Samurai Warriors 2

Pretty much everyone who's owned a console in the last 10 years has at least heard of Dynasty Warriors, the epic-scale beat-em-up franchise about ancient China.  Samurai Warriors is basically the same thing, except Koei decided to place the action in 16th century Japan.  Pretty much, if you've ever played Dynasty Warriors, you know what to expect: Beat the living poo out of hundreds of brain-dead grunts and a mixed bag of only-slightly-less-brain-dead officers to win a scenario, then advance to the next one.

Samurai Warriors does a pretty good job of mixing up the action between different battles set in vastly different locations.  They even mix up the feel of each battle nicely.  One battle centers around control of a mountain from which you can use cannons to rain death down upon your hapless foes, another is a series of small islands connected by bridges, which you win by demolishing the enemy without losing a single allied officer.

The only issue is, there's about 15 or so different characters, and all of their story lines intertwine around one central tale (death of Japanese Lord sends the land into chaos yada yada yada), so you end up fighting in the same battlefields several times, with different characters.  In a few cases, this can actually be interesting.  The best example is one battle, which I first fought as a lieutenant fighting a desperate rearguard action to ensure his lord and master escaped safely.  When I took another character for a spin, I fought the same battle, only this time I was part of the betraying army trying to gank the dude.  Unfortunately, these situations are definitely the minority, and in many battles, you'll have exactly the same goals, you'll only be playing a different character and starting from a different position in the battlefield.

Apart from the repetitive missions, the game suffers from quite a bit of repetitive combat.  There really isn't much incentive to do anything but mash the square button, occasionally toss a triangle in to deal out some extra pain, and once in a while using circle to deal out a super attack that will leave at least a dozen grunts dead.  I don't even know where the block key is mapped, but it seems to be pointless - 12 hours of gameplay on the normal difficulty setting, and I haven't died once.

I have lost however, and here's where we get to the biggest flaw of the game, the AI.  It seems that in order to get hundreds of dudes running around on the PS2 without any slowdown, Koei had to go for a complete lack of intelligent AI whatsoever.  Neither your friends nor your enemies respond to anything other than a) seeing an enemy to hit or b) random triggers that advance the events of the battle as Koei wants them to play out.  If your allies dont see someone or have an order to do, they will stand around and do nothing, which inevitably leads to large clumps of your guys standing around doing nothing in one corner of the battlefield while enemies gleefully run all over the rest of the field and gank your commander.  The officers at least have some form of AI running them, in that they dont stand around waiting to be whacked by something, but most of them are easy to kill, and the few times I was actually challenged was when I was fighting 3 or more of them at the same time.  Even then, the only danger came from getting knocked down, comboed while on the ground (which you can't do, but your opponents apparently can), and taking 2 years to stand back up, giving them ample time to knock you right back down.  Wheeeeee.

It's also worth pointing out that the voice acting is laughably horrible.  Hideyoshi Toyotomi in particular is an endless source of entertainment.

Overall, it's a decent diversion for a brief time.  No one can deny the main draw of the Dynasty/Samurai Warriors Franchises is the ability to be this all-powerful commander who knocks down thousands of enemies without breaking a sweat (and on some of the missions, your killcount will easily reach 4 digits).  I at least found it an entertaining diversion, but it lacks any sort of long term appeal.  You'll run through the missions of a couple characters, get bored, and leave to greener pastures.  And hey, you can probably find it in a bargain bin or a used games rack for really cheap.