Dynasty Warriors 4 - Reception

Reception

Before its main release, Dynasty Warriors 4 was already looking promising after GameSpot UK’s preview two months before the game was released. Although still very similar to previous titles in the series, the graphics engine had been tweaked and the gameplay been expanded, featuring more characters and stages.

After its release, it had high sales rates in Japan, selling over one million copies a short time after release. Its release in the US did not create as much hype as in Japan mainly because the market for the Dynasty Warriors series is smaller there, but it still sold fairly well and together with the Japanese sales, Dynasty Warriors 4 entered into the Greatest Hits charts. In its time Dynasty Warriors 4 has managed to become IGN's 5th best co-operative game on the PS2 as well. The game is criticized for being very similar to older games in the series and retaining some of the features such as the fogging and repetitive gameplay. Even with these drawbacks, Koei went on to release two expansions for Dynasty Warriors 4 Xtreme Legends and Dynasty Warriors 4 Empires. It had also been ported to the Xbox and to the PC as a Hyper edition. Armchair Empire commented that when there is a lot happening on screen at once, the game tended to slow down

The English voice acting for the series, commonly criticized as being poor, has remained in DW4. The English voice-overs of Dynasty Warriors series uses straightforward English pronunciations for the romanized pinyin names of characters and locations. The results tend to leave errors in the dialogue, with incorrect English pronunciations of originally Chinese text.