A worthy entry to the legendary Fist of the North Star series, Hokuto Musou will provide hours of blood spattering fun.
Although this game shares much of its gameplay concept with the Dynasty Warriors franchise, it is way more fun due to the outstanding job Koei did at reproducing the feel of the environment and the ridiculous strength of your playable characters.
Every level of the game is epic, allowing you to pit your super human strength against hordes of punks, barbarians, giants and a slew of steroid pumping bosses. No matter what character you play, you get to enjoy watching a continuous stream of brutality as you punch and slice your way through the onslaught.
Thankfully, the folks at Koei realized that there are a really large number of cool characters in the series that people have become fans of. Not only do you get to fight a majority of the better known characters from the series, you also get to play as them too.
The game has several modes, including the legendary (or story) mode, the illusion mode (side story mode for all the extra characters) and some other challenge modes. During the course of the game you can develop your characters with a very large chart of upgrades, including special finishing moves, enhancements to your stats, combo upgrades and special passive abilities. You can max out each of the characters throughout the different modes of the game...so far there are around a dozen characters you can play, and more may become available through DLC.
The progression of your strength is pretty balanced, and you shouldnt find yourself ever feeling weak as you go through the levels. Advancing your character in the two player mode is a great way to get quick skill points as the amounts of enemies you have to defeat goes up considerably.
The two player mode is amazing fun, with two super warriors literally taking on over 1000 enemies in a single stage.
I give the game a solid 10 because it delivers exactly what it set out to do, a fun game that is 100% faithful to the series with fun and expansive character advancement and multiplayer functionality that can provide hours and hours of team play.
I hope they decide to bring out an english version here with translated menus, but if they do, I hope they keep the japanese voice track as it really just mimics the series over the top action really well that way.