Add SAMURAI WARRIORS 2 to STEAM
better than other SW series ♡

My buddy and I really wanted to play through this game co-op as we have with many others in the series for a long time now. What this game doesn't tell you when it says "online co-op" is you can't!

You can only play online on story missions that you have ALREADY COMPLETED SOLO. What the hell???
What a seriously dropped ball. If you were getting this to play with friends you may want to pass and pick up one of the older titles instead.

Samurai Warriors 5 has a surprisingly good PC port. I ran it at 4k and 60 FPS with a midline card with very few drops. It's one of the best ports the series has ever had. The new character designs and story sequences are also damn good, although people will miss the zanier characters. If you've never played a Musou game before, this one might seem pretty great. If you have played one, you'll be shocked at how few movesets there are. Sure, there are nearly 40 characters. But only 27 have unique actions. Those unique actions are basically like the EX moves from DW7. Because Omega Force brought weapon switching back! That thing we all hate bitterly! There are only 15 weapons, so 15 movesets.

Samurai Warriors 5, as a result, has very little value in comparison to other games in the series. If you haven't played Orochi 4 or, hell, Spirit of Sanada, you should PROBABLY not spend $60 bucks on a game. For real, this game has less than a third of the movesets that vanilla SW4 had SEVEN YEARS AGO. It has a FRACTION OF THE CONTENT of a SEVEN YEAR OLD GAME. The dual katanas moveset also appears to be directly borrowed from Zoro from Pirate Warriors. As such, the game gets boring fast. Some of the movesets are really cool, though, such as the drum and ninja blade. But then there are the sleep inducing weapons. The katana. The odachi. The spear. The heavy spear.

Want to play as Tadakatsu? He plays exactly like Toshiie. What fun! The story's pretty good, at least, but I think this is the most bored I've been by a Musou game since the first Pirate Warriors came out. There's no good excuse for this amount of cloning. The game also has a dearth of new ideas, plus rush attacks don't have charge attacks anymore, so they're worse than before for no good reason. Not a bad game by any means, but a super disappointing one.

Fortunately, the producer of Samurai Warriors 5 is Hisashi Koinuma, not Akihiro Suzuki of Dynasty Warriors 9.

If you've never played a musou game, this is the one to try.
If you haven't played one in a while, this is the one to come back to.
If you have musou fatigue, understandable, but you still need to play this.

+ Visuals, art style, presentation is brilliant
+ The hack/slash is just premium with familiar and new mechanics
+ Campaign is pretty good, character depth/perspectives like never done before with a lot of familiar VAs
+ Lots and lots of replayability
+ Character designs are really one of the best in the entire series
+ Music, bgms
+ PC port is great
+ Valve Regional prices

- Only Japanese VA, only a problem when its difficult to read and play at the same time at tight situations, but you can replay the entire conversation in the menu during the mission
- Basic movesets are attached to weapon types rather than characters. So 2 characters using a katana would have most of the same moves except for a few that are unique to the character. The musou animations are unique to the characters and with those few unique moves, it barely makes 2 character play and feel differently. So it cuts down the roster in half in terms of unique playstyles. But If you only play with some of the characters that you really like, like myself, rather than every single one of the 50+ characters of the previous games, then it shouldnt be a deal breaker.

somewhat disappointed with the lack of content.

you only get full stories for nobunaga oda and akechi mitsuhide.

so no battle of sekigahara etc.

this makes the game seem very short for the pricetag, with the other content feeling like filler.

having been a fan of the warriors games since DW3 I find this installment shallow and lackluster.

Buy if you are a fan of Warriors games. The gameplay is still there, and it's an interesting look at a different starting timeline. If you've never played a SW game before, get Spirit of Sanada or SW4. This is a step-back in the franchise.

Upon writing this review, I only have around 6 hours in playtime, but having played many Warriors games previously I know it's not going to change much from here. As far as I'm concerned this is actually a step backwards for Samurai Warriors, rather than an improvement on the formula. This is a smaller scale, character focused narrative, like Spirit of Sanada, but it is lacking in a lot of areas. I'll start with the good things first.
- The new art style is good. It's not super different from previous installments, but the new cel-shaded look they have added really works. I hope they keep it for future games.
- The new setting for the story is fresh. No warriors game has really touched upon the very early parts of Oda's career. It typically starts when Imagawa is killed, from Tokugawa's perspective, but here, it starts long before that, before Oda even meets Tokugawa for the first time. It's great.
- Some of the new/rebooted characters are actually great fun to play. The knuckles moveset (Mitsuki/Yasuke) is great. As is Sandayu Momochi, who uses a kusarigama. Hattori Hanzo uses a new weapon, which is a sword and ninja stars, and I found it much more fun than his old kusarigama moveset. Takenaka Hanbei's new drum weapon is so much better and more interesting than his bladed sundial from previous installments.
- Hyper attacks are so good in this game because cancelling them into normals is made easier. It makes you very mobile and it's ace at blending up the generic soldier enemies. Ditto on the weapon skills, which are similar to the magic items from Warriors Orochi 4. It adds much more to the combat.

Now, the bad:
- There is a mysterious lack of some characters that had very close ties to the characters or events happening in-game. Lady Nene, Hideyoshi's wife, does not make an appearance. Neither does Ishida Mitsunari, his most loyal retainer. The whole Sanada family is absent, even though they had close relations with both the Takeda, Tokugawa, and Toyotomi, who are all main players in the plot. There is no Kanetsugu Naoe, even though the Uesugi appear quite often as side characters.
- I am not a fan of some of the new character designs or the weapon changes. Uesugi doesn't have his cool Seven Pronged Sword anymore. Tokugawa uses dual katanas instead of a spear-cannon, and looks like a femboy. He keeps this look all the way until the end, which is weird because Oda and Mitsuhide have a separate aged look in the 5th chapter, so why does he still look like a little boy? Shibata Katsuie uses a generic spear now instead of dual axes. Saika Magoichi uses a handheld cannon instead of a Bayonetted Rifle. Maeda Toshiie uses a spear instead of a Sword and two Halberds. Matsunaga Hisahide loses the spider motif and just uses a hand cannon now. Takeda Shingen uses a spear instead of a war fan. The list is almost endless. Overall, most characters fantastic personality and aesthetics have been reeled in to be more realistic and down to earth, which is an absolutely terrible decision for a franchise that relies on being crazy and exciting.
- The homogenization of movesets. Despite only having 39 playable characters, a lot of them share weapons. Some of the playable characters you unlock don't even have their own signature moves or musou attacks. What makes this worse is that most of these people are actually NEWLY PLAYABLE (as in, showed up as generic npcs in other games) characters in SW5, but don't even get their own movesets. Why even bother making them playable? The katana is the worst offender, because both of the main characters use it, and apart from some unique power attacks, the moveset is exactly the same. Oda actually starts with an Odachi (also not a unique weapon as Uesugi Kenshin also uses it), but not long into the game his preferred weapon becomes the Katana. One of the parts that offended me the most was the first mission where you meet Nagamasa Azai. In previous Warriors games, he uses a Jousting Lance, which is a really cool and unique style of weapon. However, in this one, you control him for the first time while playing Mitsuhide's missions (katana user), and he rocks up, looking all cool and ♥♥♥♥ on his horse, then you find out he is ALSO just a regular katana user. Total pisstake. One of the best things about Warriors games is how basically everyone has their own unique weapon OR moveset. I don't know what ♥♥♥♥ Koei Tecmo is on, but the dumbing down of weapons in DW9 and SW5 is one of the worst decisions they've ever made.
- If you compare this game to Spirit of Sanada, it is so much worse. Oda is a more boring character (to play as) than Yukimura. You play Yukimura the whole time, but he evolves over the course of the game, and by the end of it, he has a moveset that is as destructive as Lu Bu, as mobile as Xu Shu, and is at least twice as long as any other characters. He becomes so robust, but Oda never gets to that point, and ends up as boring to play.
- The story is even more japanese soap opera-y than Spirit of Sanada, but not even as engaging. Bar Oda and Mitsuhide, most characters motivations and ambitions are a complete mystery, and a lot of them we don't even get to see realised because the game ends with Oda's death at Honnoji. Obviously that's a given, because the game is about Oda's journey, but Spirit of Sanada has left a very high bar to leap over.
- Mitsuhide gets his own path in addition to Nobunaga, where you get to play battles that he was involved in from his perspective. Unfortunately, he spent most of his adult life as a retainer of Nobunaga, so most of the missions in this path are rehashes of Nobunaga's battles. It's very disappointing. The few unique ones he gets are great. The game just needed more like that.
- No castle towns to walk around and interact with characters in. It's replaced by a tower defense mode which unlocks events between characters. For such a story focused game I think this is something that should not have been taken out.
- I've found this game to be a terrible port. It will not recognise my controller properly and keeps switching it to player 2. The camera movement when playing with keyboard and mouse is so janky as well. Rather than being able to freely look around, it's more like you're turning to designated points of view on an axis.

Overall I think it's still a good game, but would not recommend it to people who aren't already fans of the series. Get on sale.

Samurai Warriors 2006: lets make them masculine and limited handsomeness

Samurai Warriors 2021: lets make them all IKEMEN

Don't know, man.

Think I had around 500 hours on SW4 on the PS4. Probably the same on SW2 + SW2: Empires back in the day.

+ The story is a lot more focused like Spirit of Sanada and it's good, though the music doesn't really fit the scenes sometimes. Everyone get's screentime.

+ The visuals are way nice. KOEI have found a very nice art style for this game.

- Music isn't very memorable and the tracks that are, are literally just remixes of SW4 songs. As mentioned above, there's certain 'sad' or 'emotional' scenes where the music just doesn't fit. SW4 was bang on with it's soundtrack. Honnō-ji's music is really underwhelming and so is the death of Nobunaga (not a spoiler as it's basic knowledge for anyone into Japanese history or Samurai Warriors games) due to the song playing in the background.

- Cloned movesets for a roster that was cut in half. How come SW4 had just over 50 characters and no clones, yet SW5 has like 27 and the there's clones.

- Limited content. You've got Story Mode (Nobunaga path and Akechi path) and then Citadel mode which isn't that great tbh.

- The combat is exactly the same as SW4. Even Hyper Attack is back. There's like a half-hearted version of One Piece Pirate Warriors 4's ultimate skill stuff, but nowhere near as good.

- Character designs are pretty boring tbh. Nobunaga's youth outfit is really cool but his Mature outfit (except the face/hair) is the worst one he's had in the series imo. A few others have good character designs like Shingen, Katsuie, Hideyoshi, Motonari, Kanbei, and Nohime but then you've got really boring, uninspired guys like Toshiie (alright personality in-game, but his SW4 outfit was way better), Magoichi (he's just been reduced to generic soldier boy both in looks and personality), Ieyasu (I mean, dude looks like a girl and he just tries to please Nobunaga too much. His armour is cool though), Nagamasa, Toshimitsu (literally just a copy + paste of Kojūrō Katakura from SW4) and Shikanosuke to name a few.

To end it off, SW4 is better. Shame we haven't got the actual SW4 on Steam and just the half-hearted SW4-II on here. Not even got SW4 Empires on Steam.

Koei did a good job with the story and art style but everything else is a step-backwards from SW4.

this game feels like a deliberate attempt to go back to basics, its got the vibe of the original game about it, and i think its probably better off for it. the wide array of characters in SW4 didnt bug me much as a musou veteran but you have to admit its completely overwhelming for new players. i prefer that koei is willing to try different things - i also like dw9 so most people are probably going to not take me seriously anyway. whatever you lose from the changes to hyper attacks you make up for in the fact that this is one of the best feeling musou games theyve ever made...attacks flow together smoother than ever, the AI is more aggressive, theres great quality of life changes with the UI, its basically more accessible than ever. anyway, i buy these games because i love beautiful men; this game is full of them