#necro plays dynasty warriors

[romance-of-three-memes]

Mandarin Dynasty Warriors 9 dub observations post go!

Sun Jian's followers refer to him as 孫大人 (Sun Daren) which, I supposed the literal translation that would get the sentiment in this instance across best is 'great person Sun'. I would probably translate it just as Lord Sun. Daren is one of those addresses that are basically relegated to period dramas nowadays. To me it sounds a bit... Not exactly odd or funny, but something approaching that I guess. I dunno, it's hard to explain.

[necromancy-enthusiast]

'Hey Necro, what do you think are the best tracks in the Dynasty Warriors series?'

Wow I am SO GLAD you asked, I've actually compiled a youtube playlist that currently has 100 tracks from almost every mainline title (if you're on mobile I highly recommend downloading the newpipe app because it's youtube without the stupid ads, and you can turn your screen off or open another app and the audio will keep playing even without the video being on the screen). I've been meaning to comb through dw9 and the empires games more since the latter often have some really great exclusive music that tends to get overlooked, but. You know. Anyway if you ask me dw4 has the best ost overall and I like that it uses a lot of traditional Chinese instruments, I really wish they'd kept that up more alongside the metal tracks. Dw3 and dw6 are close contenders though. (See, I CAN say something nice about dw6 every now and then)

Anyway here ya go, a nice little link to the playlist:

There's exactly one character song by one of the Japanese voice actors. I've barely listened to any of those and I've been meaning to check more of them out, but I added that specific one because I particularly like that voice actor, and also the song is about gay yearning and it's rather thinly veiled.

[romance-of-three-memes]

Another thing I really love about Jin being portrayed as a sort of fourth kingdom in Dynasty Warriors is that they are easily the least united of the four. It's pretty much a given that at least one of these bitches is rebelling against the others at any point in the story, basically the only thing that really unifies them aside from having been from Wei is their disunity. These people feel like if you took Samurai Warriors characters (who are far more noted for their disunity and constantly backstabbing each other than their Dynasty Warriors counterparts, partially due to the differing politics since you know, they happened in different countries over a thousand years apart), dropped them into the Three Kingdoms era, and gave them Chinese names.

[romance-of-three-memes]

The way Jia Chong and Zhuge Dan are portrayed in Dynasty Warriors is so funny because they both clearly have bad cases of gay yearning for the Sima brother they respectively advise, but instead of this being a point of potential commiseration or allyship they see one another as losers. You can't tell me that Zhuge Dan doesn't think Jia Chong's taste is absolute trash. Jia Chong respects Zhuge Dan's taste even if it's different from his own, but that's literally the only thing about him he respects.

[necromancy-enthusiast]

Dynasty Warriors is by absolutely no means perfect in how it portrays female characters, in fact I could go on and on and on about it but I'll just do something else instead. I appreciate how the series lets them have traits that are considered especially offensive or even off-limits in women, like being rude, prideful, manipulative, emotionally constipated, even just straight up cruel and sadistic, often without much of anything to redeem them. What you see is what you get. Sometimes she's just mean for the sake of it.

Also bloodthirsty. There's a lady who has it out for this dude and whenever she sees him she's like 'oh hey buddy guess what, I'm gonna rip your head off and watch as the life fades from your eyes as payback for what you did to my family :)' and I think that's very neat of her. I am biased against that guy for many reasons but like. She really should do it.

[necromancy-enthusiast]

I may have lost pretty just about all faith in Dynasty Warriors in general but I tried the dw9 empires character creator (note: God that game looks like shit on the switch, which is saying something because I never notice differences in graphic quality unless it's REALLY obvious, as in usually like diffferent generation consoles obvious) and golly, it's pretty good. And by that I mean 'female characters have a decent array of clothing and armor that are practical and not showy, and also you can make them look older than 20', which wasn't much of a thing in the character creators of a lot of older Empires games.

Anyway, since Omega Force refuses to put Lady Wu aka matriarch of the Sun Family in a non mobile Dynasty Warriors game, or to make her not look basically like a clone of her daughter while her sons and husband all get to look very distinct from one another, or to let her look old enough to be the mother of a bunch of 20 somethings, I'm taking matters into my own hands. I may get it on ps4... Just because. Or I may get one of the older albeit still more recent empires games because dw9's 'revamped' mechanics are confusing as hell.

[necromancy-enthusiast]

One of my favorite things about Dynasty Warriors is that for some inexplicable reason, some characters are like 7 or 8 feet tall and everyone else just kinda. Has to deal with that. And sometimes it looks a bit silly. Example:

Admittedly the woman is short even by the standards of the non-giant characters, BUT STILL.

[necromancy-enthusiast]

When I played Dynasty Warriors 3 as a little kid I straight up refused to play as any male character for so long. There were 7 women versus 35 men or so? So yeah that was an interesting experience. But I limited myself purposely because I just did not want to play as or pay attention to smelly, boring boys (I was like 7 and already pretty mad at the world in general, mind you, I am no longer of this opinion some 20 years later).

So imagine my incredible offense once I got to about age 12 (I played as male characters by then, but still) and wouldn't you know it, both the historical record and the novel Dynasty Warriors is based on, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, are like 99% about men, and women show up only very rarely and are usually there for like 2 seconds. Disgusting. Outrageous. Horrendous. Inconceivable.

The first time I tried to read the novel I was 12 and had gotten it from the library. It's very dense for a 12 year old, even though I read all the time, and it happened to be the first whole translation in English, which is uh. The translator deserves recognition for being the first, but it's not exactly great. Anyway I got lost pretty quickly, and then I'd just skim the pages looking for mentions of women, read those sections, and continue my search for more. So yeah, that's how I basically managed to do the exact opposite of what a lot of transformative adaptations of the Three Kingdoms era of China do, hyper-focus on the women and only occasionally glance at the men when it was necessary.