Dynasty Warriors: Dominate First Impressions – Feel free to pursue Lu Bu

Dynasty Warriors: Dominate is a Dynasty Warriors title from Koei Tecmo and Tencent Games released exclusively for mobile in China. As the game isn’t region-locked, I was able to play the game outside of the country and with my prior knowledge as a Dynasty Warriors/Romance of the Three Kingdoms fan, overcome the language barrier.

That said, here are my first impressions of playing Dynasty Warriors: Dominate.

A Familiar Setting

As per the series’ tradition, the game starts off with the Yellow Turban Rebellion. The game’s plot stays largely identical to the Dynasty Warriors games, which is a good thing.

Dominate starts you off as Liu Bei as you play through the tutorial that is the Yellow Turban Rebellion. Unfortunately, you would not be able to change characters and play as someone from Wei or Wu. You get to switch to Guan Yu and Zhang Fei as part of the tutorial, but most of the characters are locked behind gacha.

The character designs look similar to their designs from Dynasty Warriors 7. It really feels like the developers just repurposed their assets for mobile. Thankfully, the characters are consistent and faithful to their depictions throughout the franchise—Liu Bei loves helping everyone in need, Zhang Fei is still a hot-head, etc.

While the game is in Chinese, characters only have their Japanese voices. Admittedly, I was hoping for Chinese voices, since the game is released for the Chinese market and is literally about an important time period in Chinese history. 

Hack and Slash Gameplay

If you aren’t already familiar with the Dynasty Warriors franchise, Dominate plays the same way as the console versions. You play as a single warrior, having to cut down hundreds of peons as if you were a 1-man army. You do have friendly NPC soldiers, but the bulk of the work still belongs to the player.

The game’s combat is similar to Dynasty Warriors 4 and 5, in which each character can only use one weapon without switching. You also have normal and charge attacks. You can use charge attacks to end your combo after a string of normal attacks.

One major difference is the lack of a jump button, which means no jump attacks. In exchange, there is a dodge button, which is useful for fighting bosses. Bosses will occasionally perform powerful attacks that leave a red area of effect indicator on the ground, denoting where the attack will hit. The dodge button will help get you out of range quickly. You can also defend and use musou attacks when the bar is full. Musou attacks still grant invincibility.

Similar to Warriors Orochi on the PS2, you can include up to 3 characters in your time. At any time in the battle, you can switch between your characters. However, unlike Warriors Orochi, characters do not disappear when you switch out of them. Rather, they are controlled by the game’s AI and will follow the player character around and kill enemies by default.

Unlike the console games, the map in each mission in Dynasty Warriors: Dominate is extremely tiny. Here, you can beat missions in less than 5 minutes, even if you go out of the way to clear most of the map. There are also no interesting events like in the old PS2 games. For example, the Yellow Turban Rebellion maps back in the Dynasty Warriors 4 had events like boulders being dropped on the player or strong winds from windmills blocking progress. These events made each map interesting. Dominate does not do anything to change up the formula, and as a result, the hack and slash action gets boring fast. 

Another annoying issue is that whenever you perform a musou attack, the phone vibrates violently. This scared me the first time I used a musou attack. This is not a controller—phones should not vibrate this way.

Back to the Village

In between missions, the village serves as the main hub. Here, you can talk to NPCs to continue the main quest. You can also see other players running around or even chat with them.

Other than the story NPCs, there are also other NPCs that help with various functions. For example, you can upgrade your equipment at the blacksmith. Many of these helpful NPCs need to have their buildings upgraded first, so over time as you play, you can see the village expanding.

The village is also very similar to most mobile MMORPGs nowadays with the option of auto-pathing, letting the game automatically send you to the next story-relevant NPC. However, there is no option to skip dialogue or let the dialogue auto-play. As a result, if you want to speed through all the dialogue, you have to keep tapping the screen, which is annoying. The game already has the option of automatically sending you to the next NPC, why can’t it let you automatically skip dialogue, too?

Gacha and Monetization 

As an old school Dynasty Warriors fan, gacha is a mechanic that blends horribly with the series. For example, your favourite character is Zhuge Liang. In the console games, you either play a certain stage to unlock him or he is already there (Xtreme Legends). In this game, you may never play as your favourite character because you only have a chance of getting him or her via gacha.

Gacha rates are pretty standard, with SSR-ranked characters with a 1.5% chance of dropping, SR-ranked characters at 2.5% and R-ranked characters at a 10% chance. There is much higher rate of character fragments dropping, but again, I am not a fan of this system at all.

Like many other mobile games, Dominate has daily rewards and a VIP system. The more money you spend on the game, the higher your rank in the VIP system, granting you more benefits.

While this sounds pay-to-win, the game’s campaign is easy enough that you do not really need to spend money to beat it. Even Lu Bu, the hardest enemy in the series, can be beaten the first time you fight him. That’s right, there is no need to run around him or abuse charge attacks—he is only slightly harder than the normal enemy general encounter. 

You will only need to spend money if you want to get a specific gacha-locked character. Either that, or if you want to unlock skins for the characters. If you want Liu Bei to wear a western suit as he runs around murdering peons, you can, for a price.

Another annoying feature is if you skip cutscenes, you will lose out on rewards. Why Tencent Games and Koei Tecmo do this is beyond me. Punishing players just because they want to skip cutscenes strikes me as non-consumer friendly.

Graphics

The game’s visuals are pretty average both in combat and in the village. Other mobile games, especially MMORPGs tend to look a lot better. Regardless, I feel that Dominate is aimed more towards Dynasty Warriors fans in the first place who do not mind the graphical quality as much.

However, I do have a major issue with the cutscenes. This is the first game that I ever played where the gameplay actually looks better than the cutscenes. Take a look at these two screenshots.

Here is how the game looks when I’m performing a musou attack:

Here is how the game looks in a cutscene:

Firstly, the way the game crops the side of the video makes it look ugly. Secondly, the models look worse than in-combat graphics and their skin is too shiny, as if they do not fit naturally in the environment. I really dislike the cutscenes, yet the game punishes me by taking away rewards if I were to skip them.

Also, you may be confused by the comments flying around in the cutscenes like it was a Nico Nico video. Luckily, these pieces of text can be turned off. I do not know why they are turned on by default, but they seriously ruin my immersion. I’m here to play a game, not get distracted by the comments invading the screen.

Closing Thoughts

Honestly, as a game, Dynasty Warriors: Dominate is pretty average. If you want a hack and slash game on mobile, it delivers exactly that purpose.

However, the biggest problem with the game is locking characters behind gacha. When fans of the series are already used to playing as the characters they like, implementing a gacha system feels like a step backwards.

There are ways to make PS2 games run on phones. Why should I play Dominate and be unable to play my favourite characters, when I can run Dynasty Warriors 5: Xtreme Legends on my phone and have ALL the characters right from the start? As it stands, Dominate feels like a cash grab, rather than a respectable mobile game that can stand tall with most of the mainline titles.

Visit the game’s page to learn more.

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