Warriors: Abyss - The Definitive Review
When you Musou into the abyss, it’s actually really brilliant and totally worth doing
One colossal anomaly with Affectionate Discourse is that up until this point, I haven’t covered a single Musou title. I fucking adore Musou games and of the lot, it’s the Warriors Orochi series that has delighted me the most. This is the aggregation of Koei’s various historical spin-offs into one shared universe, alongside guest stars from Tecmo’s back catalogue and various other bits and pieces. Of them all, perhaps with the exclusion of the sublime Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3, the Orochi titles are where the Musou template reaches its most abstracted peaks of intensity. This achieves a certain pinnacle with Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate, which added Gauntlet mode - a kind of paean to Atari’s Gauntlet in the Musou style, which introduced the idea of roguelike play to the series. Orochi 3 Ultimate was deliciously exploitable with the right kinds of weapon attribute configs, and this video gives you a sense of what was possible. With a steadily-increasing challenge level (wonderfully named ‘miasma’), this was the first time that a Musou title had sought to really test the player’s limits with decent rewards for the risks. Previous survival modes and whatnot didn’t really compare to the way that Gauntlet mode’s miasma could skyrocket the chances of death from minimal to certain over a matter of minutes.
My love of the Orochi titles was unconditional. I bought them all, even Warriors All-stars and went full max-grind on most of them. My one and only 1000g was in Warriors Orochi 2. Yet there was always a sense that Orochi was still a bit too trapped by the architecture of the mainline Dynasty Warriors orthodoxy to really explore the limits of what it could do, or how hard it could push the player. They relied on the same map styles and scales for the action, which felt both restrictive in terms of laying out enemies for combat and as a means of differentiating Orochi from the Musou mainstream - a massive issue in terms of the series’ PR1. For me, far too much time was spent running between the mobs and as each sequel arrived, this never seemed to change. It was something you simply had to accept, even if I went full bonkers and developed an elite-level RSI-inducing jump-dash technique to eliminate the excruciating 2-second anims for getting on and off horses. Such are the demands of the true Musou flow. And as far as Musou goes, Orochi is where the flow state is finest. Of course, that’s when you’ve maxed the difficulty to get the biggest, toughest mobs and have the characters and equipment to tear through them, but when the game is humming along at its peak, there’s a kind of supreme gaming umami from its relatively simplistic combat system that’s wonderfully addictive. That joy of repetition in pursuit of clearing the battlefield has the primal delight of chomping on some joyously flavoured and textured mouthful, or in scything away a vast thicket of tall stingy nettles.2 If only, I wished, there was a Musou game that did away with all the running around and let you just get on with the killing.
Imagine my surprise and delight when it turns out that Warriors: Abyss is precisely that! It’s nothing but the killing, and it’s absolutely superb as a result. Well, it is for this old Musou fan, but with Abyss, Omega Force has almost defined the ultimate correct Valhalla for its suite of heroes to find eternal battle. Thanks to a fixed isometric projection camera and compact arenas for each stage, the game has been labelled as a Hades-alike in some quarters, but that feels a little lazy. It actually takes the edge of the old Gauntlet mode and modernises it into the most tightly-focused Musou title to date, and it does this by learning the best lessons from Hades and its contemporaries. Gone are the re-tellings of ancient legend and attendant fan-fic melodramas of the Dynasty and Samurai Warriors mainstream, and even the more off-kilter and playful Orochi narratives are flung to the wayside. Warriors: Abyss is freebase Musou, as if it needed Hades to give it a camera angle and a vaguely similar superstructure to contain its naked wildness. It’s weirdly generous too. The full traditional rosters are all here, with a set of Dead Or Alive/Ninja Gaiden characters backing them up as well as three explicitly manga ladies from the Atelier series. Imagine Hades with 100+ characters to try and you’re almost there. Only it gets to a fizzing, savage intensity pretty quickly. The game’s structure is cleanly straightforward. There are regions and there are rounds in each region. Rounds are governed by a KO count to reach and sometimes, additional mission objectives. Once a round is complete there’s a rest phase where you pick randomly-offered characters to make alliances with, in order to bolster your mega team musou attack. These alliances also increase your battle rating, which does something very important but I have no idea what that actually is. You just want to make the number as big as possible. After a bunch of rounds there’s a boss, and after that you hop to the next region which comes with a step up in challenge. Then at the end of the fourth region, there’s a big boss. Then you’re done for that run. After this there are additional tiers of the same run to complete which obviously get harder with each successive traversal, rounding off with a set of additional modes that offer Disgaea-like depths to plumb. It’s all beautifully neat compared to the sprawling story arcs of previous Musou titles and, once again, a nice development of the barebones structure of the original Gauntlet mode.
Character progression comes from a trad levelling system, but one that only offers permanent increments to base stats every 50 levels. However, outside the main game there’s an entire screen dedicated to unlocking characters with one of the game’s internal currencies. There aren’t any arcane story-derived unlock conditions here, just a big web of warriors with a range of prices to unlock them. Beautifully, once you’ve unlocked the entire roster, the currency can be spent levelling them up. Even more beautiful is that each character unlock comes with a permanent stat upgrade for all characters, so by the time you’ve reached the far ends of the warrior web, your base stats are improved to a surprisingly decent standard. In battle, you can level up traditionally3 but each run’s dynamic, roguelike nature is built from picking up attributes as you play. Certain enemies drop attribute orbs, and on collection you’re given choices of which attributes to pick, so you can direct your development along particular lines. This is fucking great. You also get nifty rewards from the boss fight treasure chests that persist through that run as well as the occasional offer of buffs and bonuses in between stages. There’s a great deal of variability offered to the player throughout the game and hence a real sense of choice in the style of your character’s development. You can specialise in speed and elemental damage, or tank up with defence and lethality attributes. Or you can expedite charging the team attack and your own Musou special. It’s all delightfully free and plentiful, lending the whole affair a real sense of playfulness. My only gripe, particularly as an Orochi head, is the lack of character swapping. I’d love to pay some in-game currency to switch lead characters, and given the game’s roots in Orochi, it seems a bit mean that you can’t.
In general, the game starts that fizzing hum around the third region. Then it really steps up the enemy densities and it’s here that the game’s biggest mechanical change comes into play. It has a dash, only it’s a cooldowned dash. This is a source of quite venomous criticism for some, but I absolutely love it. Abyss has a very polite system of painting the floor with purple wherever an enemy’s AOE can damage you. Initially, it’s easy to thread your way around them and in boss fights, they’re extremely obvious for sorting out attack windows and whatnot. However as the intensity increases, the amount of purple does too. This makes your battle traversal all the harder, and places more strain on your observation skills whilst slogging through mobs. With the dash having a cooldown, it means you can sometimes dash into danger with no way of dashing out again, although I’ve found that kicking off a combo string can get you out of peril fairly reliably. Some characters on my runs have been configured in such a way that dashing is barely required. A particularly monstrous Ayane build saw her absolutely tearing through mobs with frightening leaps of speed and savagery and as such, she was well away from any charging-up attacks before they could hit, and in fact comboing the very same motherfuckers up the ass before anything landed. It’s this kind of primal command of the mob, while under real pressure, where Abyss really shines; the umami is strong, the sense of power is tangible and the core Musou delight is flowing in abundance. It’s deliriously gleeful shit, as the need to keep moving is absolutely paramount. The tempo is therefore as ferocious as your combos. In that heat, the game becomes the absolute peak of Musou play. I fucking love it.
It’s interesting that its fans fucking love it too. Community comments are full of people discovering Warriors: Abyss and professing their adoration. It’s a solid 7/10 with 10/10 heart. A spectacularly harmonious focusing of the entire Musou proposition, with all the fat trimmed away. A real joy of the old Orochi titles was building up weapons with attributes to suit your playstyle, but here there’s none of that. There’s just one extra weapon to unlock or buy, but I don’t feel cheated by that at all. There are no fucking horses, there are no bullshit vulnerable officers to defend. There’s just fighting, and it’s some of the best fighting to be had, full stop. I always had a suspicion that I don’t like Soulsbournes because they are, in a sense, the diametric opposite of Musou. With Abyss, the entire Musou proposition finds a kind of ascendancy, a novel respectability. It would take quite some effort and investment to refine a Orochi run to the point where you can feel the grandeur of taking out mobs on Chaos difficulty, but with Abyss, you’ll get there in 45 minutes. A straight run through one traversal is under an hour and, deliciously, the game autosaves between stages, meaning you can put down and pick up runs at your leisure. And again, there’s such a generous abundance of choice. I have a list of characters unlocked, which I want to take for runs, that’s so long I could be here for months. Considering I bought the game from the Xbox Store for £11.99, that’s fucking good going. It’s always baffled me as to why I haven’t been clamouring for Dynasty Warriors Origins. I do scour the preowned shelves for it whenever I’m in a CEX, but I’ve not felt the tug. Little did I know that was because my destiny lay with Warriors: Abyss. It was there the whole time, just waiting to make my Musou dreams come true. Fucking yes.
[21]
I doubt this is breaking any NDAs but I was actually offered the job of PR manager at Koei before the Tecmo merger and had to immediately turn it down as I was literally one week into my boutique developer PR job. My sense of honour conflicted with me having the best time ever. What a buffoon! All I can say is sorry, Will! I was a fucking idiot.
I actually own a scythe for this very purpose and the similarity between clearing nettles and cow parsley and being the beast Lu Bu on Chaos difficulty is genuine.
Well, you level in a temporary sense, only for that run unless you breach an increment of 50 levels. My normal runs on the base traversal ended up with characters at 35-40, meaning any new run starts at level 1. I’m lead to believe that past 50, you get stat buffs on top of that base level.