Dynasty Warriors: Origins is a break from tradition for the long-running Musou series. Rather than an array of playable characters whose stories all combine to paint the full picture of warring Chinese kingdoms, you play as just one character – the Wanderer. He has no memory at the start of the game, and therefore no loyalty, letting you forge your own path. But what he does have is a very big arsenal.
The variety comes less from the different stories you leap into and more from your own player choice. While previous games let you experiment with different styles by inhabiting different characters, the Wanderer can make his own choices. Narratively, this means whether to side with Cao Cao, Liu Bei, or Sun Jian. Mechanically, it means picking your weapons and evolving them as you go. But you don’t quite get everything on the menu.
Your Arsenal Grows Throughout Dynasty Warriors: Origins
Things start simply enough – you have a sword. Pretty soon you unlock a spear, which is like a small sword on the end of a long stick. I assume you’re familiar. Then things start to get interesting. You fight enemies who wield bladed discs they throw around the battlefield like deadly frisbees, and soon enough, you can use these weapons (known in the game as ‘wheels’) for yourself. Progressing through the chapters, it’s a similar story for gauntlets, pikes, staffs, podaos, lances, and crescent blades, which are another version of a small sword at the end of a long stick.
These are all pretty cool, each feeling as if they had different weights and none a chore to play as I levelled them up. Eventually I settled on wheels and pikes as my go-to options, but there’s something for everyone. Almost everyone. And the exception is me. All the way through as I saw weapons waiting to be unlocked, I had my eye on the prize, and it never came.
The first few generals you face (whose deaths are tide-turning compared to the hordes of soldiers, and who therefore have more health) are armed with swords or spears. But soon after, you see something tremendous. A man with a massive cooking pot on a stick. Is that truly what this thing is? I have no idea – we never unlock it to use for ourselves, so we never learn its true name. It just looks like a huge metal cooking pot on the end of a wooden stick, used both as a club and as a grounded pole for swinging around with acrobatic kicks. I want it in my life. I need it in my life. And yet, I cannot have it.
You Can’t Beat A Morningstar
It’s obviously not really a cooking pot on a stick, but I have no other way to describe it. It’s a massive ball of metal, which looks to be roughly the height of a person’s torso and spherical, that enemy generals can wield as if it’s nothing. The twin pikes attacks are cool, running into danger while swinging my axes wildly, and the wheels’ musou attack has you breakdancing as they spin around your ankles capoeira-style, but I really, really, really want that cooking pot.
I think it’s because I’ve always thought the morningstar was an incredibly cool medieval weapon. And if you’re wondering what a morningstar is, it’s like a mace but with spikes. And if you’re thinking ‘I thought maces had spikes’, well, they do sometimes. Medieval weapons are weird and complicated. Sometimes they have swinging chains and sometimes they have several heads and sometimes these sorts of weapons are separated off into flails and sometimes they aren’t. It probably makes sense to someone, somewhere.
As you might have guessed from that last inane paragraph, different sorts of weapons are an easy selling point for me. It’s not because I am such a gaming expert that I thrive on having to master multiple movesets in order to progress in a game – if I were an ‘expert’ would I really be a ‘journalist’? – but because picking weapons is cool. Giving you more to choose from makes the odds that you’ll find a choice for you that combines looking the business (staff) with you actually being good with them (sword) into a perfect union of style and substance (wheels).
Dynasty Warriors: Origins provides you with a variety of weapon choices, not to mention an array of combos to use with them and different Battle Arts to make each skirmish your own. No matter what your fighting style is, you’ll find something that suits you. Unless your fighting style is whacking people with big metal cooking pots, then you’re out of luck.
- Released
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January 17, 2025
- Developer(s)
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Omega Force