ARSLAN: THE WARRIORS OF LEGEND Reviews

Of all of the Musou/Warriors games that Koei Tecmo have ever released, Arslan is by far the single best. It goes above and beyond as an action game, simple enough to allow for the braindead button-mashing experience you probably know Musou games for, but there's a surprisingly deep layer of complexity to the combat and mechanics in this game that nothing else they've made has ever even come close to matching. Every single character has a variety of weapons, and even shared weapons do not have the same movesets like they do in other musou games with this mechanic (e.g. Gieve, Farangis, Arslan and Daryun all have a bow and their movesets are all different, a rarity for musou titles). You can use 3 weapons at a time (characters have 2-3 weapons total each base game, with some extras unlockable through the DLC missions adding even more to character variety) and switch between them all in multiple ways. The first way, and one of the game's main mechanics, is the chain rush. After performing any of your power attack string enders, pressing the special move button will perform a "chain rush" which sends out a small gust of wind to continue a juggle whilst also temporarily switching you to your next weapon, allowing you to continue the string after that with the new moveset (where the chain-rush counts as the next light attack hit, e.g. if I do my C2 with a sword and then chain rush, if I immediately press power attack again i'll get the next weapon's C3, if I do a light beforehand it'll be the next weapon's C4). Naturally the limitation of the chain rush is that you can't go backwards in the string order, but you can also manually switch weapons. This doesn't send out that gust of wind, and you can't cancel into it like a chain rush, but it has the advantage of letting you initiate with that weapon and also having a different chain rush order (which can completely change your combos). Normally this switch you would do in between fights or while you're not doing anything, but after certain moves, e.g. C5 with Arslan's sword, you have enough time to recover, switch weapons and still continue the combo with that new switch. This can be used in conjunction with the chain rushes too, for instance if I do a regular C4 string with Arslan's spear, you can then chain rush into Sword C5, manually weapon switch, walk up and continue the combo, and since you switched weapons manually your chain rush string has reset and you can continue to extend with yet more weapon swapping shenanigans. These mechanics on their own make Arslan a more dynamic, complex and interesting game to play than most other Musou games, but there's a lot more to it than just that. Each weapon also has several elemental variations that slightly change their power attacks. These elements not only change what the attacks are on a basic level, they all have distinct properties. Fire damages enemies over time so long as they are in the air, encouraging extended juggles to maximise it's damage output, very useful in conjunction with chain rushes (do a power attack with a fire element weapon, chain rush into your next weapon to extend the juggle). Miasma is a similar damage over time effect, however less damaging than fire but it continues to damage grounded enemies too, thus it is not as useful for combos but better for crowd controlling and handling multiple officers at once. Water slows down your opponents, this includes their falling animation, making it exceptionally good for extending combos. This works well more for manual weapon switching than for chain rushes, as the slow down of the water means you will have more time to recover and manually switch to the next weapon, although you can easily apply both methods (Start a chain rush combo, go into a water element weapon and apply the effect, end the chain rush, manually switch to the next weapon, begin another chain rush combo). Wind shoots out orbs that can juggle enemies on hit, but not particularly well, however it decimates enemy guard making it a very good opening tool when fighting boss enemies. Each weapon also has a "fusion" moveset which mixes a few of the elements across different charge attacks of it's moveset. Choosing your weapon order, the element (or lack of element) each weapon uses and considering how best to combo, crowd control, etcetera adds a lot to the combat especially on higher difficulties. Add on top of that, unlike some musou games Arslan has a manual dodge function, and you can also dodge cancel any (all that I've tested at least) normal or charge attack, adding another way to animation cancel and extend combos without using your chain rushes. The usefulness of dodge cancels varies from character to character (Narsus' paintbrush moveset can do a lot with it, a character like Elam or Farangis not so much) but even if a character cannot utilise it well for combos, it's still a useful mechanic for destroying guard gauges or just cancelling recovery animations at the end of your combos. Speaking of guard gauges, that's a mechanic that makes officers and boss fights a lot more interesting than other musou games. In a lot of musou games you can juggle officers, but there's usually a mechanic to prevent it from going too long (in DW and SW officers will randomly flip out, preventing combo depth). Arslan does not for the most part do this, you can juggle to your heart's content, but the balancing factor comes from the guard gauge. Most officers don't have one and you can juggle them from the start, however higher level officers and all bosses do have a guard gauge. This gauge essentially provides them super armour and negates (almost) all damage they take until you deplete it. However, once broken that officer becomes stunned and you can combo them as much as you like until their gauge recovers (which is something you can play around too, like with Gieve rather than ending your combo the way you normally would you could end it by setting up his clone/distraction so that when the officer gets up you can easily begin destroying their guard gauge again quickly, sacrificing combo damage for what is essentially fighting game style wakeup pressure). This allows for combos without completely trivialising officer encounters. And as mentioned in that aside about the """wakeup pressure""" each character has a special move they can use at any time during movement or normal attacks (not during power attacks as attempting that is how you initiate a chain rush) that varies wildly. These are very diverse and VERY useful, trading a small amount of your musou gauge for an attack that can be used to reset your chain rush combos, to escape enemy attacks, to move to areas you normally couldn't reach, etcetera. They're also usually a character's most versatile tool, providing multiple advantages (e.g. Elam's special move allows him to leap into the air with this bow, which he can also followup with firing volleys of arrows below him if you press the attack button. This can be used for strong crowd control, it can extend your combos and you can just use the leap part of it to reach areas in maps that other characters cannot). There are even more nuances to the combat that could be mentioned (e.g. Narsus' setplay moves, Daryun's extended mounted moveset compared to every other character, getting Azrael as a support with Arslan) but this would be an absurdly long review if I went into every last detail of it. The short version is simply: Arslan - The Warriors of Legend takes the basic musou formula and builds on it in so many unique and varied ways that it's combat becomes much more than just a musou game, potentially being appealing to players of more traditional 3d action games with more complex combat, and is all throughout an extremely polished and enjoyable game with a surprsing amount of content. This is the best game Omega Force has ever developed and likely will ever develop.

great for a fan of samurai/dynasty warriors series! even if you are not game is still pretty neat . slaughtering thousands of soldiers in matter of minutes now in HD Good combat mechanics , interesting story , nice music , many collectables and new options that we didnt have in Warriors series. maybe a bit overpriced but its worth it to me since this sort of game usualy have around 100-150 hours playtime for me.

This is one of those 4 / 10 sort of games. It isn't that I hate it, but I've played a lot of musou games and this isn't a particularly good one. Plus it is for an anime I'd never even heard of before and am unable to find anywhere even now. Most other musou games are rather more fleshed out than this one. There aren't many characters, and quite a few of them have clone movesets or near enough to them. Weapons can't be significantly customised beyond picking an elemental moveset after unlocking them, and an annoying card collection is the substitute for character skills (but you'll probably want exactly the same cards on every character anyway since some are overwhelmingly better than others). Word of advice: Even if you don't bother with any others, do stage "The Villager's Plight" on Hard mode and get 250 KOs quickly during the 2nd objective for the single greatest card in the game. Boosted attack speed is a massive game-changer. Story Mode is VERY badly handled. Which is to say you start the game with Story Mode as the only option, and it just continues endlessly through battle > cutscene > battle > cutscene without any indication that it is safe to exit the game. Sometimes cutscenes segue into gameplay without any warning and drop you in the middle of things if you happen not to be holding the controls at the time (I've had to restart stages due to this). The story doesn't really go anywhere since it follows what is presumably season 1 of the anime and ends on a cliffhanger. It is a kinda naff story besides, though I guess I can't blame that on the game. There are quite a lot of "generic angelic prince reclaiming a kingdom" stories out there, and it is absolutely NO different to any other. Anyhow, only by opting to Interim Save in a battle or simply risk exiting after the first do you find out there are other parts to this game. For the most part though, they're just replaying story mode stages. There are a few other extra stages, but that is it. The gameplay itself is mostly normal musou fare. Press normal attack a few times then press strong attack to do a combo. That sort of thing. About the only unique feature are the Mardan Rush things, but they don't last very long and half the stages don't even have any. Plus the game itself is ludicrously overpriced most of the time. I managed to get it on sale, but even then it wasn't reduced much. And it is WAY too expensive for being so half-arsed. It is also worth noting that the only DLC worth bothering with are the Scenario ones to unlock extra stages because, as is always the case with Musou DLC, the extra DLC stages are by far the best for grinding out Experience and extras. Anyway, yeah. I like musou games of all sorts so I can't really hate this, but I am disappointed at how shallow it is, especially for the price.

Played through to completion! Graphics – For what it is - Dope. Gameplay – Musou. Soundtrack – 9/10 Windows – 10 Difficulty – Pretty easy. Grind – None. Story – Sterling Standard. Price – Sale. Bugs – None. Rating - 9/10 Play it again - Yes!

The game has a few major issues, of which I will post here: 1) The gameplay. For those of you who are drawn here as Dynasty/Samurai warriors fans, know that the gameplay in this game will feel like a snail's pace when compared to these two series. Instead of there being officers proper in the game, the game throws a lot of 'Generals' at you, and the 'Generals' are frequently uninteresting in their combat style. Compared to the consistent named-units you get in the Dynasty/Samurai warriors games, this honestly feels like you're fighting fodder to get to a 'boss' at the end of a level. And what this does is create a feeling of wasting time until you can get to the end. Not only that, but the idea of the 'Charges' - while a brilliant idea that's fun in the first execution or two - does not stay fun. Once you've done it once or twice, all it becomes is a mechanic that has you 'moving forward' instead of feeling like the leader of an army. 2) The visuals. Dear god, the visuals. Anime style is perfectly fine - I would've LOVED if the anime visuals were beautifully done, like watching an anime. That'd of been a huge turn-on for me personally. Instead, we got some kind of mutant abomination of anime - where every character does not feel like they were animated, so much as they were drawn on a page, cut out of the page, and treated like cardboard cutouts placed overtop a background with mouthes that flash up and down in the movement. 3) The story - I do not think I am qualified to overly talk on this one, but the initial presentation of the story created a very repetitious level design out the gate. You start with a story that has you do a few mechanics. Cool, I can get into that! Then it cuts to a flashback of... something, in the past. Which is really just a nicely-masked tutorial. Ok, cool. Then we start the very first level again, only... from a few minutes before the same point we had already played. Literally, the first level... Played itself twice. So it was a slice of the level that it made you play twice with an extension on the beginning/end... It just didn't really feel fluid. The things I liked: + I felt the tutorials were nicely implemented into the game, to create story+gameplay. I like when games do that, though everyone may not agree. + I like the customization of the characters, and know that had I been able to get into this game, I would've enjoyed using the 'cards' system to customize my stats and skill loadouts. + Voice acting is really nice, though it's only in Japanese. I didn't mind it too much. + THE GAME HAS CO-OP CAMPAIGN! Can play through with a friend, BUT A huge minus because your friend has to be either CLEARED of the stage OR ON THE SAME STAGE AS YOU, or else they can't join. So, if you're gonna pla with someone, make sure you're at the same point or one of you will be going back! This was a refund for me. I might re-buy it at $20.00, but not worth it at $50.00

I always loved DW games, but this spin off is quite a pleasent surprise, you have all the whistles of dw, with an hybrid rpgesque lvling system and equipment , in this case called Skill Cards . The combat is very fluid , very dynamic, and have an adition of a infinite combo system, that if you know what your doing you can chain attacks forever! Technically , KT finally listened and the game can run at 4k, provide your system can run it, and the graphics are beautifull, run at 60 fps , but it have a 30 fps lock on mid-battles cutscenes for when you destroy a barrier with the cavalry, but they are fast animations and dont distract you from the action, you would only notice that if you run with a fps counter. The transition to in-game engine from anime cutscenes is pretty well done too! Heard AMD can have drops in fps, i run on Nvidia and didnt had any fps drops was solid 60 all the time. All in all, its worth its price, lots of fun, and a must have for Musou fans :)

My impression of port so far. This is KT best port of a Dynasty Warrior type game I have played, however it still has a lot of flaws. Reasons to avoid: - If you play with KB and Mouse. Game doesn't support using mouse. Button prompts are xbox360 so you need to memorize the keyboard controls. - If you prefer English dub audio. This game has Japanese audio only. - Not familiar with anime. Not require to watch anime since cut-scenes summaries episodes.You can watch Arslan anime steaming from Funimation website. Subbed is free, dubbed requires subscription. - Not using a 16:9 aspect ratio display. - Possible performance issues with AMD video card drivers. Improvements compared to other KT games - Able to select resolutions above 1080p. - A lot of graphics options to configure. - PS4 level of quality and better if your system can handle it. Suggestions for KT: - Add mouse support to control camera. - Support multiple button prompts. If player is using keyboard switch to keyboard button prompts if player starts using controller switch to controller prompt. Allow modders to customize controller button images to support other type of controllers. - Add more AA options such as SMAA. - Don't lock real time rendered cut-scenes at 30fps. Issues encountered: - Performance issues with resolution 1440p and high settings. My Titan X usage isn't maxed out and CPU has very little load. I have to switch to medium setting or 1080p. Even at 1080p there are some frame drops. - When displaying on my TV game doesn't launch properly showing a green screen in full screen mode and causes performance issues. I get around this issue by launching game in windowed mode then switching to full-screen in game. Video of tutorials at start of game. Detailed tutorial prompts don't display since I already completed them. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=620740830

Gameplay and graphics were great but I finished the campaign in 14 hours and the MAJORITY of that was watching cutscenes. Fun game, good co-op, but there's not nearly enough content for the price. Wait for a sale and/or DLC. PS: There absolutely IS local splitscreen/couch Co-op, ignore the other review(s) that say(s) otherwise. I think you may have to do the first mission or two before you can access it, but from then on second player just has to hit start.

It's weird when I really enjoyed a game, and I mean /really/ enjoyed it, but still can't recommend the purchase. Arslan: Warriors of Legend has perhaps the best combat of any Musou game, the best action, the best graphics, the best 'story' (clearly borrowed from an anime), the best character selection, and the best- well, everything. But the entire game is let down by a lack of content. Previous Musou games guaranteed not only dozens of hours of main story to chew through, but plenty of free modes, unlockables, and 'what ifs'. Arslan gives none of that and only has a 9 hour long story-mode to show for it with 150 dollars of cut content resold to the player as DLC. It's a shame, too, since the story was lovely and well presented. Even at half-price (30 USD at time of writing), it wasn't enough of a game to make me feel like I got my money's worth though.

A Koei Tecmo game with: [list] [*]Online Coop [*]60 FPS [*]better graphics than the ps4 version [*]4K Support [/list] Is this real life?