about 70 hours in DW9 now... it's actually pretty awesome on Chaos difficulty, the AI is so much better. they use defend abilities a lot more and different enemies defend differently, or are countered by different style weapons/triggers differently. dueling different styles of bandits or officers and adapting your weapon choice/triggers/gems is fun, and some of the battles (e.g. Hulao Pass as Dong Zhuo) are really massive... like 3000-4000 KOs. plenty of cloned camps/castles with generic captains too tho.
game looks pretty decent with low or HUD too. pretty nice world design once you leave the Great Plains of the early chapters and the game has tremendous weather effects. the jungles and mountains/valleys of the south-west have some pretty decent landscaping. half the time looks like a cheap last gen MMO (FF XI quality?) with plenty of cloned assets but other half the time the landscaping is decent looks like a current gen mmo (less XI, more XIV) -- and it has its moments. it has probably over ten different levels of weather or atmosphere effects... some of the different types of storms or haze are a nice touch. not everything is lazy without attention to detail: torches go out when the wind picks up or it rains, and mud collects on your clothes faster when it rains (and you're actually fighting in dirt). i like how feathers on your weapon match the direction of the wind (even if you turn your character) or just how many things are dynamic (grass that bends or objects that break) ... but it makes you wonder why do those things when you frame rate is shit lol. 60 fps first plz -_-
sadly the polish 2/10 but there's a great foundation here for the XL version ... though, that's also why I'm happy Koei is getting shit on... not really acceptable behaviour to release such a poorly polished game, even by DW standards. which is weird because the game is absolutely massive in terms of content, cutscenes, voice acting, etc -- spent so much time trying to make the game big and saved nothing left to polish it beyond barely beta phase 1 quality.