Dynasty Warriors Origins Review: Epic Battles and Replayability vs. Repetition and Bugs

With over 100 hours in the game, we review Dynasty Warriors Origins, a repetitive yet gratifying action RPG game with great replayability.

The Dynasty Warriors series is known for its fast-paced, hack-and-slash gameplay, rooted in the rich history of ancient China. The game’s main appeal is enormous, sprawling battles where you, the protagonist, face off against hundreds, if not thousands, of enemy combatants. The story features a nameless protagonist trying to regain their memory while aiding various factions, all varying for power. DWO is a single-player Action RPG game available on PlayStation®5 / Xbox Series X|S / Steam® with a base game price of $60.

As a reviewer, this is the first game I’ve covered in the Dynasty Warriors Series. I was first introduced to combat when my son started playing Hyrule Warriors, a Legends of Zelda series reskin of Dynasty Warriors. While that game was fun, I didn’t understand the overall appeal and entered into the game skeptical but optimistic the combat, weapons, and build crafting would be an entertaining escape for a few hours.

In this Dynasty Warriors Origins Review, I’ll walk you through the various parts of the game, including combat, graphics, bugs, gameplay, and more. I hope you walk away from this article knowing if Dynasty Warriors Origins is right for you. With over 100 hours in the game, I love the game, but I don’t think it will be for everyone. Below are some of the details used for this Dynasty Warriors Origins Review:

• Platforms: PlayStation®5 / Xbox Series X|S / Steam®
• Reviewed on: PC
• PC Specs
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070
  • Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS
  • RAM: 16 GB
  • OS: Windows 11 Home
• Release Date: January 16th, 2025
• Developer: KOEI TECMO GAMES CO., LTD.
• Publisher: KOEI TECMO GAMES CO., LTD.
• Gametime: 100 hours

What is the Dynasty Warriors Origins Game About?

When I first started playing Dynasty Warriors Origins, I was confused about the game’s focus. After a brief tutorial featuring mainly combat, you were given an odd open-world area to explore. Similar to Final Fantasy games of old, your character was scaled to the size of the world with map markers and points you could explore. As you can imagine, the map was small at first and limited, leaving little room for exploration, but enough to give you a feeling of freedom.

What initially stuck out was the cutscenes, story, and graphics. The flashy animations, incredible fight scenes, and beautiful art and music captured my attention. I’ll be honest: when I’m skeptical about games, I usually bypass the story and just get to the gameplay. Something stuck out to me about the characters in DWO. You had a mysterious protagonist, villains, and sketchy characters trying to topple one another for power.

Having taken an Eastern history class in college, I was fascinated by the historical context of the “dynasty” and found the story immediately riveting.

Villains and Heros

With zero knowledge of the franchise and series, all the characters seemed interesting. During combat and battles, you have popups and dialogue with leaders and officers giving situation reports and commands. While chaotic, it adds a unique element to their personality and feels similar to real-life combat (I am a combat Veteran). After battles, you would regroup at headquarters and discuss the battle and the next steps. It was very military, which I loved.

While the writing and characters were excellent, what started to set in was a pattern of storytelling and gameplay. Complete the battle, do two to three cutscenes, and move on to the next fight. This left little room for organic exploration with a limited overland world map and even less room for an exciting sporadic introduction to characters. The story’s main downside is that it’s a repetitive cycle of events with little room for randomness or excitement. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not without appeal.

The main villain at the start of the game changes, and eventually, you meet Lu Bu. He’s this over-the-top character who can help or hinder you depending on your aligned faction. They introduce and build his character just like the JRPGs of old. Like Sephiroth emerging from the bike scene in Final Fantasy 7, Lu Bu is a daunting, unstoppable force on the battlefield, destroying everything in his path.

The writers do a good job of building up characters, with players making a key decision on one of three factions at the end of chapter 3. During your initial playthrough, you have no idea who’s the “good” guy or bad guy and must go with your gut. While I won’t spoil anything for you, the ending is satisfying, but you want to see how the other factions played out and immediately start another playthrough. That’s when I knew I enjoyed the story and wouldn’t space bar button spam to skip it.

Companions Are a Huge Miss

One of the big misses in Dynasty Warriors Origins storytelling are companions. Yes, they have them, but they join you sparingly in specific battles in the story. You can pick only a few depending on your faction, nine companions in all. They have individual backgrounds and stories but little option to inquire more about their motivation. After playing Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s hard to get excited about any other RPG companion storytelling. I was sad that Dynasty Warriors Origins had barely any romance options. While I don’t play games specifically for this reason, having a companion lover, just like in real life, can add a sense of connection and depth to your experience.

While companions miss the mark in the story, they aid you in combat. When they tag along on select missions, you can use their abilities to combo battle arts or use an ultimate ability. Once their gauge is max, you can swap to them and use their overpowered skills and ultimate. This gives you a second ultimate and a taste of the end-game battle arts and weapons. But, why the developers only decide to have them limited to specific missions is beyond me and a major disappointment in the game.

Sprawling Battles, Keeps, Castles, and Valleys

While venturing through various battles and open-world environments, the art style stuck out as colorful and alive. The colors of the environment, popups, and skills (battle arts) made you feel every choice in combat was impactful. The battles start to scale up dramatically as you progress the campaign. For instance, one battle had you siege a massive keep with a mechanic to protect a battering ram. You spend some time taking small towns around the castle to avoid reinforcements before your siege. You crest a hill to see a massive sprawling keep with ballista, trebuchets, and nearly endless enemies awaiting you.

Then, you gather your forces just outside the keep and move near a small circle on the map. This triggers a charge from your faction, which is utterly epic. The graphics rumble and shake as hundreds of soldiers, calvery, and officers charge the front of the keep, giving you a sense of what this must have felt like in ancient times. You come crashing into waves of enemies to get an over-the-top camera pan of the view and then re-engage with ground combat. As someone who loves military history, this was genuinely epic and didn’t get old over the 100 hours in the game. While this is a videogame, Dynasty Warriors Origins gives you a glimpse and feel of what this must have been like hundreds of years ago.

The downside to the graphics and areas was the lack of diverse environments. While this was set in a local area in China, most battlefields looked and felt relatively the same. Sure, there are mountains, but there is little, if any, difference in the battles. Moreover, the overland exploration didn’t have the freedom or sheer volume of exploration as an open-world game. Therefore, you are left to the same repetitive environments and setting in combat as well as exploration.

Destroy Everything with Amazing Weapons

My favorite aspect of Dynasty Warriors Origins is the combat and weapons. You are introduced to one at the start of the game, Sword, and this serves as your class. The game features a total of 10 weapons, each with its own unique playstyles, battle arts, and combos using strong and normal attacks. You gain battle arts, which are skills that follow a similar Eastern action RPG format: four skills: dodge, blocking, and time-based gameplay. Think Black Myth Wukong here with more skill usage.

As the game progresses, you gain access to new weapons and use them to improve your ranks. Ranks unlock skill trees and passive bonuses, improving your overall power. All of this to say, the game wants you to experiment with different weapons and find your fit.

Combat in Dynasty Warriors Origins is also repetitive if you caught a theme here in my review. You build up bravery, a resource used to activate battle arts, and use normal and strong attacks to remove a shield from enemies called fortitude. Then, you get two to three seconds to beat on the enemy via an assault. You have officer enemy types, which are bosses and trash mobs, which are very easy to kill.

In combat, you mainly take small towns, fight officers, and keep your officers alive, riding a horse from objective to objective. What’s great about this is the overall hectic nature of combat and gameplay. You have NPCs who are near death crying for your help. Meanwhile, an enemy requests you duel. Then, you get ambushed and knocked off your horse by an officer, all while the story dialogue is going on. The “fog of war” sets in, giving you a chaotic, realistic experience that, while repetitive, is a blast.

Why I Played 100 Hours

While Dynasty Warrior’s combat and story are repetitive, I enjoyed the repetition. What kept me playing was seeing how both the story and combat unfold differently when playing a second time. As I mentioned, you can repeat the story via post-game content. With five chapters, completing the campaign takes about 30 hours the first time. After that, you unlock a new weapon (overpowered), the Halberd, and a new difficulty Ultimate Warrior. Additionally, you can retrait weapons with more crafting options.

Essentially, the game gives you a heavy incentive to play over again. While you chose a faction to support in Chapter 3, the post-game content lets you return to that decision point and start fresh. This allows you to play all three factions, and they unfold radically differently. Moreover, after completing the same battles multiple times, each time, I learned better and more effective strategies. During my replay, the story does get even more repetitive, but multiple epic cut scenes with Lu Bu keep me engaged.

What kept me playing Dynasty Warriors Origins for hours was the sense of constant progression in getting better at combat and ranking up my battle arts and skills.

Even at 100 hours, I learned more about the story, creating builds, getting better at combat, and generally having fun.

Performance and Technical Issues

One of the biggest issues I think players will face is crashes, bugs, and poor optimization. I played Dynasty Warriors Origin mainly on my laptop gaming PC with an NVIDIA 4070 GPU and an AMD processor. However, I have a secondary computer with a 4080 desktop that handled the game much better. With only 16 GB of RAM, my laptop would sound like an airplane taking off during big battles, and I had a few crashes. Additionally, some of my saves were bugged out, and I lost an hour or so of game time.

While I was playing on an early access build, I hope consoles and PC players don’t feel the same struggle. Rendering hundreds of figures on the battlefield can be a strain for any rig, and while mine was good, it could barely keep up.

Black Myth Wukong vs Dynasty Warriors Origins

If I were to compare Dynasty Warriors Origins to a recently released game, I’d say it has some similarities to Black Myth Wukong. The biggest difference for players is exploration. Black Myth Wukong, like Elden Ring, has sprawling zones to explore in the open world. Meanwhile, Dynasty Warriors Origins has a weak open-world knockoff. However, Dynasty Warriors Origins has a map and gives players an easy sense of navigating what to do next and why.

I’ve played Dynasty Warriors Origins much more than both Black Myth and Elden Ring. I like a little hand-holding in my game, guiding me to the next objective. DWO even gives you a bird with a trail to follow to the next objective if you get lost. The build crafting is very similar to Black Myth Wukong, with ways to customize your playstyle via passives and battle arts. However, it lacks the complexity and depth of weapons and customization options such as the Elden Ring. It’s good enough to give you freedom and choice, allowing you to feel like you have agency over your gameplay.

Who Should Play Dynasty Warriors Origins?

While I received a free review code, I would have paid $100 for the Digital Deluxe Edition. Throughout this review of Dynasty Warriors Origins, I’ve mentioned the game’s repetitiveness. Personally, this repetition was enjoyable, and any game that gives me 100 hours of fun game time is worth a hefty price tag, especially since there isn’t a marketplace flooded with microtransactions cash store traps you find in current F2P games.

But, with the base game costing $60, should you play Dynasty Warriors Origins?

Yes if:

• Action RPG combat is enjoyable
• Military history fan
• Want Eastern lore and art style
• Love massive battles and button-mashing fun
• Enjoy ultra hard, challenging difficulty

No If:

• You love open-world games
• You like organic exploration
• Action RPGs aren’t your thing
• You want multiplayer

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Score

We give Dynasty Warriors Origin a 7.5 out of 10 for our review. The game’s strength is rewarding combat, a huge story campaign with 30+ hours, and tons of content. The massive battles are enjoyable, though they can be repetitive. The downsides are repetitive gameplay and story, bugs, crashes, and the lack of a true open-world experience.

While Dynasty Warriors Origins isn’t likely to be the game of the year, people like me who love button-mashing combat and Eastern history will find it worth their time and money.

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