Exploring the story of Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition

Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition is, as we talked a little about last time, a sprawling and complex game with a lot to explore. Your first port of call with the game — and indeed a feature that will keep you busy for quite some time — is the Story mode, which tells the tale of this vast quantity of playable characters, their attempts to strike back against the fearsome Hydra, and the events which occur thereafter.

Today, rather than analysing the narrative as such, we’ll be taking a look at your early hours with the game’s Story mode, and exploring how it acts as a nice centrepiece to the package as a whole. Because while Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition has lots of different ways to play, most of them feed into one another in some way.

As we talked about last time, Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition opens with a tale of three surviving warriors attempting to make a last stand against the Hydra, and having a distinctly unsuccessful time of it. After escaping thanks to the intervention of the Mystic Kaguya, they determine that what they need most is allies; lots and lots of allies.

Unfortunately, all of their potential allies are dead; fortunately, Kaguya has the means of sending them back in time to save those allies. And thus, the early part of Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition’s story consists of meeting up with various allies and rescuing them from perilous situations.

Sometimes this is as simple as meeting up with a character during a battle and them joining your cause after you successfully complete your objectives. But quite frequently it’s a bit more complicated than that, necessitating the completion of various other missions before attempting a “Redux” of the original battle where your seemingly doomed ally fell.

A good example of this comes right at the beginning of the game, where during the Battle of Yiling, Guan Zhong falls to the enemy assault because he locked himself inside part of the map in an attempt to heroically hold his foes back solo.

Since he’s a stubborn old man, he’s not just going to open the gates if you ask him, so you need to get yourself some suitable siege weaponry to break down the gates he’s hiding behind. Unfortunately, there are no such siege weapons nearby — but what if another battle elsewhere nearby unfolded a bit differently, allowing some siege-equipped reinforcements to show up and batter the gate down in a timely fashion?

Sure enough, if you complete an optional side mission that clears a path for said reinforcements to show up, break the gate down and support Huang Zhong, he will then survive in the battle’s “Redux” scenario, and thus be able to join your cause.

Initially, triggering these Redux scenarios is fairly straightforward, but once you get into the game’s second chapter they start becoming dependent on various factors: usually the bonds between your officers and, in some cases, whether or not you’ve previously completed some other optional rescue missions and battle Redux scenarios along the way.

Bonds between officers are raised in several ways: they can fight alongside one another in the same team; you can host a tea party or banquet in the camp for everyone in your forces, which raises your current playable character’s bond level with all of them; or you can complete requests that they issue you with prior to taking on a battle, which obviously requires they not be in your playable party.

There’s a certain amount of “grinding” necessary here, but it’s not as bad as it sounds; the nice thing about Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition is that at any given point, you always have a variety of different things you could be doing. So if you know you need to get Goemon Ishikawa and Hideyoshi Toyotomi’s relationship value up in order to trigger a particular side mission, stick them in a party together and go do some missions with them fighting alongside one another.

In the process, you’ll earn the Gems required to fund parties, too, meaning it won’t be long before they’re close enough to trigger their stage — and, of course, you’ll be levelling them both and collecting equipment for them, too.

In comparison to the rest of the game, the stages you’ll tackle in Story mode of Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition tend to be quite easy, particularly if you keep on the default Normal difficulty. This is presumably because the Story mode is intended to ease people into the Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition experience, with more complex challenges — such as the sprawling Gauntlet mode, which we’ll talk about another day — intended to act as the package’s overall “endgame”.

Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition’s Story mode stages tend to be heavily scripted, meaning that you generally don’t need to “strategise” too much in order to effectively complete them. Sure, you always have the choice to take alternative routes, go off the beaten path and attempt to pre-empt mission objectives, but for the most part there’s a clear critical path from start to finish that you’ll need to follow, ensuring that your allies stay fit and healthy along the way.

The upside of this, of course, is that it means you can encounter some rather entertaining events along the way. These become particularly entertaining once you reach the game’s second chapter, which is when the game starts bringing in the “guest” characters from other Koei Tecmo properties such as Dead or Alive, Ninja Gaiden, Atelier — and some deep cuts like Bladestorm and Trinity: Souls of Zill O’ll. Yoshitsune Minamoto’s complete inability to deal with Ayane’s formidable breasts is a particular highlight.

One of the reasons you might find some of the Story stages relatively easy is because it’s fairly straightforward to level the characters you’re playing as, earn Growth Points that can be used to level characters you haven’t played as — or indeed buff up your already levelled characters further — and acquire loot.

Loot is especially important, because not only do better weapons increase your characters’ base damage, they also come with various traits attached. By using the Weapon Fusion system to transfer these traits from one weapon to another, you can add all manner of wonderful additional effects — and extra damage — to your favourite weapons, and customise your characters in the process.

If you have a character whom you enjoy battling with quick-hit normal attacks, make sure you apply some traits that boost the power of those normal attacks. If you enjoy mounted combat, apply the Cavalier trait to boost its effectiveness. When attempting to level characters quickly, add some traits to their weapons that help with that process. And so on.

There’s also character progression to bear in mind. A character’s experience level can go up to 100, with stat boosts coming with each level up. Once reaching 100, a character can be “promoted”, which allows you to level them again with additional bonuses — and, of course, this process can be repeated multiple times.

On top of that, each character has an innate skill that benefits either themselves or your entire party, and the more you use this character the more their “proficiency” in this skill increases, making it more effective. This, in turn, can help inform your party builds — if you have a particularly solid character who boosts the abilities of Technique-style characters, for example, you’ll want to party them up with other Technique types to maximise their usefulness.

On top of that, the longer each character makes use of an individual weapon, the more their compatibility with that weapon will raise, gradually increasing the base damage the weapon does up to a certain point. At some point, you’ll find it worth upgrading to the next “tier” of weapon — but sometimes it pays to hold on to a lower-tier weapon with which you’ve built up a decent amount of compatibility, particularly if facing tough foes.

Story mode is very much the core of the Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition experience, allowing you to meet, get to know and learn to play as a wide variety of characters. But it’s far from the only aspect of the game that there is to explore — and indeed, there’s no need to feel like you need to complete Story mode before investigating the other modes that the game has to offer.

In fact, you may well find that you sometimes reach points in Story mode where spending some time in the other modes of Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition is very much to your benefit in terms of raising bonds between characters, earning Growth Points and Gems, or simply taking on some different types of challenges.

So with that in mind, next time around we’ll start exploring some of these other ways to play Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition — including a few that you might find unexpectedly entertaining!

Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition is available now for PC. Thanks to Koei Tecmo for the review code.

^{Disclosure: Some links in this article may be affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if you make a purchase after clicking on them. This is at no additional cost to you and helps support Rice Digital!}