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| WO Deconstruction; It's getting pretty academic here... | |
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| Topic Started: May 26 2008, 02:22 PM (584 Views) | |
| Chosis | May 26 2008, 02:22 PM Post #1 |
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First Lieutenant
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Would've put this up sooner, but I was sweating on how well it actually went down with the faculty. I wrote a deconstruction of Warriors Orochi as part of my games degree, and figured this was an apt place to put it. Turns out my tutor for the subject is a closet Warriors fan, and it went down pretty well. I should point out that this isn't a review per se, but I figured this was still the right place to put it. The deconstruction is written according to the Konzack method, detailed in the link below. Fair warning, this is a loooong article. --- Deconstructing Warriors Orochi, Betteridge, R, 2008, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn Warriors Orochi is a spin-off game from a rich pedigree synonymous with action adventure gaming. The virtual space of this game invites the players to lead and fight a military campaign against a demonic lord, the titular character Orochi. The game is a spiritual successor to Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors, from Koei, and many characters and stages are borrowed from each series. Play is divided into Story mode, in which the game's plot is revealed, and Free mode, essentially Story mode sans much of the narrative. The game is intended for solo play, but a second player may participate in a cooperative role. Either play mode offers experience points to participating characters which unlock new skills, along with new weapons, concept art, character renders, and videos. These new skills can be used to challenge harder stages, where victory is rewarded with greater prizes. The playground of the game is the game pad, through which the player controls a team of three military officers and fights their way across a battlefield populated by hundreds of enemy and allied soldiers, completing secondary objectives to raise army morale, and ultimately defeating the enemy commanding officer. The hardware required to play Warriors Orochi is a Sony PlayStation2 or Microsoft Xbox 360 connected to a television, with one or two respective game pads, and the game disc. The Xbox 360 has the ability to save progress onto its internal hard drive, but for PS2 users, a Memory Card, while not strictly necessary, is highly recommended. Alternatively, one can track down the recent PSP or PC ports of the game. Warriors Orochi rewards progression in its Story mode with the release of conquered stages for use in Free mode, the occasional new character, and in turn new ways to play the game. This is evidence to support the presence of textonic dynamics in the game. Its indeterminableness is proven by the sheer numbers of variables in any given situation, with hundreds of individual soldiers acting at once, fighting as a unit or fleeing for their lives. The game is transient; the battle will be fought without the user if s/he chooses not to participate. If the player does participate, however, every enemy slain affects the enemy's morale, making opposing soldiers more likely to desert their forces. This example of the player's strategic role demonstrates the personal perspective present. Access to the game's content is controlled, as many facets of the game require unlocking through play. Progression through the Story mode demonstrates conditional linking; future campaigns, characters and items are only released for use by fulfilling certain conditions of increasing difficulty in campaigns. The core game play of Warriors Orochi is a configurative user function, where the player's choice of where to go and who to attack affects where enemy troops get sent, how many, and even how confident they are. The player takes part in Warriors Orochi by playing as a team of three selected characters. A second player may also participate, fighting alongside the first player. The computer takes the position of judge, enemy, and ally, controlling not only opposing soldiers, but also friendly units, and governing interaction between this menagerie of combatants. The player selects a game mode, character, campaign and various other customizable elements using the game pad. Characters are all ranked differently in terms of character type (Power, Speed or Technique), base health, attack power, constitution, running speed, and Musou, a form of energy gauge that facilitates the use of highly advanced attacks. Attacks consist of three types: Normal, which can be chained together for long combinations; Charge, used to interrupt a Normal chain and put your foe at a disadvantage; and Musou, a powerful repeating move that gradually drains your Musou gauge. Each character also has access to a Maneuver determined by their character type, the ability to whistle for a horse, guard and switch between teammates. The virtual spaces of Warriors Orochi are various battlefields from a range of settings in Feudal Japan and third century China, the playground being in front of a television screen. The battlefields, while vast, are a limited space, enforced with castle walls and impenetrable forest belts. The goal is to win campaigns by fulfilling specific victory conditions and avoiding defeat conditions, both of which are displayed pre-battle. Victory conditions usually comprise defeating the enemy Commander, a playable character under the computer's control, while keeping your Commander, another computer controlled character, alive. All campaigns are timed, although time rarely plays a factor in game play. If once the campaign time has elapsed neither conditions are met, the campaign is awarded to the computer. On the path to the enemy Commander are numerous sub-goals, such as the securing of supply bases, blocking enemy reinforcement paths, or the capturing of key strategic points. This is achieved by defeating enemy Captains. Obstacles include enemy soldiers, armed with a variety of weapons; Guard, Base and Defense Captains; enemy playable-character Officers; and the enemy Commander themselves. In addition, numerous stages also include natural obstacles, such as flowing streams that affect movement, cannon fire, or navigable castles. Your character's vitals and objectives are common knowledge, as is the health of enemies, the morale of both sides, the names of important units and their position. Details of the enemy's strategic plays, such as sending units towards a key base, are displayed in the form of announcements, as are your own accomplishments. Defeating enemy units rewards you with experience, on occasion health replenishment items, temporary stat multipliers (attack, defense, speed, unlimited Musou), or new weapons. Being defeated by the reduction of your health to zero results in surrendering the campaign and having to start again. Warriors Orochi creates a meaning for the player by the way it portrays its characters. A total of seventy-nine characters are present, divided into four major forces: the three Chinese armies, Wu, Shu and Wei, and a Samurai army. Each character has a part in the Warriors Orochi narrative, some more so than others. For example, Zhao Yun, poster-boy for the Dynasty Warriors series, is left wholly demoralized after witnessing his lord's defeat. It falls to him to reunite his army and rescue his lord from Orochi's clutches. In some cases characters' personality can affect game play, such as with Dong Zhuo, a tyrannic womanizer, who kidnaps a female officer from the player's forces and won't return her until he is defeated, or Magoichi Saika, a self-professed ladies' man, who allies with the player to help rescue a beautiful officer captured by the enemy. Warriors Orochi diverts from its predecessors' methods in terms of plot, having one chapter dedicated to each major force, instead of each officer. Each of the four chapters of the story deals with a theme, from a son emerging from his father's shadow, to a whole family of warriors blackmailed into fighting against their better judgment. This brings forward a long-standing trait of Warriors games to present many different narratives, but be vague and inconclusive about which is the true narrative of the game's world. This is seen in many versus fighting games, to help reel the player in when the sequel comes around, and is an ideal ploy for a franchise that can warrant the release of four games (SW: Katana, Orochi: Maoh Sairin, DW 6, and a PSP port of Orochi) in the space of a fortnight. The progenitors of this game, Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors, are based on the Three Kingdoms era and the Feudal era, drawing heavily on characters and settings from both periods. These are portrayed based on historical accounts, such as the detailed documents of the Feudal era, and dramatized novels, such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Many Eastern people consider Cao Cao and Nobunaga Oda, two charismatic and unforgiving lords of their age, amongst the great 'what-if' confrontations. Thus, the game's appeal is evident, as an opportunity to compare those who would otherwise be incomparable. Warriors Orochi, a fictional amalgamation of the two eras, creates an opportunity to explore the theoretical interaction between entirely unrelated characters, an opportunity the staff behind the game have capitalized on. The friendship forged between Sun Shang Xiang and Ina-hime, for instance, can only be understood with the knowledge that both women grew up in warrior families, with plenty of exposure to warfare. Even without prior knowledge of the characters, however, much work has been put into giving each member of the cast a unique, recognizable personality. Warriors Orochi is clearly dedicated to the fans of the other Warriors games, who make up the target audience. The games themselves can be seen as political allegories of two eras in history that still capture the imagination of adult and child alike, fresh takes on the audience's perception of these historical figures. Where Cao Cao's own historians (the oldest records of the Three Kingdoms era) depict him as harsh yet just leader, Dynasty Warriors and in turn Warriors Orochi reveals a merciless and brilliant warlord, told more from the perspective of his enemies than his allies. There is also the simple satisfaction and pride that can be taken from defeating wave after wave of enemy soldiers single-handedly, further enhanced by the congratulatory one-liners used by allies, in response to defeating officers or reaching a milestone of dispatched soldiers. The over-the-shoulder perspective provided by the game serves to amplify this feeling, reinforcing the knowledge that the player is a minority against a legion of adversaries, making victory all the sweeter. In deconstructing Warriors Orochi many layers of depth have been found in what has been perceived by some critics to be a cheap cash-in. Delving deeper into the gameplay presents the user with a simple and intuitive system, to match the simple pleasure derived from a hard-fought victory of one over many. Referencing characters from historical figures helps give the characters context, with which the player can recognize and be familiar with the roles available to them. The narrative fulfills its purpose of bringing together two series in a celebration of the folklore behind the two eras. Warriors Orochi is at its core a game of simple pleasures, made engaging by the many layers of thought present within. --- Reference List Lars Konzack, 2002, Computer Game Criticism: A New Method for Computer Game Analysis, Arhaus University, Denmark, http://www.vrmedialab.dk/%7Ekonzack/tampere2002.pdf Omega Force, 2007, Warriors Orochi, video game, Koei Co. Ltd., Tochigi, Japan Luo Guanzhong/Moss Roberts, 1937, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, ISBN 0-520-22478-7, University of California Press, California, USA |
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| LittleDragonZ | May 26 2008, 02:44 PM Post #2 |
Behold the spear of Baby Dragon!
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Excellently written. Despite the various words I had trouble understanding (haha) you pretty much wrote the basics without going deep into the game mechanics and features. (which you didn't have to) Besides, I sensed a few very little amount of complaints present, which is great! Good luck in University! |
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| crazyboyz | Apr 30 2009, 11:03 AM Post #3 |
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Elite Soldier
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Great review! |
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