Samurai Warriors Chronicle 3DS Review

Samurai Warriors Chronicle is sort of a handheld spinoff version of samurai Warriors three. I personally have played no other games in either the samurai warriors or Dynasty Warriors series but I have to say that I was impressed by the robustness of content as well as graphic's of this pretty fun hack and slash game.

When the game starts you the option of playing as a male or female character, after selecting the gender game starts in 1500 feudal Japan tribes clans chieftains emperors warlords are everywhere and they all hate each other. You as a wandering warrior or mercenary seemingly at first arbitrarily pick a side of a battle and then fight along side that warlords against his bitter rival, until the next mission where you fight on your former enemy side against your former rival. At least this is how the first chapter of the game plays out. Counting the bonus gadin in the fifth chapter, there are five chapters in the game. In the second and third chapter however you do stick to one side in the conflicts. Before a battle he could single player showing some background information about the attackers are the tacky as the end then matte screen will summarize the events that are about to take place and show you the location in Japan than occasionally get some general chatter; where your allies for mission will talk amongst themselves when you see a map of the battle field with your league general explaining the strategy of the map you can also set your equipment and skills are than you find in the mission after mission silver your generals will again speak sometimes you sometimes look themselves and then you'll get the opportunity to pick out a random general in a choice of three shocking them or to better appreciate yourself to unlock them as a character and stage or her weapon or comment style for your main character to use.

Samurai Warriors Chronicle is essentially a hack and slash. You see an enemy their health bar is red, you then mash the Y button until they're dead. When you see a blue health bar don't kill them since they are a ally, not that you could anyway. You can also use the X button for a slower more damaging attack, or the a button or a magic finishing move, but of the most the time you'll want to just keep mashing Y. missions play out usually something like this . The enemy has two to six main boss generals, and a whole lot of officers who are like sub-bosses, and of course a lot of foot men, which is varieties like magicians wh gunners, archers, and plain old regular samurais. The players side  also usually has the same number  of men at your disposal, but in added to the main player character, it also play as any of the three allied generals available for that mission, a later on after you've beaten the mission once, you can assemble your own custom team of whatever characters like to take unto battle with you. There are also various points on the map that can be controlled by either side such as guard stations or garrisons. The battle gauge on the top of the lower screen represents momentum and troop moral from each side conflict, blue being  your side red being the enemy. Each time a general or officer is killed or a guard station or garrisons changes control the battle gauge of the losing side decreases. Likewise completing sub-mission objectives  within a given time limt, which is usually one to three minutes, like killing 100 enemies protecting allied officer or stopping a particular general from capturing a garrison, will increase your battle gage if successful and of course lower at in the event of failure. The advantage of having a high battle gauge is that all your troops will have greater health, they will put a greater fight and be more likely to capture enemy territory. It also affect the amount of allied troops that even spawn in the battlefield. Annoyingly  it seems like failure of even one mission, can bring the enemy's battle gauge from almost 0 to practically full, but however it seems impossible for the players side to ever regain lost ground on their battle gage. I also can't seem to find a way to control regular officers or at least give them orders on the players side. Missions end in success when the boss enemy general is defeated, but they can also end in defeat when the main player character or one of the key allied generals are killed. At the end of every mission you'll have the opportunity to distribute weapons among the main player character as well as any of the three playable generals from that level. Also at the end of missions you'll received stat boosting items which can also be used to upgrade and improve the stats of the aforementioned weapons later in the shop menu. Now during the game to switch to any of four characters where you want using the touch screen, just as long as the character you're currently playing as isn't being attacked. Given the short time limit of the various objectives that you must complete during a mission is often a good strategy to divide and conquer, and send your forces to different areas of the map. Outside of directly controlling the character yourself, you also use the battle plans menu to tell a AI controlled general to travel to a certain area of the map, or to attack a particular garrison or enemy. Annoyingly however AI generals controlled in this manner seemed to move at one's third the speed you would if you were playing as them, also they almost never are able to intercept an defeat a moving enemy officer or general, which causes much frustration.  It's things like this that  make me wish again had some form of co-op as it would makes completing mission objectives infinitely easier.
Also annoying is that no matter how many allied AI forces are attacking the pulse general even if he has zero health left you the player regardless of what the character playing as must get the lesson of the boss in order to successfully beat him, if you are trying to complete objectives while the AI holds off the boss could potentially be screwed over by the zero health zero health boss slowly but surely killing all of your AI comrades since at this point is effectively invincible unless of course you were fighting himm
This leads me to the crazy upgrade system un the game. At the end of the mission you're prompted to pick which character to give a new weapon to. What weapons they receive is random, but I think I think it has something to do with the Luck stat. What I don't know however is the quality of the weapon you get determined by the character receiving it luck stat, or by the character who originally picked up the item luck stat? There are three kinds of weapons speed balance and power. Speed attacks faster but does less damage while power does more damage attacks will and I think that balance is rather self-explanatory. In addition of this weapons can also have up to two different elements gems, such as fire wind or lighting. Weapons also have bonus stats, in different areas like attack defense health healing ride or agility. Usually she receive only have 2 to 4 of these extra stat increases in modest sums like attack +20 or ride +30. All these features of weapons you receive are entirely random. You can however combine two weapons to add two or three points to an existing stat, or if you wish to add entirely new attribute to the weapon that doesn't already have will have to first add another elemental gem to it and then combine the weapon with the item that has desired attribute. For instance you often find weapons that increase defense and health, but not attack still have to add it manually. What's really annoying however is that weapons can only be upgraded nine times before being maxed out, and finding weapons adding an element gem, and adding attribute item ALL count as an upgrade. Luckily however you can still use the maxed out weapon to upgrade another non-maxed out one , which gives any extra stat boost of 10 or 15 points to every attribute . So the best way to get a perfect weapon is to wait until you find one of your preferred elemental gem attribute loadout, and then put it aside while you combine an upgrade many other weapons to maximize the effectiveness of upgrading your primary dream weapon. This process of course requires courting a massive amount of otherwise useless except for upgrading potential weapons, but however each character can only hold eight weapons, which is infuriating given the aforementioned design choices. Likely there is a way to bypass the very poorly designed upgrade system. If you betray and befriend one of the generals of the game by talking to them after battles and choosing the right dialog choice which is usually easy to do, you can first unlock them as a playable character in any stage and then later unlock their signature weapon for use with your main character these weapons are already powerful enough that they don't really need the upgraded.

As a interesting diversion also by horses in the game are preferred to as mounts that in theory increase your run speed and travel time across the map you can also equip other characters besides your main one with mounts as well to varying this success. The problem is that I find it difficult to attack enemies wall-mounted at least with a male character supposedly it's a much easier for female. So why get to enemies that want to attack I have to get off my horse. Then as you progress the game and your character is upgraded you'll start to notice that your run speed is faster than the horse ride speed and then you'll start to question why even bother having a horse. You can buy upgraded faster horses but that's money you could be spending on upgrading weapons so I don't see a point.

This upgrade aspect is emphasized throughout the game and you might be tempted to upgrade the weapons of characters other than your main one however you will soon be punished for doing this as your ally characters are certainly changing throughout the first chapter of the campaign and much of the second and third as well. The point where I adopt the policy of only if the character is the sole reason why I'm not beating this level should I upgrade them.
In addition to weapon upgrades your basic character stats will also increase to check the status and level will also eventually increase given experience from killing enemies to 99.

On normal mode I find the game to be pretty difficult. It starts out okay but by the first mission of the second chapter things start to get Harry. I you'll find yourself restarting missions three or four times. Soon by the end of chapter 2 you'll be redoing missions 6 array to 8 times and my chapter 4 again will seem almost impossible. When your basic character stats-based character level gets to 30 the game becomes significantly easier. The difficulty in the game comes from your stupid AI allies who seem incapable of completing mission objectives by themselves and annoying catch up AI enemies. You have plenty of time with all your characters at full health, about to beat a mission when the boss at zero health blocks all your attacks, does a infinite combo and kills your entire team, forcing you to restart the entire 30 minute mission over again. I don't think I have to tell you how maddening this is. There is a way around it over. Any time you're about to commit a risky activity in the game like fire boss or if you have a tight time to complete a certain task. Press the start button and use the interns save feature to save your progress in the middle of a battle then if you get screwed over by the annoying catch up AI, and go back to the start menu leave the battle reload to where you left off before the cheapness began. My view however is that I shouldn't have to do this. I shouldn't have to save every five minutes in fear of having to redo 30 minutes of work do to poor game design

The graphics of samurai Warriors impressive they remind me of a original Xbox game, colors are sharp with character models being nicely detailed especially in the general conversations. I've counted at least 12 enemies on screen at once, unfortunately over when there is more than this they can to pop in or appeared and then disappear randomly based off your proximity to them. The 3-D aspect is interesting. When turned on the battlefield gains extra sense of depth but I must however question what things are chosen to pop out and what are chosen for the backround. Why do text and menus icons pop out a character models in the foreground, also reading text in general in 3d is the disorientating. They probably would've been better off just making your character in the center of the screen pop-up instead. There is the occasional pop out a fact of projectile weapons which is nice.
The campaign's samurai warriors is pretty lengthy that I would estimate for most players at least 30 hours. It is especially good for a handheld game. And if your completionest it could potentially take hundreds of hours to max out all your characters to level 99.
The music is pretty good but very repetitive it often seems as though there's only maybe four tracks. At first it sets the mood and atmosphere to the game pretty well but soon grows monotonous.

Characters  from. And being stupid and missing orders repented the magic hellish upgrade system 3-D and eh not enough time to complete the missions upgrading characters when they switch every mission seems pointless, why can't they don't team up for time dilation after a repeat upgrade in general being annoying enemies block at the Emmys running much faster you get a guy running one third the speed you do a guide by killing targets you mark them to kill and die without being able to kill bosses don't matter how many of them there are out while the boss health is. Good voice acting but it's all in Japanese. Pretty long 20 out.
The game is presented nicely with full voice acting hour I suppose aptly so it is all in Japanese. Only things add up to me often playing  without the sound on