Dynasty Warriors 6

[Wombat]

Anyone else pick this up? Like the rest of the Warriors games (Orochi, Samurai), it has some good changes and bad changes from what we've seen before:

Good - Graphics have actually been updated (vs. the simply better textures of Samurai2). Nearly every stage has a prerendered (but done with in-game models) movie before and after the stage.
Bad - To do so, Koei cut about 10 characters from DW 5. Even worse, nearly half the characters that do come back are only available in Free Mode. Sure, gameplay wise there's no difference from using Lu Meng on a map designed for Lu Xun, but without intros and endings, why would I bother ever loading Lu Meng unless I'm completely bored of using the "real" characters but still want to play more? I'm not done, but as a result it also looks like the map count is way down from DW 5 (though each stage is far more distinctive from the others than DW 5).

Good - You can "swim" in the water.
Bad - Which is largely irrelevant when high cliffs surrounding the water mean you can only slowly wade out to the one or two exit points.

Good - Unless a character is historically known for using a specific weapon (like Guan Yu with his polearm), they probably use a totally different new weapon (and new model) and move set.
Bad - There are no individual items for the characters now. You can only pick up two types of items: Horses, shared among all your characters, and Weapons, which only have three models, all of which you could see after completing the first map with a character ("better" weapons just have higher base damage and bonuses- there aren't model changes). No elemental orbs, no life/musou extenders, not even any near-cosmetic Orochi items. As long as you can hack your way to the ending on the characters that still have endings, there is no reason to do exceptionally well in any stage, especially once you start cheesing the weapon drops (Get Lu Bu, do 2 player New He Fei castle, park that even level one 2p in deep water, run up to Sun Quan and musou bomb him, farm 3+ weapons in 3 minutes.)
Bad 2 - Some of the weapons are new. But many are just swapped around from other characters, e.g. Zhang Liao just picks up Pang De's dual axes (who isn't in the game anymore).
Bad 3 - Yes, you can still get Red Hare and the other horses. But they just randomly develop from good horse stock when played with characters with horse maxing abilities. There's no ploy to steal away Red Hare from Lu Bu or Guan Yu - you just randomly crack open a box with a harness and he may grow into Red Hare.

Bad - No summon horse whistle!

Good - There are clear mission sub-objectives.
Bad - Which result in exp and weapons only for completing them. So I can either make the level much much harder (getting Wei's Chi Bi missions means you can't stop the fire attack)... or just go through it twice on easy-mode, in probably less time.

Good - The new Renbu system makes killing more than the nameds matter.
Bad - But it completely replaces the combo system, for the worse.

I could go on, but the point is that outside of updated graphics, this is not a particularly good ruleset for the series, especially if you're an achiever type that gets every weapon and character. If you've been Jonesing for some Dynasty action after a long break, it's fine, but otherwise I'd recommend to just wipe your Samurai Warriors 2 save file and go through that again (If SW2's skills were auto-learned from killing anyone who had them, I think that would be the ideal Warriors ruleset).

[Blank]

I decided to skip this Too many of the changes I just didn't like. The lack of characters, stages, stories (even if "repeats") is just meh. The battle changes in particular just seemed lame.

Oh well... I hope they revert back to 'normal' in dw7 -_-