Orochi Warriors (PS2/360)

All hail Koei owner of the Romance period of china and the warring states period of japan. Seriously they really do own it. So let's see how the newest installment did.

Game play: Like most of the warriors titles the main point of the game is to run around and maim everything. Occasionally you get specific missions to maim a certain person. Well in Orochi this hasn't changed much except for the fact that you don't play a single character you alternate through a team of 3 at will adding a bit more depth to the game. Characters also have some nice little specials tho these can either be useless or extremely over powered. 3/5

Story: The Story is that a crazy demon guy named Orochi yoinked up all the greatest warriors from the warring states and Romance periods of China and Japan respectively and then got them all to fight for his and your amusement. From there you follow one of the 4 stories through 15 stage 7 of which are side stages usually for unlocking characters. This is fine as koei never really cared about the story and its mostly about the violence. 3/5

Graphics: The game looks nice. Enemies don't randomly disappear because there's too much going on. The game doesn't freeze do to all the explosions and shiny special attacks. The only real flaw was that most of the cut scenes were just done in the plain normal game graphics. Unlike previous installments that seemed to be moving in a good direction with full CG movies.
3/5

Audio: Koei changes voice actors way to much and if you've played the other games it does take a bit away...that and some peoples voices are insanely annoying. The music is good though. Great battle themes and the return of the character specific themes makes them all the scarier. 5/5

Replay: There's a hand full of things to unlike more on the 360 but there's nothing there you can't find on the internet or another game. Once you beat a stories there's really nothing left but unlocking the few extras. 2/5

Overall: The game have a great concept but it wasn't taken to its fullest. Many characters suffered from a lack of balancing in the special abilities. The fact that if you played multiplayer you were forced to be the same team as the first player. The unlockables really weren't that interesting and getting the good ones usually happened in the course of playing anyway. All in all koei messed this up spending more time a on tuning up the specials and the multiplayer would have made this a much better game. Even though there are 4 60 stages none of them are very original most are overlapping in both plot and battle design. There really is alot more that could have been done here. 3/5