Review: WARRIORS OROCHI 4 ULTIMATE Has Pretty Swords And Bland Targets

I’ll start this by being totally honest, Warriors Orochi Ultimate 4 is my first real play through of a Warriors Orochi game or even any hack and slash, musou style game. When I first popped it in, it felt like a boring and pointless button mashing game that let players feel all cool and powerful while slaughtering thousands of enemies with ease. However, as I played, I found myself wanting to play more and more to get better at combos, unlock more characters and level up my gang. This game may still be ultimately as shallow as your neighborhood pond, but it doesn’t mean you can’t have a good time skipping rocks and dipping your feet in the water.

The Story, Challenge and Battle Modes are available at the beginning, but without a wide selection of characters and the ones you have sitting at the most basic levels and abilities, Story Mode is really the only thing to do. I couldn’t find the story to be anything more than filler and bare-bone reasons to play against massive armies in obscure and generic places. This being said, the story has a lot more voice acting and actual conversation than I expected, even though it isn’t great. The story mode really is just a way to get levels, weapons, characters and play against increasingly difficult enemies that require increasingly more powerful characters. This loop is surprisingly entertaining, especially after a player finds a couple of officers that they particularly enjoy. 

With 170 characters/officers to play, the variety of battle styles are welcome, but at some times frustrating. Some characters have great rushing attacks, area attacks or powerful magical abilities. But other characters reach is barely farther than right in front of them and their combos don’t allow them to move, making that character feel absolutely pointless or annoying to play. Not every character can be amazing and I understand people have their own personal play styles, but I feel like a number of characters were just poorly designed. Moving past this complaint, the light, heavy, special and magical attacks do allow for a fun, variety set of moves. They get stale and very repetitive after a few minutes, but it could’ve been worse, and at least every character does have a pretty unique special attack with a few unique light or heavy attacks. I think a more smooth approach to combat and movement with more unique combos (maybe fewer characters as a sacrifice) would have been well worth it.

As for the rest of the game modes, they’re interesting but almost indistinguishable from the story mode. All that is different are some time limits, slightly different objectives, less talking and other (but similar) rewards. It would be great to have other modes with a much greater variety, like a random hero mode, giant or tiny enemies or mode arcade like modes. This isn’t a very serious game and I think it would benefit from a deeper dive into the ridiculous.

Another thing to point out about the game is that everything that isn’t an officer is terribly generic. The armies of enemies and allies are literally identical at times, thousands of them running at you and they are all EXACTLY THE SAME. The areas you run through are terribly bland and just generic geometry to hold enemies. With so many characters and ways to kill, it is too bad you feel like you're playing against training dummies in a wasteland of boring, average historical arenas.

I was happier with the combat than I expected and I was surprised with the uniqueness of the character’s fighting styles, even if the differences were small or just plain bad. This game has multiplayer, a few interesting challenges, leveling and weapons forging/upgrading, but they all feel like tacked-on pieces to make the game seem more fleshed out than it really is. But looking at the game as a whole, it is clearly made for those who enjoy these types of games and I am sure they will really get a lot of fun and quality hours out of this game, it does its job well. But any newcomers to the genre will have a hard time finding much here other than a few hours of fairly generic button mashing.