Mindless Fun

It's practically April now and living here in Montreal guess what we get? A nice layer of snow! Now I love winter and snow; going out to parks and playing ice hockey whenever you want is awesome, so is skiing and drunk tobogganing... but once it hits April, I think everyone has just about had their fill and this trend needs to end.

On the topic, one trend I'm quickly not becoming a fan of is the lack of booklets accompanying my games. Currently none of the Ps4 games I own come with a physical manual... or so I thought. I picked up Dynasty Warriors 8 Extreme Legends and to my pleasant surprise, there it was! I barely skimmed it of course but it's Dynasty Warriors; of all the games to get a manual it's probably the only one that doesn't need it.

My Booklet!

Way back when, it wasn't really customary to have any sort of heavy tutorials in games (especially if we're talking Ps1/N64 days). If you were playing an RPG, it was almost mandatory to read the literature. I was going over my old Ps1 games last week, trying to organize the chaos, and I was astonished by the amount of games that were one disc but still needed the double jewel case just because the manuals were crazy thick. Skip ahead a few generations and booklets are becoming extinct. Now the way things are going, I can understand, but in my mind this is more about tradition: you buy a game, you get a book!

Now I don't know when this happened to the series, but they started taking some pretty huge liberties when it comes to crazy stuff they add. I've mostly played story mode and the way stages are set up, you have a choice between 3-5 different characters (there are like 80 in total, it is nuts). One level there was this big burly dude with a beard called Huang Gai, who looked cool so I took him. Each character has 2 weapons they bring into battle: a primary weapon, which is character-specific, and secondary weapon, which can be chosen by the player. Looking at this guy’s little weapon icon, I swear it looked like a canoe but all I could think was "it can't be can it?!". Low and behold, this guy goes into battle beating people up with a boat. HE EVEN STARTS SURFING IT! It was crazy and I couldn't stop laughing... He is currently my favorite character.

Land Surfing!

Moving on, there isn't a whole lot else I can say about Dynasty Warriors 8 (if you've played one than you've pretty much played them all). If you are unaware of the series, it is pretty much a beat 'em up, button mashing bonanza and if mindless fun doesn't bother you, it's one of the best ones out there (competition in the genre is slim though). Aside from the Dynasty Warrior Gundam series, I haven't touched a DW game since maybe the 4th one on Ps2 about 10 years ago.

Story wise, all of the DW series revolves around an ancient Chinese novel called Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is part true and part legend. Unless you know anything about that sort of thing, it is pretty hard to follow I'm not going to lie. Fortunately if you care at all, the game comes with an incredibly extensive encyclopedia which has all kinds of information about the provinces, characters, weapons, wars, etc.

Of course this type of game isn't for everyone. Aside from different looking environments, they might as well be interchangeable. There is a huge amount of content in here, multiple story campaigns, a challenge mode, even something called ambition mode which see's you build an empire to compete against other empires. All that sounds amazing but much like the environments, everything is pretty much interchangeable.  Characters do all act differently though, and with the massive amount of weapons in the game, you'll always have something new to see. And hey, if you've never seen someone beat people up with a boat, now is your chance!