completed Shu and Wu.
i recommend if you play the game you leave Jin for last. historically they were last AND it works better with some of the story twists they added to DW7. i would also recommend Wu second to last. mainly because Wu was second to last to go extinct. the overall story is weighted towards this fact too. as for Shu and Wei... well, i did Wei first and i feel like it was a good decision. Shu could have been played first as well and perhaps the designers intened it to be played that way. but i feel like when you start Jin you're basically starting off where Wei left off, and Wei ends with Guan Yu's defeat so whereas Shu adds a bit more to that story and Wu adds a bit more to Shu's story. Jin wraps the whole thing up.
also i recommend you play the game on normal mode. if you don't then you end up with super weapons after you beat your first mosou and all the other mosous are a bit too easy on normal, but still too difficult on hard. Shu is very difficult to beat on hard mode - even with beating Wei first on hard and doing some of the conquest mode parts to help beef up characters.
also, playing in normal mode gets rid of a lot of the craziness i compalined about in my earlier review. combat isn't so insane so all the special effects and insane officer/soldier pile-ups that fill the screen with incomprehensible chaos just doesn't happen. if i start the game over from scratch i will definitely play it on normal mode next time.
i think the story is probably the very best yet. it's just one of those things you have to experience to appreciate. how the characters are scattered throughout a mosou mode definitely keeps the game more interesting. rather than play 10 or 15 or 20 levels with Zheng Fei or Xiahou Dun you play with a different character at least every two levels. this keeps it mixed up and allows the writers to match the story more realistically to the book AND it keeps the story from being generic AND it injects a sense of emotion into the story. no Liu Bei fighting at Wuzhang Plains with Cao Cao hanging out with Sima Yi weirdness.
the scattering of characters over a mosou mode also means this: if you like a particular weapon you get to play with it just as much as you would have if you had a locked-in character for a mosou mode. so the broad sword for example is mastered by Cao Cao, Sun Quan, Sun Jian, Xiahou Dun, and a few others. so you run into the broad sword just about as many times throughout the game as you would had you played with Cao Cao for all 20 or so scenarios in a Wei based mosou from DW4. however each character has their own particular twist on the weapon so even though you have various characters using the same weapon their use of it is varied enough to make it very interesting. so even though it's the same sword the way the character uses it has some variations - some small some significant - and their mosou attacks are pretty much always very unique from each other. plus each character has two mosou attacks which means even more variety. point is i never felt like i was stuck playing with the same weapon even though the weapon model was identical as well.
now it would be very nice if you could play a fantasy version of the levels where you could play through the exact same mosou scenarios but use whatever character you wanted to use from that faction (actually from any faction would be even cooler) - even if the character wasn't in existence at the time. i did like that about DW4. but for now that's not possible. there are those times when i'd like to play another character from the scenario i'm playing just to see how the game would play out, but that's not possible on the same faction. so for example you can't play zhou yu during the Chi Bi fire attack - you play as Huang Gai.
as for DW7 i recommend it over DW6 for certain. i hope the design of the game continues in this vein. i also see some of the DW7 elements preparing for DW7 Empires - and i hope the designers listened to our complaints from DW6:E!!!
as for DW7 and buying a new PS3 or 360... well, no, of course not. if you don't have some other games you'd like to play on those systems you'd feel pretty silly for buying one just for DW7. maybe Empires will be awesome, but you're not talking a lot of game time with DW7. however, i believe there are enough games available on the PS3 and 360 to warrant buying a system anyways. inFamous for starters. if you're into FPS then yes, and then there's the Netflix and the PS1 games on PSN.
i'm Brunorotk btw on PSN BTW!!
as for individual mosous i like all of them so far. i'm just getting started on Jin and it's actually kind of dark - so that's new. i think the most improved award has to go to Wu. Sun Quan, Sun Jian, Sun Ce, SSX, are all better characters. Costumes are a bit crazy for many of the characters, but some are improvements of DW6. acting is a lot better. the older versions of the game like DW4 suffered from having to create characters that lived throughout the game. in DW7 a character usually lives only for the extent they are in the book. material doesn't have to be created for filler. Dian Wei shows up, fights a few battles, and then he dies saving Cao Cao - for example. and since you aren't playing Dian Wei during the Yellow Turban rebellion AND the battle of Heifei the writers aren't having to come up with "pithy" lines and explanations as to their presence there.
the odd thing is that many characters that you would think would be playable in mosou aren't - Ma Chao, Ma Dai, Wei Yan, Xu Huang, Guan Ping, Cao Pi, Taishi Ci, Yue Ying, Zhen Ji, Cao Ren, Zhou Tai, the Qiao sisters, and Xing Cai - some only because you could in earlier installments of the game. and of course you don't play any of the characters from the 'Other' campaigns of earlier games. so no Lu Bu or Yuan Shao for example from that long list. and many of the new characters aren't playable during mosou modes either. so all of these characters are reserved for conquest mode - which is fun, but not that fun.
Bruneauinfo
Cao Pi is in the musuo modeWu 2nd: Wu ends at Dongkou.
Jin indeed was masterfully done. The new visions and reasons for battling were so generic, but the genericness makes it so uniqe. Wu to unify china under the name of the Sun Family, Shu to unify China under a benevolent rule, Wei to conquer China and create a dominant rule.
Jin: Unify china. It was just well done.
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