I’ll start off by saying, if you don’t like Dynasty Warriors games, make like Xam’d and fucking scram.
RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY.
That’s actually how many times they say RUN AWAY in the Xam’d intro.
Down to business.
Scrapped Princess Review.
Okay so well, Scrapped Princess, or Scra-Prin is a 24 ep series by BONES that aired sometime in 2003, I think it’s based off a series of light novels.. so it’s not an original thing. I’m not sure how close the anime adaptation is but I’m not reviewing the books, so it’s irrelevant.
What’s the premise? Well, there’s a princess, and a prophecy. The prophecy states that when she turns 16, she will become “the poison that will destroy the world”, as such, her father the King orders her to be executed at birth. She’s tossed down a ravine by a Knight, and supposedly, that was that. However, she survives (it makes sense when you watch it) and is taken in by a family of commoners. Eventually news spreads that she is infact alive, and she is known as the “Scrapped Princess” and hunted by.. well, pretty much everyone. So yeah, it’s Pacifica (the princess) and her new brother and sister, Shannon and Raquel against the world, more or less.
So throughout the series stuff happens, there’s some pretty inventive (you can argue it isn’t, but it’s hard to be original nowdays, so ssh) plot twists and generally, the story is good enough, not amazing, but not boring. The series does have its bad points, such as well, it starts off slow. Very slow. It also starts off rather abruptly, and if you didn’t read a summary (such as the above) I’m pretty sure you’d be clueless as to wtf is happening for the first few episodes. That aside, there’s a classic trap, sadly one people still fall for. Characters that are pointless in the story. As in, they’ll take up an episode or so with their introduction, yet from then on they are essentially useless and serve no purpose other than to sit there grinning happily etc. I won’t name them as I’ll try to avoid spoilers etc.
As for the good things, well, the music is good, the animation is good, some of the facial expressions are pretty funny without being absurdly distorted >:EEEE style faces, again, it’s hard to explain. The animation is pretty standard throughout most of the show, and above average, there’s little QUALITY moments (at least I didn’t see many) and as a whole, the animation looks smooth enough, the background are pretty neat too. Animation becomes alot better during fight scenes, however, sadly only the first series of fights in the series are.. well.. I’m trying not to spoil anything, but let’s just say after around the halfway point it’s not really sword fighting as such (Which is my preference). Yet, it’s more of a personal thing. Production quality is quite high. As for voice actors.. eh, I’m apparently a pretty bad judge of voice actors, but I thought they were all fine. Hmm..
One thing I enjoyed alot, was the magic system they employed, it was sort of like the kido in Bleach.. only.. different. As in, you can skip the incantation of a spell, yet generally that reduces the power and so forth, the incantations themselves are pretty awesome, however I had terrible subs that phrased them weirdly. “Wall, protect everything” as an example. As for the Peacekeepers (who are the main big bads you could say), they were very awesome I thought. This is bordering on spoilers, but I thought of them as like Agents from the Matrix.. only there’s a very small number of them. Their eyes fucking creeped me the fuck out, they’d just be standing there then it suddenly zooms in on their face and their sclera (thanks Adam8) turns red, their pupils turn black and they just.. ugh.. yeah. I get really freaked out by eyes.
Uh now that I’ve got distracted by IRC again. Where was I. Well, that’s probably everything to do with Scrapped Princess, so, now the all important rating.
7/10. That’s the same level as Death Note and Code Geass. So yes, I would reccommend it to watch if you like fantasy/sci-fi and so on. (Those are my two favourite genres in order, and fantasy animes are pretty rare as I’ve said this all before deja vu jam it up a jew) Of course, you can count things like E7 as fantasy, but I mean classic/high fantasy with dragons, knights blah blah.
Warriors Orochi 2/Musou Orochi: Maou Sairin
Ah, Warriors Crotchi Two. Where to start? Well, It’s essentially the same as WO1 so I won’t touch on the core mechanics too much.
You pick a team of 3 out of 92(or so) different characters of 3 different types. Power, speed and technique. You then take your team and beat the living crap out of thousands of peons. You can upgrade your weapons, fuse weapons, level up abilties, find new ones, get specific things for each character, play the story mode and so on. Simply put, it’s a fan-service game for fans of Samurai Warriors and Dynasty Warriors, which I am, hence I like it.
What’s new in WO2 then? Well, there’s a good deal of new characters, some of which are from SW2XL so not really “new” technically. The entirely new characters are Fu Xi and Nu Wa (from DW3), Himiko, Orochi X (well he’s basically giga Orochi) Kiyomori, Taigong Wang, Sun Wukong and Minamoto. All in all there’s 92 or so characters, ALOT. There’s not even many clones nowdays, indeed, everyone is pretty much different, the only similiar characters really are Ma Chao/Jiang Wei, and the “rulers” aka Sun Quan/Jian, Liu Bei and Cao Cao, they all share similiarish movesets, but different types, abilities, special moves and musous etc. So, what else is new? There’s two new attacks, Triple Attack and Support Attack. Triple attacks are activate by pressing LT and RT at the same time, when you’re in red health (or you can enchant it so you can do it whenever) and it basically.. well, it OBLITERATES everything. Imagine DW3’s double musou, lightning and fire enchanted weapons with super attacks. Yeah, it’s like that but fucking on CRACK. I’ll give a description of what happens when you do a triple attack with Musashi Miyamoto, Toshiee Maeda and Kojiro. Kojiro activates, smashes the peons in a cone around him, Toshiee then swaps in and does a quick series of thrusting attacks, Musashi then swaps in and smashes them up into the air, then it swaps back to Kojiro, only the other two are now standing there too, so you’re in a circle of three, then all three of them begin smashing everything in the universe. I got a 2000+ hit combo from one triple attack once. Oh right, and some character combinations have special ones, such as say, Cao Cao, Sun Jian and Liu Bei, they have one where they cackle about three kingdoms and make weird poses whilst their symbols explode everywhere. Nobunaga, Ieyasu and Hideyoshi have one where loads of kanji type symbols appear on the screen, it’s pretty kickass looking. As for support attacks, essentially, it’s just something used for when you’re getting your ass handed to you, for example, say the 1000 Wukong clones are beating me down, I hit LB and X/Y and Cao Cao or whoever is on your team will come in, say “I AM HERE” and smash them with a quick attack. It’s essentially something you use when you’re in trouble of dying.
What else is new? Dream mode, it’s basically like the mode in DW5XL I forgot the name of. You do unique stages with a specific team, fufilling conditions and so on. For example, there’s one where you play as Saika, Jiang Wei and Lu Xun, and you have to fight your masters, and overcome them via tactics etc. My personal favourite is one where you play as Zhuge Liang, Zhou Yu and Shingen Takeda, pitted against Sima Yi and his friends, not only does Men of Intelligence play on that level, but you get to do tons of tactics, which I like.
Versus mode also has a new fighting mode style thing, which essentially turns it into Soul Calibur, that’s okay I guess, no online though which is annoying.
Which brings me onto the bad points of the game, it’s a lazy port by KOEI, who insist on primarily designing PS2 games, I think this is a moronic plan of action, considering the possibilties of the DW franchise on “next gen” consoles. There is so much room to expand yet.. KOEI ain’t taking it. For example, the graphics, whilst not exactly bad.. are nowhere near the level that a 360 can do. It’s basically the ps2 version running at a higher resolution, with real time shadows turned on, more bloom and SLLLLLLIGHTLY sharper textures. When the game first came out it was plagued with HORRIBLE slowdown that made the game almost unplayable which is unacceptable for a game running on the 360. To their credit, KOEI patched it somewhat quickly, which indeed saved their score. Where’s the ONLINE too? That’s a horrible thing to neglect, people love online, I love online, online is easy to do and it extends the lifetime of a game tons. Please put online in the next DW/SW game.. KOEI.
Of course, I’m relatively easily impressed, as such I think WO2 looks quite nice when it’s running at 60FPS, the effects are colourful, the models are great and highly detailed and it’s just awesome unleashing an elemental attack and watching millions of peons go soaring away.
Eh.. I’m not gonna give WO2 a score out of 10, it’s really not something I can do. See, from a pure review of the game point of view, I would give it a 4/10, yet I enjoy it – enjoying it doesn’t make it a good game though. It’s cheaply made, the production quality is pretty low, although the voice actors are improving, for sure. Even so, if you’re a fan of DW/SW games, I would say pick it up, it’s good fun and will probably last longer than WO1. If you’re not a huge fan and have WO1, not really much point buying WO2, it doesn’t add tons to the first game that you’d appreciate. If you’ve never played a DW game before, make your own choice. I think DW is something you either love or hate. I myself have a love/hate relationship with it because I LOVE DW games, I just hate KOEI for holding them back so.
This is what I want to see in DW7/WO3 or maybe SW3 (though I think it’s gonna be Wii only – ….)
- Online co-op and versus modes
- Empires mode intergrated into the game
- A GOOD create-a-warrior system, as detailed as SCIV, have its own mode where you join a kingdom like Destiny mode I think it was, in DW5. New items and armour can be picked up etc.
- Weapon system like WO, please.
- Lu Bu needs his DWTactics outfit, PLEASE.
- More outfits for everyone, customizable colours, and EVERY outfit from 2-6.
- Expand the stronghold system used in DW6, increase the types of stronghold, example, if you capture a “Stable” type stronghold, you can unleash a horsey charge and so on.
- More enemies on screen, smarter AI, I want them to actively COME TO ME to try and take me down, I want archers ambushing me, I want fire attacks, I want to feel like I’m quite literally a one man army changing the course of the battle. Or, if I stay back, I want more control over troops, intergrate an RTS style troop management system into the pause menu, so I can tell Xiahou Dun to stop fucking about over there and go help Dian Wei fight Zhou Tai, and so on.
- More character growth options, so perhaps I can make Xiao Qiao focus on Attack, make Xu Zhu focus on speed and so forth, more crap like that, I’m bad at thinking of character stuff, just.. more RPG things.
Yeah.. bye. I think that’s everything. Oh right, Fable II and Far Cry 2 soon. Joy.
