Dynasty Warriors (AKA, “Musou” in Japanese) is a long running series based around the famous novels dubbed the “Romance of Three Kingdoms” that takes place in ancient China. The idea of the game is to take the role of one of the historical characters such as Liu Bei, beat your way through hundreds of enemies to occupy new areas and then usually, take out the main commander on the opponent’s side. The Sony Playstation versions of the game offered many other features to help break up all the button mashing but with the latest title to hit the Nintendo platform, things seem to have been simplified fairly drastically for “Dynasty Warriors: Fighters Battle DS”.

You start off creating a profile by entering a name for your army and for some reason, the developers at Koei decided not to use the touch screen. Instead, you have to resort to the old method of inputting letters using the D-pad which is very cumbersome. It’s an odd decision considering the touch screen isn’t in use at this point. Once that’s done, it’s time to choose your avatar from one of the three commanders available. Instead of naming them after the famous commanders from real history, they are named typically after the Gods from Ancient China this time; Suzaku, Seiryu and Genbu. Not exactly much choice.


Just 3 characters to choose from in this latest incarnation.
After a random commander out of the remaining two characters is selected to be your opponent, you pick something out of the three difficulty levels and the game begins. The two paragraph storyline is just as simple as the gameplay you’re about to experience and that is, two military commanders have appeared in the lands of Northern China and must battle it out to become ruler.