Very early initial Dynasty Warriors 9 impressions. Noting that I'm playing on a PS4 Pro and with hard difficulty. Might switch to chaos.
-Do not even attempt to play this on "Movie" mode. Just don't. The framerate is atrocious and borderline unplayable.
-"Action" mode seems fine on Pro for the most part. Is it 60 FPS? LOL, no. But playable. I did however see it dip to a ridiculously low level when I rushed into a battle. It was still playable, but noticeable low.
-I both get and do not get a Dynasty Warriors 6 vibe from this game. It being similar in that this is kind of like Omega Force starting over again with new mechanics and gameplay systems, and not similar in that so far, at least...I like the game. It's not jaw-droppingly awesome and is very rough around the edges (total musou-jank), but it's actually been fun to play.
-Combat has kind of been reworked and there's still enough attack combos to pull off. It is simply done differently than before. You hold down R1 to bring up a modifier list that allows you to choose different type of attack follow-ups using the face buttons. It also appears that you can change these up with moves earned or items crafted. It's actually pretty awesome how you can chain together multiple square and R1+button attacks, then run up to the enemy when they get knocked back and keep right on doing it. Really makes your character look like a bad-ass.
-Total menu/stat overload. There is a LOT of information coming at you at once, especially when you start playing.
-Movement feels pretty good for a Koei musou. You can roll, (double) jump, lock-on with R3 and circle-strafe officers, musou attack, guard/strafe, use available items like health power-ups, and call your horse. There's also a focus on countering using triangle now. When not in combat, holding R1 will let you run and tapping it uses a grappling hook to climb over walls. I got a bit of a wire-fu kung-fu movie vibe when running and jumping between rooftops in towns, too.
-You can run pretty quickly (and your horse runs even quicker), although you have a stamina meter, so it's not infinite. This combined with fast travel doesn't seem too bad, but I still found myself taking a minute or two to run through barren land towards the first major battle, which made me chuckle. I can see this getting annoying.
-When traveling, you can hit L2 to auto-run with your horse and your character will move automatically to a set waypoint. Helps to not feel so tedious when going to a far away destination, but I would have preferred an option to just teleport right to where a mission is. So far I have encountered random little battles while traveling, so at least it's not entirely barren.
-Dunno how bad the English voices are because you get Japanese and Chinese voices too. Tried Chinese and people sound into their roles for the most part.
-There's various crafting materials all over the map. You just run over stuff to pick it up so it's not a big deal to get into crafting items. But if you need to find something specifically, that can be annoying. Had to run around for a little bit to find a specific ingredient to make an item for an NPC request, for example. Still, if you have a location on the map, you can set a marker and arrows will point the way.
I'm not big on open-world games in general and would have preferred set maps/levels like most other Koei musou games, but this doesn't seem too bad. They need to work on getting the framerate improved and I think it will be fine. But again, these are very initial impressions so I might end up getting annoyed with other quirks or problems yet to come.
It's cool to see them trying something different, but this game definitely lacks the polish of releases like Hyrule Warriors, Fire Emblem Warriors, One Piece Pirate Warriors 3, and Dragon Quest Heroes II. If you're OK with trying something new and different, understand that it will lack polish and feel 'janky,' and have a Pro or XBone X, I'd give this a shot. I don't want to recommend this to vanilla PS4 or Xbone owners based on early videos I've seen. The framerate just looks awful. And the jury is still out on PC AFAIK.
