Dynasty Warriors 7 - Where The Meat Is At

Conquest mode is the true game for Dynasty Warriors 7. This is where you get personal missions for every character, unlock their big weapons, unlock animal companions, and play multiplayer. Since this is the mode that every character is active in I accept it as the real game and Story mode as the side game. This brings up another pet-peeve of mine, online modes, but I’ll save that for later.

In Conquest mode you are given a map of China broken up into small hexagons (or are the pentagons?) Each hexagon is either a mission or a city. Cities are where you buy gear or animals, take tests, build bonds with other officers, or learn weapon skills. 

For the most part you can choose any character you want in this mode. Most of the missions are “dream scenarios” and have no impact on the actual story. Scattered about you’ll find missions for each character in the game. Completing a characters mission will unlock that character and give you wallpapers for the loading screen. So now I finally know how to unlock every character! Why did they bury them in this weird Conquest mode? 

For all that Conquest is the real game there’s not much to talk about. I keep changing characters because I can. It’s nice that the characters can have personal conversations with people they know. I laughed when Cao Pi had to fight his wife Zhen Ji. She greatly lamented her death at her beloved’s hands. But actions like that don’t seem to have any real consequences.

You can build bonds with other officers by helping them out during a mission. I assume if you have a strong bond you’ll get something good, but all of my bonds suck at the moment. You can also talk to a random officer in town and that will strengthen your bond with them.

I’m playing Conquest in multiplayer mode with my wife. Let me just say that she does not care about the story for any of these missions. She always grabs the same guy, Xiahou Dun, jumps on her horse and slaughters everything as quickly as possible while I’m actually trying to complete mission objectives. I constantly have to tell her where not to go. It doesn’t help any the arrow for her character is RED on the map. Enemy soldiers are also red dots on the map so it’s very easy for her to get lost. The designer who came up with that idea should be shot.  Maybe a bigger TV would help…

We’ve been playing on normal, but things seemed way too easy so I cranked up the difficulty to expert. The change is pretty drastic. We easily slaughtered all enemies in our path on normal mode, but we found ourselves easily slaughtered on expert. I knew things would be different and that we would need to be more careful, but this seemed like over kill. I just wanted the battles to last a little longer. Instead the opposite happened and we found ourselves quickly killed on every map we attempted. I changed the difficulty back to normal. We’ll keep it there for a little while longer.

It looks like we’re roughly a quarter of the way through Conquest and I’m having fun overall. Unlocking characters is nice but there’s no real desire to play them now. It almost feels like I’m just unlocking skins for the same character. The ex attack and musou help, but only a little. They made a lot of weapons for this game, so why not assign them to a specific character. I don’t need twelve characters that use the basic sword or spear. At least make their move sets unique. Make them feel special; it can really help push forward the drive to play.