POSTED 5/3/16


ARSLAN: THE WARRIORS OF LEGEND

Omega Force/Koei Tecmo

Which came first, the novels, the manga or the anime?

Umm, the novels. Now that we’ve cleared up that poser that really wasn’t, we sally forth into the latest in the ever-expanding Warriors series of hack, slash, hack some more and fuck it, let’s-slash-heaps-more-just-for-the-hell-of-it extravaganzas.

For a collection of games that are ostensibly the same with different skins, it’s impressive how different story vibes can change proceedings markedly. We were dumbfounded by how much brilliant fun last year’s One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3 was, even though mechanically it wasn’t overly different from more po-faced Warriors sorties into ancient history.

This clever chameleonic ability continues here, adding beautiful anime-quality visuals to the established gloriously mindless hacky/slashy aesthetic, twisting the very Asian formula just enough so as an entertaining game with a gripping story – with its roots in the Middle East no less - bursts all over our screens.

The story? Princes, betrayal, horses, friendships, liberation, evil warlords, blahblahblah. We kind of lost track of the subtitles (the voiceovers are in fabulously emotive Japanese) as we were too busy having a mighty big slash – and skipping several scenes due to our itchy sword fingers. Speaking of big slashes, forget your usual murderous Warriors combos, here you can hit a blue cloud rush thingy and your entire army goes in for the kill, triggering mass slaughter to the tune of tens of thousands at a time.

Omega Force really have this format down. When they can dress it so beautifully in anime lavishness so that you feel like you’re in the midst of a super-fun playable movie then you can only wonder as to what incredible journeys may grace us in the future.

...and we got all the way to the end without any rubbish gags about rectally-mounted computer networks. Erm, yay us.

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