My favorite games in this genre are Basara 2+Heroes, Basara 3, Warriors Orochi 1+2, Hokuto Musou, and Samurai Warriors 3 (it pretty much just replaces 2 for me). Just want to show where I am coming from on this.
man, this is so inferior to warriors orochi 2 and dynasty warriors 6 empires it isn't even funny! you japafags sold me some serious florida property, here. this is like playing some 2004-era hybrid of dw4 and sw2, with smaller maps, lamer events, and no strategifyin' to speak of. it's only "strength" is the distinguished mentally-challenged weeaboo humor. how can capcom not make a better musou than koei? this is some third-string shinola, folks.
You didn't know that there was basically no strategy-stuff from the start? Basara isn't like Koei's games in that regard, and is more about just straight-up action. It's a more linear game for sure. To me it makes up for this with a better assortment of enemies, crazier bosses, and over-the-top style. I also find it more challenging than most musou games ***on the higher difficulty setting***. If you are not playing this game on hard or extreme, it is way, way, way too easy.
Prole, you might like Fist Of The North Star Ken's Rage a lot more than Basara 3. It is a little different than other Koei musous, but does keep some of that strategic feel with the optional challenges that pop up in every level of the story mode, plus there is the Illusion Mode, which is exactly like a traditional Musou-style game, pitting armies against each other.
But for anyone who plays that, do keep in mind that Kenshiro is kind of slow and stiff. This was done on purpose, as odd as that sounds. That is how they wanted him to play. The other characters are more fun to use because of this, IMO, and some of them play COMPLETELY differently from each other, not just in attack style but in how they control and what the buttons do.
I played more of Basara 2 than I did any SW/DW game. A lot of that was because I liked the characters and stories since it was so over the top and hilarious. If the US version wasn't stupid and had JPN voice option I'd pick it up for that price.
I played SB2/Heroes and the Warriors Orochi games about equally, I think. Sometimes I just want to beat the shit out of enemies, and that's what these games do a good job of. Koei games sometimes annoy me with their "strategic elements," which is more like
"RUSH TO THIS SIDE OF THE SCREEN! NOW RUSH OVER HERE! OH DID YOU MISS THIS EVENT OVER HERE?! NO WEAPON/CHARACTER UNLOCK 4 U!" I found the Warriors Orochi games challenging enough on the higher levels, since you take more damage than usual, even from normal enemies. Those games were a lot of fun, but TBH on most of the versions I played, I used hacked saves or codes to start the game off with all the characters unlocked.
I hate how you have to do all this shit just to get one character playable. With some of the recent games, the developers have thankfully changed their tune-- in Samurai Warriors 3, you earn credits to unlock characters as you progress. You can unlock anyone you want to in any order, no bullshit. Basara 3 unlocks characters each time you clear someone's story mode once. Nobunaga is the only character with whom more stuff needs to be done with. He's supposed to be a "hidden" character, so fine. And in Hokuto Musou, you'll get people to use by clearing the story modes/illusion modes. I actually got some characters unlocked when I bought some of the DLC, so it was even quicker.
Basara gets held in such high regard because Musou (unfairly) gets held in such low regard. It's an image thing.
Nah. It's because Capcom took a different approach to Koei's tired formula and people enjoyed what they did. That's it.
the improved movesets are nice, but the combat isn't actually any better, and the camera seems a bit worse.
The camera is about the same in these games, I.E. not that great.
But I can understand them not having lock-on mechanics since there's usually too many enemies on-screen. You just have to get accustomed to snapping the camera back behind you with the guard button.
basara's maps are like the worst of the gimmicky samurai warriors maps. i'd say basara's strength is the animation and the visual variety of the enemies, but in the end they are just fodder to slow you down like any musou game. the best musou titles like orochi and empires have whole map control and event management metagames that basara, so far, does not, and that really just throws the shallow beat-em-up mechanics into stark relief, like i'm playing vanilla dw3 or dw4 -- and even those had much bigger maps and time management components. the callenge in sb3 seems to lie in the boss battles and uncovering the full set of "secrets" (usually blatantly obvious) events that maximize your mission xp gain.
Yes, no question that Basara is more akin to a traditional beat-em-up in comparison. And I like that. I like that there are more stage hazards and other things going on as well. Basara is definitely not a game about strategy and time management.
really, any reviewer -- and i'm looking at you, ray barnholdt, you fat fop -- that holds the basara games in esteem while pissing on musou titles is distinguished mentally-challenged.
Absolutely. That is ridiculous. Who said that...was it in the 1up review?
i can understand a mild preference for basara because yer a full-on animu cigarillo, or a massive musou preference because you've invested in the endless ea-esque releases and variants, but to VASTLY prefer basara over musou? getdafugouddahere.
You can say that, but at the same time, to VASTLY prefer Musou over Basara? U GETDAFUKOUTTAHEEYA.
maf nailed it when he said that the folks with the big basara preference are importers who smugly delighted in gasping "oh, you like musou games? well, it's a shame you haven't played the much-better basara games from NIPPON. i have and they are SOOOO AMAZING." 
and now these pithy pale things are being called to the motherfuckin carpet hey ho
Did MAF forget that the Musou games also come from the glorious empire of NIPPON as well?
Do smug-import bastards even exist anymore in this day and age? Basara 3 hit Japan only a few months before the U.S. version did, BTW.
i dunno on the voices, i think the american va work is decent. i like tsuruhime's end quote -- she does some distinguished mentally-challenged chirpy loli dance, and then says "i dunno, i didn't get a whole lot of sleep last night" in this kinda depressed voice. for some reason, that made me lol. maybe my anifag gene is firing.
My only experience with the English voices were from the demo. I didn't think they were bad...I just didn't think that they fit. They sounded out of place, and certain voices like Date Masamune's just can't be replaced due to the sheer LOL of it all.
What I want is a musou type game that controls and has combo depth to the level of Devil May Cry. Basically DMC without level design and just hundreds of enemies to beat down while conquering a map and getting loot. To me the closest game that did this was Chaos Legion. It had solid combat with a moderately deep combo system, plethora of moves, and tons of enemies. But it didn't have the loot/map system of a musou game.
I don't get why Basara is satisfied with having so-so combat. You get like 6-8 moves that you can string together (though you can only use 2 at a time in Basara 2 and 3 or 4 at a time here) and so you can pull off a few varied combos but that's it. You just keep doing them over and over on fodder. Plus the moves are just WRONG. If you're going to make DMC or NG combat you need the animations to be short so you can link things and have smooth combat. Basara says "we don't want good combat, so instead we'll make big flashy animations for each attack" but that just means more sitting and watching the same attack animations over and over and it's dull.
And yeah the camera was terrible in the demo. I dunno why it's so difficult to make a decent camera in a 3d action game.
This a total re-tread, but no Bebpo. NO. Chaos Legion was total shit. Complete garbage. Basara is infinity times better.
And Basara games still feel "deeper" than most of the Koi games do, for if no other reason than that the characters have both the combo strings AND special moves they can do. The characters also feel more varied compared to the ones in Koei games.
Out of who I have used in Basara 3, Magoichi and Fuuma Kotarou have been the most interesting. Magoichi can switch between several different guns and Fuuma is just all over the place; super-fast and with crazy combos. You can do launchers/air combos with him, and he's got a nice counter-move that can be earned.
ENGRISH aside, I found Date Masamune pretty average in this game. Same with Yukimura. There are better characters than them.
