Chaos Legion was good dude if you played it right. If you used your legions are actual people like musou bodyguards the game sucks. If you used your legions as weapons, the battle system was basically Devil May Cry 3 but slower and not as good. The amount of combos you could do were awesome. So much variety and GREAT juggling. There aren't many good combo vids online because no one played the game but:
Now I'll give you that the levels and enemies and stuff sucked in CL and really the only thing good was the battle system. But then when you're spending 99% of your time in musou just fighting hordes of enemies, battle variety is really the most important thing to keep it from being repetitive.
There's no "playing it right." The game just sucked, sorry mayne. I don't recall the battle system being all that great either; CL was even blander than Koei's games are in terms of enemy design and environments, and hitting the same enemy-things over and over again got boring fast. I never did get the girl character playable though, maybe she was better.
I file Chaos Legion along with Oz as GREAT Japanese action games that were misunderstood.
OZ I can agree with. I never did put much time into though; really need to play it. It and ZOE2 remain two Konami action games I really haven't touched.
I played a ton of Basara 2, but eventually I just got really bored and shelved it after about 6-7 character runs. But then I only make it through about 4-5 runs in most musou games before shelving as well. Like I said, it's a little better but Capcom is just not taking it far enough to fix the repetition of musou. And yeah, if they just let you access all your moves at once it would help A LOT. Because instead you are stuck doing the same combo or two OVER and OVER the entire stage which gets boring just like XXXX,CHARGE4 over and over in musou does.
Yes, the same combo thing is the big, big flaw with these games. I still enjoy them though and I think you pretty much have to turn the difficulty levels to max, or they're just too damn easy. 6-7 character runs is a nice little chunk of the game. You should have played some more; I don't know who you used, but the game has some unique characters like Hideyoshi, who fights entirely with his hands and does grapple attacks. Some of the items even change stuff around; there's one you can equip Nouhime with that changes her attacks from gun-based projectiles to melee. The other play modes are also cool; the game just generally offers more than Koei's titles typically do. The one thing that was missing in SB2 was co-op play, and they added that into Heroes.
The main problem with the boss fights in Basara IIRC is that there's no lock-on so the fights are like musou boss fights which are just a lot of running around or blocking and then attacking. If they gave you a lock-on and the ability to have lock-on moves like rolling/flipping in DMC suddenly the boss fights in Basara could be deep and exciting like NG/DMC fights.
Have you tried Battle Heroes on PSP? It does almost everything you mentioned. The game isn't regular musou, however, it's more like Gundam Vs. Gundam. You typically take on small waves of enemies first, then fight "boss" characters on every stage. It plays like Basara 2 except that you have two sets of regular and basara attacks right from the get-go and can combo them together (unfortunately this is ALL you get; there's no other basara attacks to switch to, although some characters' attacks differ depending on how long you hold the button), and you have a lock-on button. You can also dash around, and in fact a major tactic is to block and then dash around behind an enemy at the right time, leaving them open for some major punishment. The game has its share of flaws (and balance issues), but it's pretty damn fun.
One thing I'll give Capcom is that the jump between Basara 1 and Basara 2 was a HUGE improvement. So I'll give Basara 3 a look and hope they take it to the next level.
Definitely. I only tried the original Basara briefly, but thought it was awful, awful crap. I only got Basara 2 after it got a shit-ton of praise on various message boards, and I really want them to go next-gen with this series too. Especially since Samurai Warriors 3 is headed to Wii. Speaking of which, I have Basara 2 and Heroes on both PS2 and Wii, and WOW does it look like shit on Wii compared to the PS2 version. It's muddier and lacks detail. Not awful by any means, but I really wonder what happened. They aren't even 480p, and while the PS2 versions aren't either, the games still look sharper on PS2, plus you can play them upscaled on PS3. The Wii versions do benefit from having all the characters available in SB2, plus data can be saved and sent to Heroes continuously, where as the PS2 versions only let you transfer data once. I thought the Wii version of Heroes also had slightly smoother 2P split-screen play as well.
Battle Heroes marks the first time that the series is 480p.
It looks noticeably sharper than the other games do.
I never get bored of these games. I'm not sure why. Must have something to do with my increasing lack of taste due to my casual-ization as a gamer. :'(
SB2 is cool, but if people think Musou is bad with the mashing-the-button thing, SB2 is much worse. But I like the crazy combos and the sense of humor. Too bad Capcom is set on ruining the series and the name.
The thing about Basara is that everything is smaller-scale. You don't have these huge battlefields where you could literally spend 90 minutes doing everything; it offers more compact, linear stages and things just flow much faster because of it.
Totally looking forward to getting WO Z for PS2. 
You mean on PS3? Yeah, it's pretty nice! I wouldn't get it if you have the Orochi games on 360, but it does offer more enemies on screen and seems more challenging, plus you got two new characters (who are NOT in the story modes :/) and new dramatic stages that have been added.
I played Chaos Legion, and REALLY wanted to like it. But it stunk. There was a big promotion in Japan with capsule toys and comics and stuff, it was clear Capcom had brought their best effort to everything except the game itself.
I remember there being a fair amount of hype for it on the internets too, but it died down pretty quickly once the game came out.
Didn't they release a PC port later on as well?
They're kind of all the same game, but it's a fucking fun game.
They really just need to tone down the amount of releases, really. "They" being Koei and not Capcom. It seems like Koei has a new musou or port ready to go almost every fucking month.
I believe the difficulty in Chaos Legion was raised significantly in the US release which actually made for a better game.
Didn't know this. Doesn't save the awful, bland and boring design however. Still I probably put more time into than I did Ninety-Nine Nights and KUF Circle Of Doom.
