Musou Warriors and Giant Robots

There are two Japanese phenomenon which i am consistently baffled by. The first is the popularity of the Dynasty Wars series. It's a massive scale hack and slash-0-rama that hasn't changed much since its second inception (they are up to 6 now, not counting pseudo-sequels such as Dynasty Warriors 3/4/5 Empires and 3/4/5 Extreme Legends). The confounding thing for me is that DW is entirely about "historical" battles during the Three Kingdoms Era of ancient China. I put historical in quotes because I'm relatively certain that these battles didn't involve Wu leaders invincibly carving a swath through thousands of Su warriors with blinding light pouring out of their weapons just so they could fight similarly powered Su Leaders who weren't even alive at the time of the actual conflict.

An excellent example would be if the latest Canadian gaming rage was a game featuring George Washington cutting down nine hundred British soldiers alongside Abe Lincoln, and Andrew Jackson with the goal of facing Henry VIII in mortal combat.

Yeah, it's a very strange phenomenon.

A few years ago, Koei started making Samurai Warriors games, which are more or less exactly the same as DW, only taking place in Japan's Sengoku Period, and featuring many more katanas.

Because reaching they are always looking for ways to reach new heights of absurdity, they recently produced Warriors Orochi. Which, well, just read this:

Orochi, the Serpent King, created a rift in time and space. By creating a twisted new world and bringing together warriors from the Three Kingdoms era of China and the Warring States period of Japan (more than 1,400 years apart in history), Orochi wished to test the might of the warriors of these two eras.

Yeah, you read that right.

Anyway, the second unusual phenomenon is Gundam. In a country where even the best shows come and go after their season is up, Gundam just keeps on coming. At last count, there were a combined twenty five series and movies. As far as i can tell, Gundam centers around emo kids (in 1979, before emo was even a term!) who pilot giant robots and then whine a lot about war. This series is popular, we're talking huge. just about every major anime store i've been to in Tokyo has an entire floor dedicated to models and figures of these mammoth mecha. But that really doesn't describe how big Gundam is over there, though this might:

Gundam is a popular cultural icon of Japan, it is a 50 billion yen business of Bandai Namco (projected 50 billion yen income of the company and reached a highest number of 54.5 billion yen in 2006).^[11] Not only were stamps published, the Agriculture Minitry was reprimanded for contribution to Japanese wikipedia Gundam related pages, the Japanese Self Defense Forces code-named its developing advance personal combat system as Gundam and the Fire department used Gundam to promote the future of fire fighting developments. A tram station stood a monument of the original Gundam and used the main theme of the first Gundam anime as its departure melody and other businesses like Mitsubishi not only created a test-type simulator for concept cars with a version of Gundam cockpit, it also held recruitment seminars using How to make a Gundam as a demo of what their development process is and based their Lancer Evolution design on Gundam. Isuzu also used a Gundam to model the VX2.

I think you see where this is going:

Dynasty Wars: Gundam

And this is what I've been playing lately. Dynasty Warriors was always a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. A game that I logically know isn't "good," but for some reason, I enjoy tremendously. Every eight months or so, I find myself playing a DW game. I play it religiously for a few days and then, as soon as I tire of the bad English voice acting and brownish color pallet, I shelf it and move on. DW:G is exactly what one would expect from the title. the gameplay from DW, coupled with giant battles from Gundam. This game has serious potential for outlasting its predecessor though, since the colors are vibrant and bright; and the game actually offers a Japanese voice track. Please note that while I'm sure the Japanese track uses the same horrible dialogue as the English, but somehow they just sell it better... I'm also sure that it doesn't hurt that I can't understand Japanese.

As I mentioned, I'm going to be playing this one for a while to come, it seems that ancient China and giant robots are like peanut butter and chocolate.