Samurai Warriors 4 is already out in Japan and will be coming to North America in October. This is something I'm stoked for, as I've always preferred the Samurai Warriors series to Dynasty Warriors, and this looks like it should be a great new entry. I found this video of the Japanese version online where the player has included captions to describe some of the mechanical changes specific to this installment:

Some of the highlights:

• Two characters are now controlled in all battles, and the character not under active control behaves independently, similar in nature to Samurai Warriors Chronicles on the 3DS.
• Weapon pick-ups are now specific to the character that collects it, rather than giving weapons to all of the characters (as was the case in Warriors Orochi).
• Various tweaks have been made to the combo system.
• Hitting 1000 K.O.s now puts the player character in a temporary ultra-buffed state. This is the first time in the entire Warriors franchise that a gameplay bonus of this nature has been given for reaching this milestone.
• Armor equipment has been removed, and defensive stat buffs are now granted by weapons.

Ultra buffed as in Musou Rage or just X2 everything?

Samurai Warriors was good when the VO didn't suck.

I don't know the exact stats on it. Looks more like an overall stat buff and not Musou Rage.

If I may ask why?

Just curious, never played the Samurai games. I thought they were basically DW in a different setting. I assume that's probably wrong?

I will say those changes sound cool. the 2 character thing sounds like a lot of fun, a great way to add variability and fast travel into the game.

@slag: The original SW had unique characters, excellent voice acting, and a better combat system than DW had up to that point; now it's sort of a wash on the combat front but it probably still has a slight edge on character variation (though having 70 more characters probably overrules that).

Part of it is just the setting and aesthetic. It's also a period of history I'm more interested in. But the gameplay has always had notable, some could say experimental differences compared to Dynasty Warriors. Even as far back as the original Samurai Warriors, elements were introduced that had never been in a Dynasty Warriors game before, like a proper experience/leveling system and marks the first and really only time that the aimed projectile attacks that were present way back when actually served a modicum of use. (That mechanic was dropped entirely from the Warriors franchise eventually, I believe starting with Samurai Warriors 2, which introduced character-specific techniques when R1 was pressed.) Character equipment and gear has also been historically handled differently, though the ways that they've been handled has changed over the course of the series.

Samurai Warriors 3 introduced a couple of specific twists in the spirit gauge and item loadouts. The spirit gauge is a series of orbs that when filled, could be expended to perform a super-powered musou attack, or to break an enemy's guard. In Samurai Warriors Chronicles, the gauge was also tied to using character specific abilities on the battlefield. As for the item loadouts, Samurai Warriors 3 allows the player to enter battle with a selection of expendable items on their person, with preset loadouts featuring health items or temporary stat boots.

Finally, the gameplay modes outside of the story mode have tended to be entirely different, ranging from a survival mode castle, to a Fortune Street-like board game, to (in the case of Samurai Warriors 3 on the Wii), a full-blown mode based on an old Nintendo-produced title for the Famicom Disk System.

Basically, both series started off in somewhat different places and have evolved in different ways ever since. One isn't just a reskinned version of the other.

I didn't even know they were still making Samurai Warriors games. I've only ever played the first one.

This may be a minor thing to complain about, but why must they place the dialogue text in the middle of the screen during battles? Warriors games have always been very chatty, so there's just this fat, solid dialogue box covering up the action in the middle of the screen for a majority of the time. Again, perhaps I'm just nitpicking, but there's better real estate that they could put it such as the top left or bottom right corners. I don't know why it's bothering me now as I would imagine this isn't the first warriors game that's had it.

After looking at some DW:8 gameplay, it doesn't seem as egregious as the dialogue box isn't so centered as it is here.

Anyway, the dual character thing intrigues me the most. Does the other character follow you around like your guards did in DW:(4?), or does it go off into other areas of the battlefield? I also wonder if you can set the AI character to clear out a specific area or if it's totally independent until you switch to it. How would it work with Coop? I never played SW on 3DS so I'm not familiar with the system.

@hailinel: Well both series have an extremely strong historic base, DW just has a very strong fictional base as well. Hideyoshi is definitely more competent than Cao Cao historically (both of whom annihilate any of the other generals/strategists in their respective time periods) so I guess if you wanted to tackle it from a practical front you'd favor Sengoku in Japan over Three Kingdoms in China.

The second character doesn't act like the bodyguards of old. As for whether they can be guided in any way, I'm not sure. Chronicles on the 3DS allowed for setting paths and targets on the touch screen, but that manner of interface isn't present on consoles (aside from the Wii U, which this game isn't on). So I assume that the characters act indepdently.

That's also true. Though this also isn't to say that I don't like the DW setting or characters. I enjoy them greatly. Just not as much as what's depicted in Samurai Warriors.

Whaaaa? Those alt modes sound crazy.

Thanks for the reply! Makes total sense.

No problem! I put a lot of hours into those Castle modes in particular. I logged well over a hundred hours in the first Samurai Warriors/Xtreme Legends in particular largely due to that mode.

Fuckin finally. Since Warriors Orochi I've wanted to play a Samurai Warriors game, but my friend I always played Dynasty Warriors with only had those, and none of them came to the PS3 in North America. I always found the characters more interesting or fun to play. I mean, it is a bunch of samurai and ninjas after all. DW has some cool characters, but Zhou Tai was always one of my go-tos there for being the closest to playing as a stoic samurai, complete with all the fancy sheathing and unsheathing.

Maybe it's the flashy effects, what looks like some specularity on clothing and armour, or just the character designs themselves, but something about the player models here looks crisper than I remember from the series of late. Lighting looks a tad bit better too. Granted the games still looks far off from the next-gen Musou game I used to dream of.

Gotta say though, looking for characters to refresh myself on characters from SW, I came across some Sengoku Basara stuff. I might have to give that series another chance. They made Kotaro Fuma look like a bad-ass instead of a red-headed ninja Kefka (which is admittedly also kinda awesome).

Those games always had a great sense of style, but the little I played of the first one was a lot more linear than I was expecting. It was mostly just me running down a rocky path fighting to the end of the level as opposed to running around a more open space like in DW. Combat felt a lot smoother and way more combo-focused than DW though. Also apparently SB4 just straight up has a Dante costume for Masamune Date, so fuck it, that's kinda cool.

I read this as "Dynasty Warriors 4 Gameplay Video Highlting..." and thought "Wait, what? But I just bought Dynasty Warriors 8!"

I often forget that Samurai Warriors is even a thing. I was deep into Dynasty Warriors by the time the first Samurai game came out and for some reason Samurai just never grabbed me (Which is weird because I enjoy that setting and time period in Japan more than in China, so I had thought for sure I'd have been hooked on it right away.) Maybe it's time to give it a try again.

Zhou Tai is a favorite of mine as well. Still, I really lean more toward the Samurai Warriors cast than Dynasty, which really shows in my usual character selections in Warriors Orochi. As for the way that the game looks in general, the footage in the video above is from the PS3 version. The PS4 version is should look at least marginally better when it's released later this year. I'm really curious to see how the graphics in the overall franchise will improve once Koei moves away from the previous generation hardware.

Sengoku Basara has some really nice designs as well, though I personally find some of them to be a bit much. Not that many of the designs in Samurai Warriors are subtle or realistic, but when it comes to Ieyasu Tokugawa more or less as he's remembered historically versus Ieyasu the buff teen, I'll take the former, thank you. Still, that's a matter of taste there. You are right thought about the linearity. My only experience with Sengoku Basara came from Samurai Heroes, and the maps in that game just felt far too restrictive. And objectives never seemed to change regardless of who I was playing as.

Samurai Warriors has undergone a lot of changes over the years. I'm guessing that you probably never played them beyond the PS2 era, so you might be pleasantly surprised by how much it's changed.

And I might as well ping @patrickklepek, as given his recent curiosity in the Warriors games, he might learn a thing or two from this thread.