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Hi. This is Kenichi Ogasawara, a producer at KOEI and the creator of Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce for PSP. We’re launching a new multiplayer demo tomorrow on PlayStation Store, so I came by to share some thoughts about the game.

Over the years, we’ve gained a lot of support for the Dynasty Warriors series, but the longer you continue a series, the more conservative some elements become when you are making the game system and the game world. Our aim this time was to overhaul everything: new system, new visuals, new action.

With Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce we shifted the focus of the series on PSP to 4-player multi-play. But even by adding multiplayer to the Dynasty Warriors formula, my team and I were really doubtful as to whether or not players could get any more excitement from the series. We still felt we needed something huge…

Monsters! Yes!

This might sound completely over the top, but idea behind adding monsters (like Bi Xie, the giant stone tiger you’ll see at the Battle of Hu Lao Gate) is that we wanted players to have the same reaction that actual warriors would have when going up against massive fortresses. We really brainstormed. In the end it was decided that visually Bi Xie would be the best way to portray the frightening nature of the Hu Lao Gate (which in Chinese translates to “Tiger Cage” Gate).

Still we felt that wasn’t enough! So we created the “Fury” transformation. There were two big reasons for this. The first is that we loved the idea of having these high-speed battles where the characters could fight in the air. In order to realize this concept we really needed something revolutionary, a power that these warriors never had before.

The other is that the team wanted to break the rules of traditional characterizations. Many of you know that the Dynasty Warriors characters are all based on their historic counterparts, so we are fairly limited to what we can do with their design. With the Fury transformations, we gave the characters more uniqueness and freed them from these fixed designs as much as we could.

In the demo, you’ll face some of the strongest warriors of the Three Kingdoms such as Lu Bu, and Diao Chan. Fighting them will be really tough if you do it on your own, so the best way to approach this is to divide up your team and to figure out a strategy such as one player attacking one enemy, while the others go after Bi Xie. You will have to use these multiplayer elements to advance through the stage, so have fun trying different strategies.

I really hope all of you will play the demo tomorrow. In the meantime, check out the trailer.

As you’ll see, the levels have received a major makeover. Other than what you see in here, there are heaps more stages. Plus, for a multiplayer game, this has got to have the fastest pace of anything out there!

God-Like Phoenix

Mar 26 2009, 10:53 AM

although I did laugh a bit at the part mentioning Diao Chan in the context of "strongest warriors of the three kingdoms"