"Why do people buy each one?" is not that hard of a question to answer. This is really the only thing that actually bothers me anymore about the weird way Dynasty Warriors is treated in games media in general, because it blatantly ignores the trends other popular franchises have lived on. The question can easily be turned and asked about Call of Duty, or Madden, or Assassin's Creed, or Civilization, or Castlevania, or Mega Man, or Street Fighter, or so on and so forth.
It's fine that there are folks, even if it's a majority of folks, that don't like the streamlined character action game that Dynasty Warriors is. This is true of all genres! I bet there really is a lot of people out there going "Why do people buy each Call of Duty? It's the same game every time, and they pump them out so quickly." You just don't hear that very often in mainstream media.
All that said, I'm a little disappointed in how far the "open world" goes. It's essentially just larger stages with side content you can chase after instead of being worried that if you dally your AI allies will get overrun because they're terrible. But there's also a LOT of huge changes this game has made with how it works compared to previous games, and I'll probably look at picking it up later on.
I get what you mean when you say that handheld looks "low res", but I actually... really like the look? Like, it SUPER comes across as like you're playing an old PS2-era prerendered cutscene, even with a little bit of that grain effect those videos used to get. It gave me a lot more of the feeling of "You're playing a cutscene!" they were trying to express during the PS1->PS2 and PS2->PS3 transitions then those eras ever did.
Everything just looks like it's always a prerendered cutscene, and they manage to make the characters generic animations good enough that it manages to come across as hand-crafted all the time.
THPS2 for GBA was, in honesty, my first introduction to Tony Hawk games, and it set my beliefs for the franchise. Even at the time I remember being really impressed at how good they looked and how well they ran, given the GBA.
I ended up being actually pretty disappointed when I tried a normal Tony Hawk game, because it just didn't play like the games I had been playing.
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