Samurai Warriors 5 is an excellent musou game for newcomers like me. It’s got the 1-vs-500 action gameplay that these titles (and their sister series Dynasty Warriors) are known for. It’s a self-proclaimed “new beginning” for the series, with streamlined gameplay, a gorgeous cel-shaded art style, and a story shining a spotlight on events the previous games hadn’t covered. I found it to be an amazingly accessible game, with virtually no feature bloat that newcomers would commonly see in a 15-year-old series. Long-time fans may bristle at content that’s been removed from previous games, but I had a blast with Samurai Warriors 5. Despite some persistent issues, it’s a great first foray into the franchise.

The game is split into two primary modes, Musou Mode and Citadel Mode, but they both play the same. Each level is a huge maze-like battlefield, full of tough enemy officers and hundreds upon hundreds of foot soldiers. Your chosen character has to make their way across the level, hacking and slashing everything in their path while fulfilling objectives that require defeating specific people in specific places. Each character has a detailed, easy to read combo tree granting them ostentatious screen-clearing abilities. Each character also has access to cooldown-based Ultimate Skills, giving them extra powerful attacks, or temporary buffs. Some objectives are hidden unless you go somewhere you’re not directed to, or you play a level as a certain character, and some objectives have strict time limits, so there’s a lot of replay value per mission. Combat isn’t particularly difficult, but difficulty doesn’t seem to be the point. The fun of Samurai Warriors 5 comes from juggling multiple objectives while keeping up a steady combo, well into the thousands.

Most missions allow the use of two characters, and you can switch between them at any time. Whichever one you’re not controlling will automatically run towards objectives on their own, which adds another satisfying wrinkle to combat, as this essentially lets you be in two places at once. The game allows for online co-op (which I wasn’t able to try before release) as well as local co-op (which I wasn’t able to try because I reviewed this during lockdown).

Once a mission is cleared in Musou Mode, you can replay it in Free Mode, which lets you bring in any of the game’s 37 unlockable characters. 37 is considerably less than the 55 characters in Samurai Warriors 4, but I still found it to be a hefty amount. 27 of them are playable during Musou Mode, while the other 10 are only available in Free Mode. Each character has new combo moves that unlock as they gain EXP and level up, and each of them has a massive skill tree to grant them extra stat boots and abilities, not to mention their weapon rank, which unlocks new Ultimate Skills. 

There are 15 weapon types in the game, which dictates a character’s attacks and Ultimate Skills. Any character can wield any weapon, but each character has a preferred weapon which gives them unique combo moves while wielding it. So while multiple characters may play similarly, the fact that they’ve got unique combos, plus unique Ultimate Skills unlocked through their skill trees, make a noticeable difference. I found it less daunting to learn 15 slightly different playstyles than 37 bespoke ones.

As I said up top, I encountered several issues throughout my time with Samurai Warriors 5. One of the biggest is the game’s camera, which goes absolutely haywire whenever you do something it doesn’t like, like walking away from a locked-on enemy, or standing next to a wall, which, in a game full of mazes, was very often. Another is that partner AI can occasionally be inconsistent, choosing to follow you or stand still when you desperately need them to do anything else. It felt like wasting time manually controlling them and moving them where you need them to go. There are some scant AI tuning options, but a setting to tell your partner which objective or enemy to prioritise would’ve mitigated this problem greatly.

Horses can be bought from shops or collected as loot in Citadel Mode, and can then be ridden by characters in battle. Horseback combat is an option, and horses have their own stats that can be boosted by gaining EXP and levelling up (seeing “Horse Level Increased” dramatically pop on screen never stops being funny). You can sacrifice a horse to infuse their passive abilities to another horse. The game puts a lot of stock in horses, and I just didn’t care for them. Fighting on a horse is tedious and imprecise, and I only found a use for them for their speed. However, checking the map while a horse is running causes the horse to slowly stop, and you need to wait for that animation to end before it can run again, which wasn’t appreciated when I was running late for timed objectives. I understand that horses are a staple of the series, but I wish Samurai Warriors 5 had replaced them with a sprint button.