Retro Games

[rabidtictac]

It's depressing to see how Musou has replaced beat em ups. I know Jim Spergeling likes them, but I really fucking hate Musou games. Enemies are made of paper and have ridiculously bad AI. Bosses read your inputs and cheat. For a long time, every game in the series would make you do the same missions over. Now they've got licenses, but the gameplay is the same: utter shit.

When I go looking for modern examples of brawling/beat em up/hack and slash games, I see a lot of people recommending Musou shit.

[Vulcan]

I completely agree. I've completely had my fill of Musou games and don't want to play any more for as long as I live. They've tried to innovate but it's all small incremental steps and it doesn't matter when the base gameplay is shallow and limiting.

What's worse about the Musou craze is the tie-ins. If an anime wants a video game or another video game title wants a spin-off they'll give the license to Musou and we'll get yet another bargain bin generic piece of shit. To think of how many great games we were deprived of because of this. That Berserk or Hokuto no Ken would have actually got a unique, interesting original and fun game that the license deserved.

Musou is honestly the biggest idiot test there is, just slap a shiny skin of a well known franchise on it and the retarded fanboys will eat it up and ask for seconds. A sad state of affairs.

[Joe Roscoe]

That reminds me that Tecmo Koei announced Musou Stars, basically an all star crossover of Tecmo Koei franchises in a musou setting but they manage to ruin the roster already by consisting of mostly characters from DOA, Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, Ninja Gaiden, and Toukiden with a few more recentish games like Nioh and for some reason Opoona but then ignores, unless DLC comes about, for other older Tecmo Koei franchises that should have been represented like Gitaroo Man, Tecmo Bowl, Monster Rancher, Bomb Jack, Solomon's Key, and Rygar

[Kugelfisch]

I've never heard the term Musou before. Please educate me.

[Vulcan]

It's a grouping for all the various games Koei Tecmo produce such as Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, Warriors Orochi. Musou (meaning unrivalled) is the Japanese name for these games, for instance Dynasty Warriors is Sangokumusou (Three Kingdoms Unrivalled); Samurai Warriors is Sengokumusou (Unrivaled Warring States).

Musou games are hack and slash games where you move across a battlefield and kill countless weak enemies with poor AI that don't offer any opposition. They have incredibly simple gameplay with very few combos and a wide selection of characters to play as.

[Kugelfisch]

Ah okay. Never really played any because the PC ports are fucking awful and I never cared enough for them to get them on consoles.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

It would be fine and dandy if they were awful ports in general. But instead it's complete hit and miss. Stuff like Pirate Warriors 3 runs much better than pretty much everything else they put out (even shit that's years older), but then you have Bladestorm and especially Toukiden who would still run like garbage if you played it with a quantum computer from current year + 200.

When I go looking for modern examples of brawling/beat em up/hack and slash games, I see a lot of people recommending Musou shit.

Coming Soon:

• River City Warriors
• Double Warriors
• Streets of the Warriors
• Final Warriors
• The Warriors Warriors

[rabidtictac]

Kugel, you can replace "Musou" with "Warriors" and it'll give you a good idea of what games are part of the musou subgenre, because that's how the games get translated for the west, mostly.

I just think the formula is complete dogshit. I don't want every non-boss enemy to be made of paper and unable to do anything. I don't want to fight 10000s of these copypasta paper enemies. I don't want bosses to read my inputs and spam moves that can't be interrupted, or never get staggered by anything I do. I don't want to run all over a massive map full of trash mobs to complete repetitive objectives, like a Capture The Flag mode without human opponents. It's like Tecmo Koei took the worst aspects of beat em ups (cheating AI, mostly) and combined it with a whole bunch of awful shit of their own invention.

No doubt the AI being so bad was a product of trying to get 1000s of enemies running on PS2 era hardware, but this isn't the PS2 era anymore and the games still look and play like shit.

As I said, when you try to look for action/brawling/hack and slash games on modern consoles, mostly you find either Bayonetta stylish action or Musou shit.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Probably the weirdest is their main line Dynasty Warriors. I mean, there's only so much you can do adapting the same tale over and over and over again. There aren't really many reasons to ever own more than one game of that franchise for some mindless button-mashing.

Also I miss God Hand. Probably could've used an additional difficulty setting since the jump from level 3 to DIE is a bit batshit, but it's still really friggin' good.

[Guest]

That reminds me that Tecmo Koei announced Musou Stars, basically an all star crossover of Tecmo Koei franchises in a musou setting but they manage to ruin the roster already by consisting of mostly characters from DOA, Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, Ninja Gaiden, and Toukiden with a few more recentish games like Nioh and for some reason Opoona but then ignores, unless DLC comes about, for other older Tecmo Koei franchises that should have been represented like Gitaroo Man, Tecmo Bowl, Monster Rancher, Bomb Jack, Solomon's Key, and Rygar

Probably because the character models are just recycled assets from previous Koei-Tecmo games. They have plenty of Musou games to draw content from, not to mention the other games they made like Ninja Gaiden and DOA (just look at how many times they reused Ryu Hayabusa in the Black Falcon outfit) . On the other hand, there hasn't been a new Solomon's Key or Rygar in ages and creating new character models for their representatives would've probably taken more effort than they wanted (kinda surprised they choose to bring back Opoona of all characters though).

Besides, I don't see how a generic football player from Tecmo Bowl could make for an interesting playable character. How is he going to fight off a massive horde of demons? By tackling them?