Despite the diminished visuals, I often find myself coming back to DW8 Empires on the Vita. It really fits in well with gaming on the go, as you're more often than not playing the game in bites, anyway.
The strategy phase is usually something that you'll only spend a few minutes per turn on, so it makes it a little easier to put the game down.
How that phase plays out depends onDespite the diminished visuals, I often find myself coming back to DW8 Empires on the Vita. It really fits in well with gaming on the go, as you're more often than not playing the game in bites, anyway.
The strategy phase is usually something that you'll only spend a few minutes per turn on, so it makes it a little easier to put the game down.
How that phase plays out depends on your role. You can start the game as Ruler, officer or mercenary.
As a Ruler you'll have a lot more domestic choices, such as making alliances, trading, resource gathering, officer recruitment and placement, and purchasing weapons, equipment and buff items.
Or, you could be an officer, where your domestic options are quite limited, but they do expand as your rank increases. You'll also be able to do missions (Quests) on your own time to make a little scratch and earn some better equipment, but you're locked to those in the provinces surrounding your home base.
As a free officer, you can create a mercenary company (Vagabond Unit), also go on quests, but if you don't like what's in the surrounding area, you're free to move wherever you want.
As far as Dynasty Warriors games go, 8 is still by far the best of them, although I don't really feel that Empires has the same AI as 8/XL, where the AI was fairly aggressive. You'll find that the game does get significantly harder as you ramp the difficulty up, though.
Where you can probably beat the game in a few hours on Normal (Easy is just for cutting your teeth if you've never played the series at all), a Hard run will take much longer, and a Chaos run will last into the tens of hours.
To that end, replayability is through the roof due to customisation options and unlocking special abilities. While you certainly have a bazillion ways to play dress-up, the Strategems (special attacks, abilities, and/or buffs that you can use in combat) allow you to more or less build classes.
While the heart of the game is still brawling it up, your customer-built characters can add another level of strategy, if you choose to go that way.
Combat is also not a matter of spamming a single button, as many jaded reviewers have attempted to sell. Especially the higher up the difficulty chain you go. While combos are simple, the charge attacks after x amount of normal attacks are, and always have been, meaningful. They've been made even moreso with the EX attacks (I think it's just short for extra, but think of it as a combo extension) that come with the weapon that you choose to have your character specialise in.
Or don't build characters, the entire roster (plus one new character) is here, plus another 700+ generic officers.
Speaking of, if you want to create officers to replace those generics, you can do that, too.
If you have the game playing on an active internet connection, it can also passively download other players' customer officers into your game, which also spices things up a bit. Or can, depending on the power level of the custom officers. Again, adding to variety.
Speaking of custom...well, everything, you also have the ability to build and share custom scenarios, although getting there can be a lot of work due to requiring that you have a minimum of 300 custom officers created or downloaded to do so (which you can also do from the game's menus)
In terms of performance, audio is quite good, which is the norm for the Dynasty Warriors games. They have consistently excellent soundtracks (or at least have since 4), and 8 Empires includes tracks from previous games that you can choose to use instead of the default stage track.
As I mentioned earlier, the visual fidelity is not nearly as good as the PS3 and PS4 versions. Framerate drops do happen, and the number of opponents onscreen is reduced. The character pop-in still exists, although for performance's sake, it's not so much a case like you're getting battered by invisible/intangible enemies as you might on the PS3 version; you might get a bit scraped, though.
That said, it isn't a complete dive, but visuals are by far the lowest point.
Controls and handling are excellent, on the other hand, and Koei did a great job adapting to the Vita's control scheme, using both the physical buttons, sticks and touch screen very effectively.
My last complaint is more of an oddity, and that has to do with cross-saving. You can import and export your save from the PS3/PS4/Vita, but every time you access the save in the cloud, you have to wait 30 minutes to access it again. It makes it a bit of a pain if you're trying to transfer data across multiple consoles (if you are in that position), but otherwise, just backing up the Vita's cloud save on PS Plus, for Vita's sake, works just fine.
That, however, will most likely be a minor point.
Despite the visuals and weird cross-save deal, Dynasty Warriors 8 Empires has turned out to be an excellent hand-held game, which I cannot recommend enough.… Expand
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