Musou-styled Action

With the release of Age of Calamity I am reminded of this special brand of soft action. You've seen one you've seen all: pummel hordes of grunts and control the crowds with flashy moves as a self-righteous hero or a despicable villian of a certain era or setting. While it's often less about surviving the odds, keeping the style-meter up and expressing a combat flavour of your own is close enough to more dedicated hard action.

I had some fun times with the original Devil Kings for PS2 (imagine that!) and am now re-entering Sengoku Basara 3 for Wii after some years of abscence. Had the sales been sufficient, I would have given the Utage add-on a fair spin. Alas, it's too niche, I suppose, so it wasn't released outside Japan. Other titles I've been messing with were Hokuto no Ken: Ken's Rage and the sequel. With a license like this they are fun enough for what they offer. Owning a Wii U, I had my eyes for some time on Hyrule Warriors but never made the jump. I'll remedy that for early next year.

I can hear you scoffing, and I'll admid, yeah, they are indeed repetitive. I realize how I tend to get duller in concentration in replaying the same maps after a fashion. I have yet to find a title that offers more than the same old battle grounds. So I can't play them that often.

I once knew a guy who was close to nuts about them. He would play on highest diff from the start and even a GUNDAM edition for weeks after release.

How about you?

I actually *really* love the Warriors series. The highest difficulty settings and rank requirements really are tough! I think the franchise gets a bad rep, but they're actually great games.

The secret to enjoying them is realizing they're not truly action games. They're strategy games in disguise. Yes it's about pummeling hordes of enemies, but that's a surface level thing. As you get to higher difficulties, alternate modes, rank requirements, etc. you realize it's not the action you're focusing on, it's the map. It's keeping an eye on your forces, knowing *which* enemies to kill, *where and when*, and which outposts and keeps to take, which officers you should take on and which you can leave to your allies. Because for all this series is advertised as letting you take on hordes of enemies without breaking a sweat, you *still* can't take on an entire battlefield at once. And that leads to some interesting challenges.

THAT SAID I think recent spin-offs of the warriors series have been edging more into the true action territory. Hyrule Warriors had help from Team Ninja and for the first time in the warriors series, added a lock-on mechanic, and used it to great effect with fights against singular powerful enemies (other officers and giant bosses). Having to juggle enemies you have to actually think about your approach to fighting them or die with the general warriors strategy makes the franchise even more interesting.

I love Dragon Quest Heroes.

Small cast, each very different. Tons of enemy variety. Actually has decent combat depth.

I've not really played any, but I'd like to try and get stuck in to one sometime. I have one of the Sengoku Basara games on PS3 (maybe SB3? not sure, I imported it off eBay), but like most action titles, it's still in my ever-growing backlog. I've been tempted by Hyrule Warriors before, just wish you could get it a little cheaper.

I see Birdman has mentioned DQH - any other standout titles that you guys would recommend?

> Strategy games in disguise
Good way of thinking about them. Although a different style of action game, I feel the same way about games like MadWorld and Shadow of Rome, where to get good at the combat you have to have knowledge of things that exist outside of the combat. Less input heavy, more emphasis on knowing the battlefield.

Berserk seemed ok. The characters play very differently and there's only like 8. Hokuto Musou was also decent for the same reason but not much enemy variety.

I have Musou Allstars but barely touched it. Was only interested because it has characters from Kagero and Nights of Azure. Also has Ryu Hayabusa.

I lost interest in the Warriors ones years ago. They got way too samey to me. The spinoffs are more like actual action games.

DQH is great, but has a lot of protect/tower defense missions. I found these super fun though. Really satisfying to hold back a horde and run around prioritising threats.

DQH2 is great too but some aspects like the world are totally different. In DQH you select maps from a world map. In DQH2 it's more open like a JRPG where you actually run from area to area, come back later with new abilities to access new areas, warzones, towns.

Never played the genre outside of some demos but never found one that really connected with me. I should just go for it I'd admit, but no idea where to start and my backlog is already legendary.

While I love the franchise in general now, the one that made me realize I wasn't giving it a fair shake (and this seems true for a lot of people) is Hyrule Warriors. *Specifically* The Adventure Mode, where you want to get high ranks to progress quickly (as opposed to the story mode which feels more like a tutorial, in the end). You'll stop thinking the series is easy when you have to play a map where you die in 2 hits, one hit kills your rank and you'll constantly be taking artillery fire aimed at you specifically no matter where you are in the map.

I'd say go with the spin offs. You've got the Switch so grab Hyrule Warriors. I heard that's good.

I have some comments since I'm playing and looking into a few Musou games at the moment.

>You've seen one you've seen all
I would agree with this as far as DW5. Didn't play SW but I played extensively 2, 3, 3XL, 4, 4XL, 4 Empires, 5, 6 and Orochi Warriors. By 5 I was totally sick of them. Didn't bother with expansions after 4. Orochi caught my interest briefly as it has a small level of weapon customization and characters had 1 unique move but it ended up similar. These are the ones I found too samey to bother with any further releases. Not too sure if 7, 8 and 9 did anything vastly different. They don't appear to have.

The spinoffs are actually great. They add mechanics from the series they're based on so there's tons of enemy variety like monsters. The casts are often smaller, playing very differently from one another. Movesets are generally small, but that's no issue considering great games like Shinobi and ZOE2 have small (maybe even smaller) movesets, and games with tons of moves often have a lot of worthless ones.

>The secret to enjoying them is realizing they're not truly action games
>strategy
I agree they have that strategy element, but at least the spinoffs I speak of are true action games.

>I think recent spin-offs of the warriors series have been edging more into the true action territory.
Mechanically they are action. Just with more enemies and RPG elements.

Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity is excellent. I have the first one too but had already started the demo of AoC.

Anyone played Fire Emblem Warriors?

I actually think the musou games have gotten dramatically worse as they've tried harder to be pure action. The series peaked with the perfect blend of tactical and brawler depth with the trifecta of DW8, WO3, and HW, and since then has been chasing that high. In more recent games like PW4 or FEW you technically have more options but it's drowned in tedious RPG mechanic management. I would spend 15 to 20 minutes tweaking my units before a single Three Hopes fight because it's all in on micromanagement and stats over your actual battlefield actions. Add to that the fact that anyone but the most basic peons now have hyperarmor until you stagger them, and peons themselves are basically nonexistant, and less options to smooth out the grind, it's just made the games much less engaging on a moment to moment basis. I still liked SW5 though, that felt like a step back in the right direction with some fucking excellent kits and a great art style. I'm doing a retrospective on the series and ranking them all on my Backloggd now, going to have fun seeing how my feelings change going through them again. It's not the best series of games, but it might be my favorite? Certainly the most hours spent on one franchise and I have a lot of complex feelings about all of them

https://backloggd.com/u/EmpressWu/list/dynasty-senran-basara-warriors-nights-of-the-hawk-kens-chaos/
Current standings btw, will update as I go

Hey man, long time no see! Welcome back :)

I never dove deep into the games, but I've heard this take before. That later games are either too focused on the action and insane combos, to the point of introducing character-swap combos, while the original older games had a pretty unique mixture of tactics and combat with actual decision making.

Never my thing. A friend (Dark Oni) was more into that, but he played them casually.