OMEGA FORCE
Musou life
As Dynasty Warriors reaches 25, Omega Force’s Akihiro Suzuki looks at the series’ enduring appeal
Defined as it is by technology’s inexorable march, the videogame industry is constantly in flux. Anything that can withstand its caprices for a quarter of a century, then, is doing something right. The western launch of Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires comes two weeks ahead of the 25-year anniversary of the original game’s Japanese release –a landmark that few who played that game at launch could have ever imagined.
Omega Force’s Akihiro Suzuki has been with the series since directing 2000’s Dynasty Warriors 2, which abandoned its predecessor’s one-on-one fighting for the blend of crowd combat and strategy for which the series has since become renowned. And, indeed, it’s pretty much only this series that has adopted such a formula.
Barring one or two exceptions, it has occupied its own niche, essentially having a genre all to itself. In fact, the genre is often referred to by its western fans as ‘musou’, a nod to Warriors’ Japanese name. Suzuki nods towards Capcom’s Sengoku Basara as one potential rival, but says “we haven’t heard much from it lately”. It’s no exaggeration: the west hasn’t seen a new entry in that series for more than a decade, and only mobile spin-offs mean it still has any sort of presence in Japan.