Dynasty Warriors 7 - Balance Conquest

I’m still waiting for the network to come back on. I was all set to purchase a game when this suddenly happened. Boy am I glad I didn’t purchase Bionic Commando: Rearmed 2 or else I would be completely screwed as far as being able to play it right now. DRM is pretty stupid and it tends to hurt the end user. I know companies are trying to prevent piracy, but this doesn’t do it. People who pirate games will always find a way to pirate them; don’t punish the normal user in the meantime.

I played some Dynasty Warriors again with my wife last night. I feel the need to stat that I did not have a fun time. It wasn’t her fault, it was the balance. I’ve mentioned before that in Conquest mode there are missions where you have to play as a certain character. Every single character is represented at one point or another across the map.

Bao Sanniang

We did the mission for the new Shu girl, Bao Sanniang. I would like to begin with the simple fact that I do not like this character. Her personality, her voice, her weapon all grate on me. She has three missions to play. The first one where she meets Guan Suo, she seems to spend her time going about how it’s fate that they met. Guan Suo seems to think that she’s a little crazy.

However, in the next two missions the two act like they are madly in love. Sweet words of encouragement and comfort come oozing out of the two. It’s enough to make you sick. I think that it did make my wife sick. She kept yelling at Ba to shut up. Didn’t help at all that they gave her “squeaky” voice.

Now story wise this just doesn’t make sense. Why are these two so madly in love? When did Guan Suo go from finding this chick crazy to finding her beautiful? There is a huge disconnect and it’s not funny. Maybe I would like both of these characters better if I got to know them more. The game doesn’t give you that chance though. If you weren’t worth being part of the main story then you’re going to get minimal characterization, period.

The other issue I had deals with balance. I’ve never used this character before so I had none of her higher skills unlocked and her weapon selection only went to level 3. My wife’s character was a major player in story mode and uses the basic sword so it’s overly powerful. My wife ran around easily slaughtering everyone. I on the other hand would barely defeat a general before she would clean up the rest of the map. It just wasn’t fun that way.

I don’t know what to do about this. There’s no real way to fix this other than to get her to change her weapon or character and that’s not fair to her. I’ll just have to deal. I do think she would have an easier time with the game if she could at lease see where she was on the map.

Oh well, time to get back to Red Dead Redemption.