Dynasty Warriors 9 - Yellow Turban Rebellion | Cao Cao (Part 1)

Here we start the game proper. It throws a lot of tutorial boxes your way to try to show you how to do things in the open world. For now it's best to just follow the map to your objective until you get a grasp on how things in this game work. There's a lot of new mechanics like the grappling hook, the bow, and...

...Okay there's really not that many new mechanics now that I think about it. I mean hell, the bow is a returning mechanic from previous games. I'll get into the bow later when we actually use it to hunt. There are blacksmiths and shops we can use to buy items and weapons, you can also craft them if you get the materials from quest rewards or find them in the world yourself. I mostly ignore this because I've always hated crafting in games because it just brings the gameplay to a dead halt, especially for something like Warriors. So I barely use it, and honestly you don't really need it.

After exploring the town a little bit our first mission is to defeat some Yellow Turbans coming to attack the village with the help of Sun Jian. Except Sun Jian just gives us the quest and doesn't actually fight because the AI in this game is wonky, so he just stands still the entire battle. In the battle we rush outside and fight Zhou Cang and a few generic officers. That's it.

There's not any stages to describe anymore, so most of the battles are like this. You see the enemy on the open field. You go to enemy and stab them. And that's really it. With how this "Flow Attack" system in DW9 works when you start to combo an enemy, they can't stop you at all. They don't even use their musou to break out of combos. So you just mash square button in between using special attacks and wail on them. You don't even have to position yourself because the game automatically makes you close in on the enemy just from mashing square. Yes, they've made DW even more button mashy by removing the need to even position your character.

After that we just sort of get thrown to the wolves in the big open world. We have some side objectives to do, so I go and complete a few of them. They're optional but completing them lowers the difficulty of the bigger battles in this game. Not that you need them to be easier, in the end it hardly makes a difference and I'll get into why later. The two side missions I do are to defeat Zhang Liang and then one for defeating Bo Cai.

You can fast travel automatically closer to objectives by pressing square in the mission select menu. Otherwise you just have to walk to your destination yourself.

37:29 - Zhang Liang Side Mission

When you approach Zhang Liang, you have to wait for dialogue to trigger so that he'll spawn phantoms of himself before you can attack him. If you defeat the right one, which is easy to find because it's the one that was there before he made any phantoms, the others disappear and he dies. Yay. The other side mission is literally just going to the destination and defeating Bo Cai. Thrilling.

As you can see these side missions aren't all that spectacular. Honestly they're pretty damn bland. They're stuff you'd find in like, Xtreme Mode in DW4/5 or Mercenary Mode in SW2XL. There's not much to say about most of them because it's just going to the target destination and killing the officers there. And that's...the whole game, really.