Platform: Wii U

Developer: W-Force

Publisher: Tecmo-Koei

Genre: Hack and slash

Release Date: November 18, 2013

Nerd Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed by Cloud3514

Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper is the Wii U port of Warriors Orochi 3. As a crossover between Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors, it is a mindless hack and slasher that involves slaughtering thousands of identical looking enemy soldiers on large battlefields.

If you’ve played a Warriors game and hated it, don’t waste your time with this. If you’ve never played a Warriors game, stick around, you may be in for a treat.

It is hard to defend a love of the Warriors franchise. They’re stupid games and Orochi 3 is no exception. Every level is a massive battlefield and all you need to do is mash buttons to kill hundreds to thousands of enemies to charge a meter to use your “Musou” special attack to kill more enemies. Some people love the over-the-top stylized action, while others hate the admitted repetition and simplicity. I say, however, sometimes you need a simple game.

Visually, the game looks decent. The playable characters are detailed with good models, textures and hair, but the generic soldier models are considerably less detailed with some poor textures. The environments are also very plain and many maps look similar, but the game can render hundreds of enemies with little to no slowdown. The Playstation 3 version allegedly has better textures, but Hyper looks and runs perfectly fine on the Wii U.

The soundtrack is fitting, but forgettable. There’s not a lot to it, just a lot of generic rock tracks that play while you mow down the hundreds of enemies in your way. You’re likely to stop noticing it after a while.

The story picks up directly after the events of the previous Warriors Orochi games, where an evil known as Orochi fused the worlds of Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors. Not long after his defeat, a hydra appeared and killed all those who opposed him save three heroes: Ma Chao, Sima Zhao and Hanbei Takenaka. With the help of the ancient mystic Kaguya, these surviving heroes travel back in time to save the lives of the warriors of China and Japan and defeat the hydra. And you can now proceed to forget about that.

The story is developed before and after every battle, but it is entirely forgettable and annoying to follow anyway, due to the use of static pictures and text boxes for the cutscenes and the lack of English voice acting. Seriously, the original version of this game was released in 2012, there is no excuse for this kind of laziness.

There are over 130 playable characters. While they all have some unique moves, there are quite a few repeated move sets with only minor variations. Not to mention that, this being a Warriors game, the biggest difference between any of them is purely aesthetic. Some may run faster, while others may hit harder, but the ultimate difference is pretty minor.

While there are a few original characters, some act as the game’s villains and others fight along side the rest of the massive cast, the vast majority of characters are taken from Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors, with the entire casts of Dynasty Warriors 7 and Samurai Warriors 3 present. More surprisingly, there are some characters taken from other Koei and Tecmo games, such as Achilles as he appeared in Warriors: Legends of Troy and Ayane and Ryu Hayabusa of Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden.

Between missions, you will be taken to a camp area where you can interact with some of the other characters, buy weapons (that will be outclassed by what you find in battle), hold parties (which increase your characters reputation with the others, which leads to new battles being unlocked and subsequently, new characters) and choose your next battle.

Before each battle, you will be prompted to pick three characters. You can switch between these characters at any time. The characters are organized into four categories, Power, Speed, Technique and Wonder. You can generally ignore those distinctions as the best way to pick your team is to choose three characters you like or the recommended characters for the level and go. Ironically, there is actually a benefit to picking non-recommended characters in the form of extra side missions offered by the recommended characters.

Of course, those side missions will generally be completed just by playing the game since they’re usually things like killing 600 enemies in the first 10 minutes of the battle (and battles, despite the hour long time limit, generally only take 15 to 30 minutes) or killing thre enemy officers while maintaining at least 30% of your health. Missions that dictate how much damage you can take are the most annoying ones as sometimes you’ll encounter an officer, only to be hit by a Musou attack that drops your health below the restricted level.

Unlike other Warriors games, your Musou bar doesn’t fill while fighting enemies, but rather each character’s Musou bar automatically fills while they’re not being controlled. Instead, your attacks fill a shared bar that allows you to unleash even more powerful team attacks by hitting both Z triggers. So basically, same as always, just with an additional bar that fills on it’s own to give you an excuse to change characters. Character health also slowly regenerates when not being controlled.

Like its parent games, Warriors Orochi 3 is playable in two player co-op. Its a lot of fun to run around with a friend and compete to see who can get more kills while cooperating to complete the battle. Unfortunately, the Wii Remote/Nunchuck is not compatible with the game, so you’ll need a Classic Controller or Pro Controller to play co-op.

New to Hyper is the Wii U gamepad, which is hilariously underutilized. By default, it mirrors the action of the main screen, but it doesn’t look as good with washed-out colors and poorer textures and it loses sync for a second or two from time to time. It works when the TV is being used for something else, but it is best used as a map screen… that displays the exact same map that’s also sitting in the middle of the screen.

In fact, the only impressive feature of the gamepad is the ability to play co-op on it. One player gets the TV, while the other gets the gamepad’s screen. This is a really cool feature that I would love to see other games do.

Also new to Hyper are a few new characters that were not featured in the original version of Warriors Orochi 3. If you already own another version of the game, don’t waste your time with this one. There are only a few new characters and they don’t add enough to justify a second purchase.

There’s really not a lot to the game. It’s a Warriors game, after all. All you need to do is pick three characters you like, run around the battlefield as directed and kill anything with a red health bar floating over their head. Its not uncommon to see your kill count shoot up to 3000 and that’s exactly how it should be.

Like the rest of the Warriors franchise, Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper is an excellent stress relief tool. It’s simple, stupid and repetitive, but it doesn’t take away from the charm the franchise has. Anyone looking for a deep action experience should look elsewhere, though.

The base version of Warriors Orochi 3 is available on Playstation 3 and X-Box 360 and another expanded version, Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate, will be available in fall 2014 on Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Playstation Vita and X-Box One.

Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate promises improved visuals on PS4 and XB1 and extra characters, though, like Hyper, the extra characters will ultimately mean little and are unlikely to be enough to justify another purchase if you already have a copy of another version of the game.