Dynasty Warriors: Origins Brings the Series to New Heights

By Marc Normandin | January 24, 2025 | 12:39pm

Video Games Features Dynasty Warriors

Dynasty Warriors: Origins Brings the Series to New Heights

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It’s been years since the last Dynasty Warriors game—and longer than that since the last truly great one. Dynasty Warriors 9 came out in 2018, and it was not received well, but that reception wasn’t the only reason for the franchise’s hiatus: Crossovers! That was the name of the game for Koei Tecmo and Dynasty Warriors’ developer, Omega Team, for years. These crossovers weren’t a new thing post-Dynasty Warriors 9, but they became the primary focus. Where once main series releases (in both Dynasty and the Japan-focused Samurai Warriors) were a frequent thing in between crossovers like Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage, or One Piece: Pirate Warriors, crossovers became practically Omega Team’s entire deal for a bit there. And rather than licensed characters from other mediums like manga and anime, this time around the focus was on other videogame franchises.

Frequent partnerships with Nintendo were at the center of these crossovers. There were a pair of Fire Emblem spin-offs in the style of the Warriors games, Fire Emblem Warriors and Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes. The latter retold the tale of Fire Emblem: Three Houses in an alternate history featuring some additional new characters; Three Houses was itself developed by Intelligent Systems but also a team from Koei Tecmo led by CEO Kou Shibusawa. That team included Three Houses’ scenario writers, all of whom were responsible for similar work on the Warriors’ games, which makes Three Houses’ approach to storytelling, and its Romance of the Three Kingdoms inspiration for it, that much more obvious once that connection is known. Omega Team and Nintendo also partnered up for Hyrule Warriors on the Wii U, and its enhanced and expanded ports on the 3DS and Switch, as well as the Breath of the Wild prequel spin-off, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity.

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Despite being a Switch exclusive spin-off of a strategy RPG series, Three Hopes sold over a million copies, just like its predecessor, and it hit that mark in just a couple of months. That might not seem that surprising, given the Switch’s huge customer base, but consider that Fire Emblem: Three Houses is the best-selling strategy RPG ever, and has only sold a little over 4 million copies. It’s not exactly a genre that moves units in high volume, so a musou spin-off also hitting the million mark is wild. Hyrule Warriors shipped over a million copies on the Wii U, and the overseas success of its Definitive Edition release on the Switch took Koei Tecmo by surprise to the point that they ended up raising their income forecasts for the next quarter following its release. Age of Calamity nearly matched Three Houses in sales despite being a spin-off. The people had spoken: they wanted these musou games.

Now, it wasn’t just Nintendo crossovers getting the spotlight. Atlus partnered up with Koei Tecmo for Persona 5 Strikers, which moved two million copies. The Dragon Quest Heroes games, despite the lack of “Warriors” in the title, were hack-and-slash RPGs developed by Omega Team for Square Enix. And Koei Tecmo did a crossover with their own various series for Warriors All-Stars, a musou that included characters from Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, Ninja Gaiden, Toukiden, Atelier, and even the likes of one-off Wii cult classic, Opoona.

There was about a decade of this, and mostly this. Samurai Warriors 5 was released in 2021, as something of a reboot of the series despite being a numbered entry. Warriors Orochi 4 arrived in 2018, the same year as Dynasty Warriors 9. These crossovers were able to at least match (if not exceed) the commercial success of standard Dynasty Warriors titles, while receiving much more positive critical feedback, too. And it wasn’t just because Zelda or Fire Emblem were attached, either: Three Hopes was a genuinely great game, that, unsurprisingly given Koei Tecmo’s involvement in Three Houses, understood the voices of the characters and world in a way that’s delightful for fans of the original, and Age of Calamity deserved all the praise that was heaped on it, too.

This lengthy preamble is here for a reason: to set up part of what makes Dynasty Warriors: Origins feel so different from recent(ish) Dynasty Warrior efforts. It’s Dynasty Warriors, through and through, but it’s also clearly something new. It’s a little slower-paced, to let the story breathe, and to give you more time with the many, many characters. Which is also why you’ve got just half of the story to play through this time, in what is way more of a total reboot than any previous Dynasty Warriors entry was before other than when the series shifted from fighting game to action RPG—a shift so significant that Koei Tecmo celebrated the 20th anniversary of the franchise when Dynasty Warriors 2 hit that mark.

Omega Team pretty clearly wanted to avoid rushing into a sequel to Dynasty Warriors 9—the attempts to change the series far more than it had changed between Dynasty Warriors 7 and 8 had backfired, as there was just too much to dislike. Forcing an open-world into a series that hasn’t had one before is bad enough, but making it a boring open-world experience on top of that? Jail for One Thousand Years. Focusing so much on crossovers and enhanced releases of existing games allowed Omega Team time to reflect on what needed to be changed. The way characters interacted and stories were told in Three Houses/Three Hopes and Age of Calamity was Koei Tecmo influencing Nintendo games in a way that made sense for those franchises, but those kinds of interactions were then brought back to Dynasty Warriors: you spend a lot of time as your original, at-first-nameless character in Dynasty Warriors: Origins being fawned over by adaptations of historical characters who range from deadly serious at all times to complete goofballs who worry that they’re so nondescript that no one can actually see them. Which is about the most Fire Emblem thing imaginable, really.

You have bonding events with other characters to open up additional cutscenes and story elements, side-missions that facilitate more of this while also building up your strength for the main campaign, and, while the story and its characters are more grounded and less cartoony than they’ve been in the past, this is still a game where you’re strong enough to cause a mini tornado that’ll catch enemies up in it so that you can wail on them with your weapon of choice. Which is to say, it’s still very much Dynasty Warriors.

While you’ve got just the one playable character here—The Wanderer, the character created by Koei Tecmo expressly for the story that Origins and its planned sequel are telling—they’ve got a whole Byleth from Three Houses thing going on, and not just in the sense that everyone is almost alarmingly taken with their charms and skills. There’s a huge focus on being able to master any kind of weapon you can get your hands on, with this mastery tied to your ability to level up at all, to the point that you’ll forget about not being able to play other characters once you realize how much thinking and strategy goes into cranking up the rank of the eight weapon types you’ll unlock as you play. You can’t just get comfortable with a sword and call it a day, or else you’ll never grow as a warrior, professor. I mean, Shez. Err, sorry, Wanderer.

Dealing with some limitations, in terms of being attached to existing franchises and having to serve a master besides themselves, likely did Omega Team some good in their planning for Dynasty Warriors: Origins. Everything feels a bit tighter, a bit more thoughtful, the pieces locking into place in a more obvious and understandable fashion than the last time they went all-in on changing everything up. The combat is the best the series has ever felt: it’s extremely snappy, it’s incessant, and as you master more and more skills, you get stronger in other ways, too. Master this one skill by performing it 50 times, 100 times, however many times, depending, and suddenly you can perform other skills faster, or avoid taking as much damage from arrows, or you gain Bravery—the meter that determines what skills you can use in the first place—faster. The map is simple, in that its closest cousin is an overworld map from a classic RPG, except instead of random turn-based battles impeding your trips between cities, there are optional skirmishes, side-missions, and hidden items to search for. You’ll also find people to chat with, not at a base or inside cities, but around on the map, further encouraging you to explore a much more manageable open-world-style map that fits the series and its intentions much better than a true open-world.

It’s all a big-shift reboot for the series, but Omega Team has clearly learned from all the crossovers they’ve done in a way that helped them decide what to keep and improve upon, and what to toss out. Given how many of these games there are, it’s kind of amazing that Origins feels both so fresh and so familiar. 2020’s Three Hopes was the best that Warriors combat had felt in some time, owing in no small part to its adaptation of Fire Emblem’s weapons triangle as a strategic wrinkle, and the ability to do things like ride a pegasus into battle, but Origins has gone beyond that with its tight parry and evasion system that helps combat still feel personal and focused even when there are thousands of soldiers on screen at once. Which is not an exaggeration, either: Origins didn’t get a Switch release for a reason.

Retelling the story of Romance of the Three Kingdoms again and again in different ways is a tough gig, but making characters more outlandish and battles larger and more strategic got Omega Team pretty far for a long time. Origins manages to be simultaneously bigger and smaller than its predecessors, with the former owing to the hardware jump that allowed for thousands upon thousands of enemy soldiers and dozens of enemy officers all to be battling at once, and the latter due to both cutting the scope of the game down while widening the possibility for how much more personal it could be. It’s difficult not to see the influence of the tightly designed, critically lauded crossovers Koei Tecmo has spent the last decade on playing a part in that scope and design; combined with Omega Team’s penchant for going big in combat, and it’s easy to see how Origins ended up a winner.

Maybe you weren’t familiar with Dynasty Warriors before the slew of crossovers for series you were already invested in, but Origins presents the best time to change that. It’s the culmination of Omega Team’s years of experience with this series and its spin-offs, as well as development for the likes of Nintendo and Sega that helped to bring clarity to what made musou, as a concept, sing. Despite completing the main game with well over 40 hours invested, I’ll be going back for more Origins: just like with Three Hopes, there are other paths to see through to the end, other possibilities to uncover, and other characters to befriend or battle or break the hearts of.

Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.