By: Nate

Koei Tecmo has again compiled a cast of many of the biggest heroes from majority of its games into one universe. After a few entries of the Warriors Orochi series, it can be boring to retell or introduce a story that has been redone too many times.

Warriors All Stars is the ultimate mashup of Koei Tecmo characters. The story begins with Tamaki, a cute foxlike character, summoning heroes from across realms from all over the universe. He brings the characters of your choice (you can choose a few characters of a certain realm – Dead or Alive (Kasumi, Honoka, and Marie Rose), Ninja Gaiden (Ryu Hayabusa, Ayane, etc.) and many more) into this mysterious world because the land is dying. After the passing of the king, the magical spring has dried up and its source of power is dwindling. During a ritual performance by Tamaki, something goes wrong and the heroes are scattered across the land.

In order to restore peace to the world, Tamaki must recruit the strongest of these warriors and crown the land’s savior as the new king/queen. The story is very good and I felt like everything flowed well, especially when you want to take all these characters and stuff them into one big meatloaf of a game. My only problem with the story is that some of scenarios can make the game quite short. There is even a trophy for beating it in under 3 hours. There was an ending for the Deception characters that I got that didn’t take very long to get; however, there are several different endings and even some that can take anywhere from 15-20 hours to get. These endings and the many paths that one can take, makes for a fantastic amount of content for this game.

The story is great and has interesting twists, but the gameplay is mainly what people are going to pick up this game for. Players are able to take control of only 1 character and have 4 companion characters. This is very disappointing because I would like play with all the characters and not just one. In previous Koei Tecmo warriors-styled games, we could play with multiple characters on the battlefield. It is a bit limiting. The game makers also added a few more changes to the combat. Along with your standard combos, weak/strong attacks, and musou attacks, we now have Musou Rush, Hero Skills, and Hero Chains.

Musou Rush is a mode that you can unlock when you build up your meter. When you have your meter filled, you will have a certain amount of time to kill as many enemies as possible. Your companions will also cheer you on. It is a fun mode to build up a combo or kill the last remaining enemies, but I’d still rather be able to change characters or have an ultimate musou attack like in previous games.

Hero skills are built from the ground up for each character. Even characters like Kasumi, who has been in the past Musou games, has new abilities and skills. Each character has their own unique set of skills.

Hero chains allow you to have your other companions attack. It is very useful, especially in urgent situations. I would still like a nice animation along with an ultimate musou attack, but this is what Koei Tecmo decided to come up with as a replacement.

The gameplay is fun and not too difficult until you get over 10 hours or so into the main story. Once you get into the later battles, the game receives a huge spike in difficulty. When you have to take on shadow characters of almost all the warriors, your fights become very lengthy.

This is also where I must take off several points. When you have to eventually save tons of AI controlled dying characters, it is very annoying. There was a point in a couple of the fights in this game where I kept losing because they would die. Even on Easy and Beginner difficulty, those characters would die. After spending so much time killing thousands of enemies and then I lose because of the dumb AI, pisses me off to infinity.

You might be asking, “Well, how would you fix this problem?” I would fix this problem by simply having it so that you can control multiple characters and be able to control where they go. We have seen this in previous Warriors game entries or simply make it so the person you have to save doesn’t die on beginner and easy. It literally makes no sense to have the person die on BEGINNER DIFFICULTY!!! This took all the fun out of the game that I was having and I wouldn’t recommend buying it.

The graphics in the game look great. They aren’t anything too over the top, but they don’t look horrible. I didn’t notice any lag or framerate drops and this was on the PS4 version of the game. The game also is in the Japanese language with English subtitles. Some people might be wondering why and I just think Koei Tecmo is being cheap. There was a very fast turnaround and some people might be mad about this, but personally, I am fine with the Japanese voices.

The characters in the game are fantastic looking and it’s always quite interesting to see people like Lu Bu and William (the only character that has an English voice) interact with one another. There is a little town built around the Spring and all of your characters that you collect throughout the story will be there.

In the town, you’ll find many areas of interest and a plentiful amount of characters to talk to. There is a shop where you can buy/sell items and upgrade your abilities. Also, there is a place to level up your characters for the right amount of gold. I also have a problem with the leveling up system. You cannot level your characters to maximum extent unless you have all your characters at the same exact level. This is quite limiting and annoying. In previous games like Warriors Orochi 3, we could level up the characters as much as we wanted. Eventually when you get so far into the game, you will unlock all the characters and a lot will be at level 1. This means if you have a main character that you love to use, you cannot level them up until you get the rest of the characters to your main character’s level.

Let’s discuss all of the characters that are included in this game. We have a decent amount of characters, but I feel like we were missing a bunch of characters. It’s nice to see William from Nioh and Millenia from Deception games, but I feel like we could’ve seen even more characters from those and the other Koei Tecmo games. It’s also disappointing to see Sophie in this game from the Atelier series when that was easily one of weakest entries in the series. You have Escha, Logy, Firis, Rorona, and many more. Why Sophie? Why did you put her in this game Koei Tecmo? Heck, I like the Meruru princess better than Sophie. They could’ve done a combination of the two Shallies and I would’ve been thrilled.

One final note I want to add is there are no horses and no Berserk or Attack on Titan characters. Also, why are no series veterans from Dead or Alive in this game? Koei Tecmo constantly thinks that everyone likes Marie Rose. I think that they gave her a good move set in this game, but I would have loved to see someone like Tina, Momiji (Also, in Ninja Gaiden), or Helena. Momiji is one of favorite Koei Tecmo characters and they kind of disregard her altogether.

Did you guys miss DLC? Well, there is already over 20 costumes in the Playstation Store for this game. Maybe they’ll give us these characters as dlc later. My wallet is saying sarcastically, “Yay!” Prepare your wallets for over $40 worth of DLC as soon as the game came out. I am sure that there will be more. Look Dead or Alive 5: Last Round. It has had over 7 season passes.

Overall, the game tells a good story for having so many characters. The gameplay has lots of positives, but almost just as many negatives. Unless you grind a lot and can kill enemies instantly, in order to save your companions, then it might be fun towards the end of the longer story arcs. The graphics are fine but not spectacular.

5/10 – In the first couple hours of the game, I was going to give this a high score, but after playing it for around 20 hours, I just cannot do that. It has several problems that should have been perfected by now because of how many Warriors games Koei Tecmo has created. I would not recommend this game.