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PS2  SW2: Another Battlefield Knock Out 4.2
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by SadXuHuang
from Columbus, OH, United States		Jan 3, 2007
THE GOOD:
  • A return of simpler times, like Dynasty Warriors 3. No more orbs or items, just a shop and battlefield experience. Purchase skills or learn them by leveling up the character or even acquire them from defeating certain officers.
  • No more item farming! Develop like an RPG character instead of relying on the same item boosts. Encourages individual development.
  • Weapons (four levels of them) found have random upgradable attributes and elemental powers. Five elements: fire, ice, lightning, wind, and demon (familiar vorpal/death).
  • Say hello to the 10 new characters: Ginchiyo Tachibana, Ieyasu Tokugawa, Kanetsugu Naoe, Kotaro Fuuma, Mitsunari Ishida, Nagamasa Azai, Nene, Sakon Shima, Yoshihiro Shimazu, and Musashi Miyamoto. All worthy and interesting characters.
  • Great presentation. Tons of rendered cinemas of great CG.
  • Easily over 120 hours of fun.

THE BAD:

  • Bid farewell to now unplayable Kunoichi, Goemon Ishikawa, and Yoshimoto Imagawa. They are gone for this sequel.
  • Unique model characters like Kojiro Sasaki and Katsuie Shibata are unplayable but unlockable as bodyguards.
  • No more bow and arrow. On the bright side there are new awesome special moves.
    Ranmaru Mori and Okuni are only playable in all modes but Story (apparently no one got around to making them a Musou mode).
  • The new voices are difficult to get used to. Keiji Maeda now is so terrible, your ears will weep.
  • No option for Japanese voice track! (Why Koei!?)
  • With so many characters to cover some feel left-out and watered down to make room. Along with the weakened personality/story motive, some movesets leave much to be desired.
  • Create-A-Warrior and Versus mode not present. Most likely with-held to be content for the half-sequel expansion packs.

SUMMARY:
This is a true sequel. Unlike Dynasty Warriors who seem to be in a Groundhog Day-type reoccuring era, the Samurai Warriors franchise pushes forward. Whereas SW1's focus was Nobunaga Oda, SW2 aims toward the successive years towards the epic Battle of Sekigahara.

Characters have changed. Yukimura Sanada is how you left him in SW1, a warrior facing the end of his era, distraught and battle broken. Oichi is no longer the spastic little brat but a mopey teenager in a Romeo and Juliet-type tragedy with husband Nagamasa Azai. Nobunaga and No (she is no longer called Noh, just No) have moved past their conflicts of SW1 and now seem more alive and less stiff and spouting nihilistic aphorisms of existential nausea. Shingen Takeda and Kenshin Uesugi have become footnotes while Masamune Date has matured to a more prominent role rather than being some reckless interloper.

The new cast is well spread out and varied to compliment many tastes. From spritely ninjas to war-jaded samurai, personality and movesets are very unique and balanced amongst this doubled roster. Those familiar with the Dynasty Warrior set will find instances of familiarity with the Samurai Warriors. Kotaro Fuuma, a purple-skinned ninja obsessed with chaos, looks like a Tim Burton character about to sing: "I am the clown with the tear-away face/ Here in a flash and gone without a trace/ I am the one hiding under yours stairs/ Fingers like snakes and spiders in my hair" and fights like Ling Tong and Wei Yan with a musou like Gan Ning. Ginchiyo Tachibana, a woman with a serrated sword that channels lightning, fights like Cao Cao merged with Jiang Wei with a musou like Pang Tong. But don't mistake them for DW rip-offs. Each character is very unique only with lingering "after tastes" of the DW crowd.

New characters, new stages, new story-- what more can you want? The branching paths of SW1 are gone in favor of more in-depth Story modes tailor-made to each character. So many are so unique that they are only playable in that particular character's Story mode (not in Free). Plus the infinite castle returns to Survival mode where hidden skills, mounts, bodyguards, characters, and weapons are located. And new to the series is Suguroku, a Monopoly-for-Japan type game of conquering territory and mini-games for supremacy. A fun diversion, but the meat is in the main game, a fulfilling and highly replayable experience.

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PS2  Same old gameplay,more shallow storylines... 2.6
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by pyramidreaper
from , , Another World		Dec 11, 2006
THE GOOD:
-Some minor gameplay improvements
-CG movies are pretty cool
-Some graphic improvements
-Survival Mode is better than in the first Sengoku Mousou game
-Characters' special moves instead of bow attack is a good idea
-Masamune Date character is remade for the better.

THE BAD:
-Cheap and stupid "difficulty"
-No Japanese voiceovers
-Most characters' stories and endings are very uninteresting and silly(with the exception of a couple really)
-The game has much less "soul" in general
-No Kunoichi, no Goemon
-Ranmaru & Okuni are for free mode only
-Oichi character is remade for the worse
-no second costumes
-no equipment items
-no alternative endings.

SUMMARY:
I played KOEI games since DW3, and I am a big fan of the genre in general. I really liked the first SW game and looked forward to the sequel. Unfortunately, the second SW not only is not an improvement over the first game, but even took a few steps backward and is a big letdown in general.

My first and biggest complaint about this game is difficulty and AI.
KOEI games always had some stupidity in terms of difficulty, and this game continues to be a KOEI-style tactical action. Consider this, you fight a battle, defeat ALL of the enemy generals, then enemy reinforcements come, you defeat them as well(btw you must do it like the wind, or all of your generals will be killed),then you finally get to the enemy main camp and start to fight enemy commander only to see in the middle of the fight with him a message "your commander was defeated, the battle is lost". If you've played KOEI games before, you know what I'm talking about. There are a LOT of such battles in this game. Not every one, but the majority of them. Enemy generals AI is cheap and blocks like mad, it manages to evade your mousou from behind by rolling away. Yes, previous KOEI games had such things, but SW2 manages to even enhance all this stupidity and cheapness.

My second complaint is characters of SW2.

In this game KOEI added a lot of new playable characters, like Musashi Miyamoto and Sakon Shima. Unfortunately, they also excluded some old ones completely-Kunoichi, Goemon, Yoshimoto, and made Ranmaru Mori & Okuni only playable in free mode. And while excluding Yoshimoto can be considered a good move(never was a popular one),it was definitely a bad one to exclude all the others. Okuni,Keiji & Goemon story was great and hilarious in the first game, Ranmaru & Mitsuhide story was also done pretty good in the first game, So why not have it remade in the second game as well? And I find it pretty stupid to exclude Kunoichi. She played a big role in the first game, just because she was a fictional character? This game has Mitsunari Ishida running around the battlefield with a fan, and Ieyasu Tokugawa jumping like a character from some anime with a boomstick, though there's a female ninja character in this game, called Nene, They could make Kunoichi vs Nene story, would be good actually. By the way, I must add that this game has much worse characters' stories in general, and much less relationships and character development in general, with the exception of a few.

KOEI completely remade two characters in this game-Date Masamune and Oichi. They are no longer kids in this game. I liked that they made Date an adult but Oichi is not good at all. She is no longer a cool tomboy, now she is a *ahem*"proud wife of Nagamasa Azai"*ahem*.But this is my opinion really.


My final big complaint about SW2 is the replay value and extras.

SW2 has a LOT less replay value than it's predecessor. First, the game does not have the alternative endings and branching stories. This is stupid and I really can't see why they did this… then, there aren't any items in this game, then-there aren't any alternative costumes… is a DVD disc too little for this game? SW2 has one new extra-the Sugoroku(Monopoly) game..why even make this in a hack and slash action game?..well,in any case you HAVE to play it against the computer and win one time to unlock Okuni character, only to have her in free mode. Now think for yourself how good is this extra..

Speaking of things that I enjoyed in SW2 more than in it's predecessor and improvements (sadly there are very few of them), I can mention the survival mode. The infinite castle is a lot more fun and cool to play now. There are some pretty fun missions and they removed silly traps. I can say that it is the only aspect of this game that I really enjoyed, in fact I spent most of my gameplay in SW2 in Survival Mode. Well, and also they replaced useless bow with special moves-that's a good thing too.

But honestly, I can say that I really do NOT recommend to buy this, in general crappy KOEI work.

This is not a "Samurai Warriors 2"..But much like 2005's Dynasty Warriors 5, it's the same old game, even flawed. Game series have to improve and move forward, you can't do the same for five years.Yes,Playstation2 has it's limits, but Konami doesn't release a MGS every year...

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