. count. This also makes it tough though as enemies will chase you down. If you have no allies nearby then they will just keep going after you since they can see you unless you hide in an ally base. I never worried about getting chased down by normal soldiers but man was it scary trying to run away from a giant clash of forces with multiple enemy generals attacking everything.
You get a separate skill plate on the left side of the screen known as the Eyes of the Sacred Bird. The three you get access to in this demo are Volley, Charge, and Encircle. Volley has your troops pull out bows and shoot arrows constantly over the small enclosed area you choose. Charge has your troops pull out their spears and do a big run through the area you point to and does a decent amount of damage. Encircle is ordering your soldiers to surround an area and attack anyone inside.
When your army engages with an enemy army sometimes the enemy general will come out to meet you and ask for a duel. You can accept or just continue attacking the enemy army as normal. I loved the duel mechanic though because they added mechanics that feel good during 1 vs.1 one fights. Both armies encircle the general and you fighting and you can dodge, guard, and parry their attacks. Getting a parry and turning that into a combo that then uses triangle to launch them into the air felt so satisfying. You can then attack them in the air and send the general cascading back into the circle with a lot of the morale gauge lost. The goal of 1 vs.1 combat is to get the morale gauge fully blue so you defeat the general completely. If it is fully blue before the timer ends, your character instantly defeats the enemy general, and the enemy army loses all morale and It becomes super easy to defeat all the soldiers without morale.
Once I defeated Li Jue and won the map, the victory screen played out, but was then interrupted by the Si Shui Gate opening and a giant red horse jumping out onto the battlefield. Lu Bu was now here and wanted a piece of the action. I thought I had the edge on him since Lu Bu didn’t come with any soldiers to aid him. I was foolish because Lu Bu turned giant with one of his abilities and started demolishing my troops and nearby soldiers. Even my companion got hit by one of his abilities and was taken off the battlefield.
I first tried to guard but he broke it almost immediately. Dodging became key as I swerved under his giant Halberd and did a few attacks to his back. It did stun him but his guard gauge was ridiculously large. Even doing a musou attack while locked onto him proved fruitless as it didn’t do as much damage as I would have hoped. I died a ton of times during this encounter but luckily I was able to put myself to a different time on the map to re-engage him almost immediately.
After about 50 minutes of trying to beat him and eventually coming up with the strategy of running to the allied base to get more soldiers so I could use my Eyes of the Sacred Bird abilities with my normal skills, I beat him. It was so satisfying! I am so excited for this game and it is already one of the most anticipated titles for me coming out in 2025!
Dynasty Warriors is so back!
I played the demo on PS5 but it is available on Steam and Xbox Series S|X as well. It ran nearly flawlessly at 60 FPS on performance mode. There were some dips during large army clashes but for the most part, it was a locked 60 FPS.
Dynasty Warriors Origins releases January 17th, 2025 to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X, and PC.
