DYNASTY WARRIORS: STRIKEFORCE
Original Release: Koei, 2009, PSP / Xbox 360 / PS3
A Dynasty Warriors spinoff that looked to capture interest in MMO elements and Monster Hunter's style of gameplay
Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce (Koei, PSP, 2009)
Where to Buy: Amazon
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
After the first Monster Hunter hit it big in 2004 there was this brief burst, especially on the handhelds of the time, of companies digging up properties they could "Monster Hunt-ify" in some way. Strikeforce was Koei's little branch of their musou titles that attempted this, though it keeps most of the key aspects superficial and is really more of a core musou game that just breaks everything up into smaller screens and mobs (as a number of the other handheld titles did).
The game's biggest Monster Hunter-y aspect is the little hub village you start out at and return to between each mission. It's just a simple little screen with a bunch of different vendors around; they sell orbs you can attach to weapons for increased power, skills you equip directly to your character, and so on. There's also a rudimentary crafting system as every venture out into the wilderness of the Warring States has you bringing home a whole hobo shopping cart full of random junk and bits. Said bits are then used to create new stuff and also upgrade your assorted facilities.
Beyond that it really is much more typical musou game than Monster Hunter though, just with everything scaled down to fit the PSP's more modest hardware. They do throw in a giant monster once in a great while, but it's more of a bonus thing like hunting down the Weapon bosses in FF7. The closer thing to monsters that you see are the regular generals who serve as bosses in some missions, who are now juiced up and have a lot of the same Dragon Ball-esque superpowers that you do.
While Dynasty Warriors characters were already basically metahumans to begin with, they got a bunch of new perks in this one that were not previously seen in the PS2/early PS3 installments of the time. You can now equip double and triple jumps, floating and hovering, extended dashes around the playfield at super speed, homing magic spells, group buff and debuff spells etc. and so on. Enemy generals usually have some combination of this stuff too though, sometimes serving as chokepoints to force you to level up.
What it all comes down to is the multiplayer, though. The Monster Hunter clones of the mid-2000s were all pretty much trading on internet multiplayer now being easy on handhelds and consoles for the first generation. As a single-player experience it's pretty much a soulless grindathon. If you're OK with musou grinding for its own sake you'd probably do better with one of the mainline entries, which not only give you bigger maps and more options but allow you to grind the whole roster (this one restricts you to one character per save file).
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