It's been a while since I've played a Dynasty Warriors game, but boredom has nudged me into trying Dynasty Warriors Online. 
  
After a couple of hours, a few things really stuck out to me:

• There's an overly long tutorial
  
• The world is structure to that of the PSO/PSU games
• The UI is unnecessarily hindered through layers of menus
• Faction starting zones (I'm not sure if there are multiple starting zones) are presented fairly well by named characters from the franchise
• There's no real persistent character leveling
• Joining instances with other players doesn't seem too different from playing by yourself, it just gets the job down faster