I just spent some time with Sengoku Musou 2, (Samurai Warriors 2) and my initial impressions are very positive.
The game begins with Koei's usual adrenaline pumped CG intro, and I must say that Koei's animation prowess gets better and better with each Dynasty/Samurai iterations. The overall presentation quality are much improved as well, not to say they were bad before, but the quality trasitions coupled with the Japanese voice over makes the prologues before each battle very very cool.
Loading speed is super fast, they did a very good job of hiding the loading time behind important text/screens/pictures that you wouldn't really skip. So kudos to Koei for that.
Now onto the battles. I've only played musou mode, there are a couple of others from the main screen that I haven't tried. One of them is an infinite castle mode, and another sugoroku mode. Which is similar to chinese monopoly, for those of you who've played that before. Personally, I only care about the musou mode, so I'll be talking about that here. Pretty much, is the same musou mode as all the other games. The only significant change I've noticed is the AI improvement. Both the enemy and your cpu friends. The CPU blocks much more efficiently and are much more aggressive. Your cpu friends are also not just sitting ducks even when they are ganged up, especially the generals. Otherwise, it's the same musou mode as you are well familiar with.
The battle system have been changed a bit to incorporate a stance button, and an emergency evade button. The stance button, once held, allows you to execute certain special moves based on which character you picked. For example, holding R1, pressing square or triangle will do different things. The emergency evade button, R2, executes a roll, to give you the ability to get out of those situations where you are ganged up by a group of thugs. Other than these two additions, everything else is similar to Sengoku Musou 1.
Character growth is a huge change from the previous installment. You now actually buy most of the attributes from a store now. Weapons are not bought though, they are still picked up in battle. You can upgrade them in the store though. Each weapon has a certain amount of upgradeable slots, and you spend a certain amount of money to upgrade each slot, but the upgrades are random. You can also hire new kinds of guards or buy mounts in the store. The character attributes is probable the most interesting new feature. You can buy new attributes for your character in 4 categories: ability stat, growth, battle, heal/special. Things like "Increase Attack," "Gain more musou meter on lvl up," "gaining more energy after killing 100 enemies," "Find rare items easier"... etc. Each character can equip up to 10 of these in each of the four categories.
That's about all for now, but overall Sengoku Musou 2 is a nice improvement on the same old game. Personally I feel that Koei is focusing on this series more than their Sangoku series, since everything feels quite polished in Sengoku Musou 2. Going to play some more now.
The game begins with Koei's usual adrenaline pumped CG intro, and I must say that Koei's animation prowess gets better and better with each Dynasty/Samurai iterations. The overall presentation quality are much improved as well, not to say they were bad before, but the quality trasitions coupled with the Japanese voice over makes the prologues before each battle very very cool.
Loading speed is super fast, they did a very good job of hiding the loading time behind important text/screens/pictures that you wouldn't really skip. So kudos to Koei for that.
Now onto the battles. I've only played musou mode, there are a couple of others from the main screen that I haven't tried. One of them is an infinite castle mode, and another sugoroku mode. Which is similar to chinese monopoly, for those of you who've played that before. Personally, I only care about the musou mode, so I'll be talking about that here. Pretty much, is the same musou mode as all the other games. The only significant change I've noticed is the AI improvement. Both the enemy and your cpu friends. The CPU blocks much more efficiently and are much more aggressive. Your cpu friends are also not just sitting ducks even when they are ganged up, especially the generals. Otherwise, it's the same musou mode as you are well familiar with.
The battle system have been changed a bit to incorporate a stance button, and an emergency evade button. The stance button, once held, allows you to execute certain special moves based on which character you picked. For example, holding R1, pressing square or triangle will do different things. The emergency evade button, R2, executes a roll, to give you the ability to get out of those situations where you are ganged up by a group of thugs. Other than these two additions, everything else is similar to Sengoku Musou 1.
Character growth is a huge change from the previous installment. You now actually buy most of the attributes from a store now. Weapons are not bought though, they are still picked up in battle. You can upgrade them in the store though. Each weapon has a certain amount of upgradeable slots, and you spend a certain amount of money to upgrade each slot, but the upgrades are random. You can also hire new kinds of guards or buy mounts in the store. The character attributes is probable the most interesting new feature. You can buy new attributes for your character in 4 categories: ability stat, growth, battle, heal/special. Things like "Increase Attack," "Gain more musou meter on lvl up," "gaining more energy after killing 100 enemies," "Find rare items easier"... etc. Each character can equip up to 10 of these in each of the four categories.
That's about all for now, but overall Sengoku Musou 2 is a nice improvement on the same old game. Personally I feel that Koei is focusing on this series more than their Sangoku series, since everything feels quite polished in Sengoku Musou 2. Going to play some more now.