Dynasty Warriors: Origins

Genre: Action Brawler

Players: 1

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Review:

Dynasty Warriors: Origins marks the first entry in the long-running Action Brawler series (popularly known as “Musou”) to be designed specifically with modern platforms in mind, originally releasing in 2025 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S and skipping the prior generation entirely, with a port to Nintendo Switch 2 in 2026. And while this game did need to receive a few compromises to work on Nintendo’s hardware, this is a surprisingly solid port of a game that aims to refocus the series.

The most noteworthy compromise here is going to be the framerate, which is limited to 30FPS. This doesn’t affect the game terribly, and if you hadn’t seen the game running at smoother framerates you’d likely find nothing to complain about here. In fact, more noticeable is the occasional pop-in that continues to be a part of the series, for better or worse. Otherwise, you’ll find this game to be more detailed than other Warriors franchise games that released on the original Nintendo Switch, with both characters and environments benefitting from this greater detail.

This is also important because a major change in Dynasty Warriors: Origins is a renewed focus on character-based storytelling, with Origins returning its focus to the first half of the classic Chinese historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, with the game telling a tale inspired by the adventures of an amnesiac warrior wandering China and fighting to protect the common people from tyranny, corruption, and chaos, and hopefully find a way to secure peace for the country… a peace that will require tearing through hordes of thousands upon thousands of soldiers. It’s a welcome shift for a series that often seems to treat its story as an excuse to get a new fighter every now and then.

Another shift here is in combat, where this game seems to place a heavier focus on blocking, dodging, and parrying than I’m used to seeing in this series. This is both a good thing and a bad thing – it’s good in that it means this is far less a button-mash-fest as the series can often be, but it also makes the game more difficult and technical to play, with players needing to use button combinations for special attacks that may confuse less-skilled players.

Overall, while I’m sure diehard Dynasty Warriors fans will have strong opinions about Dynasty Warriors: Origins one way or the other, I find it to generally be a solid entry in the series, though as with most games in this genre, this isn’t a game that will be for everyone. But if Musou games are your style, I think you’ll have a lot to like here.

tl;dr – Dynasty Warriors: Origins is an Action Brawler “Musou”-style game that focuses on telling a story loosely based on the first half of the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, with a greater focus on character-driven story than we’ve seen in earlier games in the series, with combat that more heavily emphasizes blocking, dodging, and parrying. In part due to these changes, this game won’t appeal to everyone, but overall I think it’s a solid entry in the series.

Grade: B-

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