I’m a relatively new convert to the church of Musou, with Pirate Warriors 4 being my first major foray into the genre, so I was pretty excited to check out a preview build of Samurai Warriors 5. Would my enjoyment of this style of game carry over to a spinoff series that doesn’t have the benefit of being tied to one of my favorite anime series of all time? It turns out, it does! And while I can’t comment much on the improvements and iterations made from Samurai Warriors 4 to 5, this upcoming fifth installment, I can say that Samurai Warriors 5 had me hooked with just a small taste of its story, action, and progression.
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I was able to play the first two chapters of the story mode, which takes place during the Sengoku Era of Japan and centers around a young and reckless Oda Nobunaga in the early stages of his ambitious campaign to unify Japan under his rule. In addition to Nobunaga’s perspective, the story also gives you the viewpoint of Mitsuhide Akechi, a samurai whose fate is inextricably linked with Nobunaga’s.
One of the things that struck me about Samurai Warriors 5’s story mode is that it’s very measured in the way it drip-feeds its unlocks over the course of its campaign. Its story mode starts out very modestly, with only Nobunaga playable for the first few missions and most of its major mechanics locked by progression. It leads to a slow and heavily tutorialized start, but what’s nice is that at the conclusion of every mission, you’re greeted with something new to check out, whether it’s a weapon level up that gives you access to new moves, new equippable ultimate skills, or a new structure, like the blacksmith, that lets you upgrade your weapons.
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Eventually you’ll start to unlock new characters as well, and after playing through three full missions with Nobunaga as your only option, it felt like a breath of fresh air to be able to swing a different weapon with a different play style. It’s worth pointing out that any character can use any weapon in Samurai Warriors 5, but each hero has a preferred weapon type that they are able to level up faster and have unique abilities with. Ieyasu, for example, might be able to use Nobunaga’s Odachi sword and utilize largely the same moveset that you may have grown familiar with, but only Nobunaga can use its devastating flame power attack.
Characters level up in battle, but even if you don’t use a particular character for a while, you don’t need to worry about them falling behind in level thanks to a system of stock EXP. As you play through a level, you not only gain experience for the character you use, but you also separately gain a certain amount of stock EXP, which is determined by the rank you get at the end of the level. This stock EXP can be spent to level up any character of your choosing, so you can either bring an underleveled character up to around the level of your higher level characters, or you can just dump it all into one character and make them exceptionally strong. The choice is yours.
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As for the combat itself, it’s what you’d expect of a Musou game. Samurai Warriors 5 is all about cutting through hundreds if not thousands of rank and file enemies with relative ease, making enemies look like balls bouncing around in a giant lottery machine. There’s a certain magical satisfaction to being able to keep a combo counter going to something absurd like 10,000 hits with more than a thousand enemies killed, something that is easily attainable in Samurai Warriors 5.
It may all look very button mashy and thoughtless, and in many cases, that’s not entirely off base, but if you dig deeper into Samurai Warriors 5’s combat, you’ll find that it really gives players a lot of tools to get creative.
Each weapon has its own string of light attacks, which can be altered at any point in the combo with the press of the heavy attack button for a special power attack. Each power attack generally has its own unique function, whether it be a launcher, a stunning attack that works particularly well on stronger single enemies, or a large area of effect attack meant to clear out a bunch of weaker foes all at once. Once you do enough damage, you’ll fill up a meter that lets you use your character’s screen-clearing Musou attack.
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And if that’s not enough, there’s also a separate Rage meter that, when full, can be activated to dramatically increase your speed, power, and give you access to an even stronger Musou technique called a “Frenzy Attack.” Add on top of that the sweeping hyper attacks that move a character forward and can cancel into a basic attack string; ultimate skills that differ from weapon to weapon and have their own particular uses; and the ability to switch between characters on the fly to micromanage multiple objectives at once. Not everything on the battlefield is a pushover either, which makes knowledge of these extra details and management of these resources important on hard mode, and in later levels.
All in all, I had a good time with the first two chapters of Samurai Warriors 5’s story mode, even as a relative newcomer to the Musou genre. The story feels like a good mixture of real-life Japanese history mixed with just the right amount of anime theatrics, while the combat plays to that ever-appealing fantasy of being an ultra-powerful lone warrior carving a path through hundreds of enemies with ease. I look forward to checking out more when Samurai Warriors 5 is released on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch on July 27.