Video Game / Warriors Orochi

Ultimate Badass vs Ultimate Badass

Warriors Orochi (Musou Orochi; lit. "Unmatched Orochi" in Japan) is a Massive Multiplayer Crossover, Hack and Slash video game series made by Koei, crossing over their historical Warriors series (Dynasty and Samurai), with the addition of several original mystical characters sourced primarily from the Japanese and Chinese mythologies and folktales here and there. In the fourth installment, the series begin delving into Western mythologies, including Greek and Norse.

In contrast to other Warriors games, Warriors Orochi features a tag team system, which allows the player to take three characters and have them fight as a single unit on the battlefield. The characters are divided into three different types: Power, Speed, and Technique, which dictate their fighting styles. Warriors Orochi 3 had a fourth type, Wonder, but it did not return in future installments.

The story primarily centers on Orochi, the Demon King (or Serpent King in Western releases), who assembles warriors from the Three Kingdoms and Sengoku Jidai into a dimensional world born of chaos, where he entices them to fight both against each other and himself. Later installments put focus on other villains as Orochi is increasingly relegated to the background, although he usually has some role in the story.

Games

• Warriors Orochi (2007, PlayStation 2, Xbox 360, PlayStation Portable, PC)

Having been freed by the fox demoness Da Ji, Orochi creates a world inside the void where he unites the warriors of the Three Kingdoms and Sengoku Period. Orochi uses his demonic army to uproot them from their homes, scattering them to the four winds; some warriors are forced to serve him, while others form resistance groups to fight for another day.

In a first for a Warriors game, it utilizes a three-man team, allowing players to switch character in-game as they see fit, although you will still get a KO if your current character is defeated. A "True Musou Attack" will be triggered if players switch to another character while the previous one has initiated Musou Attack, causing the next one to perform a stronger version of the attack. In addition to traditional level up, characters can be upgraded individually by using the spare experience points (known as the "Proficiency" system). There is also a "Weapon Fusion" system, enabling players to craft better weapons from existing ones. Finally, each character has a unique personal item that can be used to enhance their abilities, though getting them in the first place is a notoriously difficult affair.

The game features a total of 79 characters, consisting of 48 characters from the Dynasty side and 29 characters from the Samurai side, plus two new additions. The characters are based on their appearances from Dynasty Warriors 5 and Samurai Warriors 2 (barring Goemon Ishikawa, Kunoichi, and Yoshimoto Imagawa, who don't appear in SW2 and as a result use their models from the first Samurai game). Each character is classified into one of the three types: Power, Technique, and Speed, which utilizes the R1 button input to deal a Type Action ability. Power characters are Mighty Glacier who can expend their Musou Gauge to perform a Special Art, which comes with a limited invulnerability. Technique characters are a Critical Hit Class who can sidestep while blocking and perform critical hits on airborne targets. Speed characters are Fragile Speedster whose unique ability is an air dash called "Aerial Thrust".

The Story Mode is divided into four campaigns; three are focused on one of the Three Kingdoms, while the remaining one is reserved for the Samurai faction. Each campaign consists of eight main missions and seven Sidequests (labeled as "[number]-X"). Six sidequests are unlocked as you progress through the main story, while the last one is unlocked by fulfilling a hidden requirement. It should be noted that while characters are grouped by the factions they belonged in the original games, character alignment is very fluid in-story, and warriors both Chinese and Japanese cross over into each other's factions. Chronologically speaking, the story begins In Medias Res; we never actually see the worlds colliding and Orochi's initial invasion, instead starting from when the various resistance groups begin to stage guerilla warfare.

• Warriors Orochi 2 (2008, PlayStation 2, Xbox 360, PlayStation Portable)

After Orochi's defeat, the warriors' attempt to rebuild their lives is interrupted when his followers immediately begin to resurrect their master, recruiting more allies from various time periods. In response, a trio of Mystics descend from the Mystic Realm to guide the warriors in their rematch against Orochi.

Considered a Mission-Pack Sequel to the original in Japan, known as Musou Orochi: Maou Sairin ("Unmatched Orochi: Rebirth of the Demon King"), the game was marketed as a sequel in the West. It otherwise uses the exact same engine as the original, though there are a couple of gameplay additions. Two new abilities involving the team configuration are added: Support, a defensive move that sacrifices an inactive character's Musou Gauge to shield the active character from attacks, and Triple Attack, which utilizes the three characters' Musou to deal a combination Musou Attack.

The game adds fifteen new characters to the roster, including the five new additions from Samurai Warriors 2: Xtreme Legends and two reworked bonus characters from Dynasty Warriors 3. Combined with the 79 from the previous game, it adds up to 94 characters.

Story Mode is made up of five campaigns, consisting of the four from the original and a new "Orochi" campaign, a Prequel that focuses on the Demon King's onslaught on the warriors of Three Kingdoms and Sengoku Period from his perspective. Sidequests are no longer integrated into the Story Mode but instead figure into the new "Dream Mode", which has no relevance to the main story, but whose completion is required to unlock Orochi X. The game also adds Survival Mode, pitting the players' team against a CPU team, and a VS Mode, where two players compete against each other in minigames.

The Japanese PSP edition features the Fury forms from Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce as unlockable costumes for Zhao Yun, Sun Shang Xiang, and Xiahou Dun. The international PSP version, on the other hand, incorporates content from Musou Orochi Z, which was never released outside Japan.

• Musou Orochi Z (2009, PlayStation 3, PC)

A Compilation Re-release of the first two games for the PS3, containing both Story Modes and the second game's Dream Mode. It also adds two new characters, twelve new Dream Stages, and more cutscenes and character interaction. Dynasty characters receive an unlockable fourth costume based on their appearance from Dynasty Warriors 6, while Samurai characters receive their bonus costumes from the first two Samurai games. Those who don't appear in either (including characters cut from Dynasty Warriors 6) are accorded a new look.

• Warriors Orochi 3 (2011, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360)

Several years after the events of Warriors Orochi 2, the warriors, having finally settled on their new lives in the dimensional world, have their peace rocked again by the appearance of the Hydra, a gigantic eight-headed monster born of Orochi's power. One by one, warriors fall to both the Hydra and the resurgent Demon Army, until only three remain. When they are on the verge of defeat, Kaguya, the Moon Princess, appears and helps them escape through time travel. She reveals that she has been sent by the Mystic Realm to turn the tide against the demons, offering the heroes a chance to save their comrades through time travel while mounting a pushback against the Demon Army.

The game is the proper second title in the series (it's actually known as Musou Orochi 2 in Japan, confusing many Westerners when it was revealed). Fittingly, there are a lot of changes to the gameplay. In addition to reclassifying many characters' class types, it adds a new "Wonder" class, whose main quirk is canceling their attacks with an unlockable forward dash, as well as dealing critical hits like Technique-type characters. Other additions are the Dash Chain mechanic, as well as a bonding system, which influences the severity of the combination attack.

Whereas previous games are based on the PS2-era Dynasty Warriors 5 and Samurai Warriors 2, this game moves up to the next gen by basing its graphics on Dynasty Warriors 7 and Samurai Warriors 3. A total of 132 characters are featured, consisting of 96 returning and 36 new ones. The new characters include the 18 new warriors added in Dynasty Warriors 7 and its Xtreme Legends expansion, 9 added in Samurai Warriors 3, 4 all-new characters, and 5 guest characters from other Koei Tecmo franchises: Ayane from Dead or Alive, Ryu Hayabusa from Ninja Gaiden, Joan of Arc from Bladestorm The Hundred Years War, Achilles from Warriors: Legends of Troy, and Nemea from Trinity: Souls of Zill O'll.

Doing away with the separate campaigns from previous games, this game has a unified Story Mode, divided into four chapters with traditional progression. However, side missions are once again incorporated back into the main plot. Some are alternate timeline version of the main battles, with time travel enabling you to save a character doomed in the original, while others are bonding missions unlocked by maxing out two characters' relationships. Instead of being directly accessed from the menu, Story Mode takes the players to a base camp a la Dynasty Warriors 7, where they can also converse with the NPCs and initiate weapon or stat upgrades before jumping into battle. Survival Mode has been removed in favor of Musou Battlefields, in which players can create customizable scenarios and upload them online.

The truly ridiculous amount of characters in the game, coupled with waning interest from Western markets, means that Koei never bothered to give this game an English dub, unlike its predecessors. This has the effect of making it online-exclusive in North America, because the region's law requires that a foreign-language game be given a token English dub. The tradition would be followed in later games.

• Musou Orochi 2 Special (2012, PlayStation Portable)

A port of Warriors Orochi 3 for the PSP, released only in Japan. It adds two new characters, but removes the base camp system in favor of a traditional menu. You can plug in your PS3 save data to continue where you left off. There is a new four-player "Battle Royale Mode", modeled after Shin Sangoku Musou VS. Since the game is on the PSP, the graphics are worse off, with nonexistent Mouth Flaps and the removal of the swimming mechanic.

• Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper (2012, Wii U)

A port of Warriors Orochi 3 for the Wii U, the first time an Orochi game is released for a Nintendo console. In addition to the two added in Special, the game adds two more new characters for a total of 136 characters. The multiplayer exclusive, card battle minigame called Duel Mode is also introduced.

• Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate (2013, PlayStation 3, Play Station Vita, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC)

An Updated Re-release of Warriors Orochi 3, the game adds a new story campaign (Chapters 5-8) that takes place after the original game, focusing on the new threat of Tamamo, a Kitsune who has a hand in the birth of Orochi. It adds nine new characters, including Xu Shu from Dynasty Warriors 7: Empires and three more guests: Kasumi from Dead or Alive, Sterkenburg Cranach from Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland, and Sophitia Alexandra from the Soul Series. New battle mechanics, both individual and team-based, are added, and the game also has a "reincarnation" system that allows you to reset a character level to zero, but keeps their stat bonuses. There is a new Gauntlet Mode, pitting a five-man team to survive a series of Harder Than Hard trials.

• Warriors Orochi 4 (2018, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PC)

After the events of Warriors Orochi 3, the warriors are sent back to their time and place, only to be brought back again to the dimensional world by the Greek pantheon, chiefly Zeus, who seeks to combat them. As the warriors deal with them, they are once again split apart by the existence of bracelets that can transform their users into avatars of specific gods, turning the once united group into several warring factions.

The game removes the Wonder type-class, mostly integrating it with the Technique class. The new Sacred Treasures collectibles replace the Type Action mechanic of the class system with equippable items that allow characters to perform magic. A handful of characters can transform into stronger beings through "deification". The base camp has also been changed into a static menu system, although it does show the current team lineup in in-game graphics.

The game features a total of 170 characters. Barring the guest characters, the entire roster from Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate returns, joined by 16 added in Dynasty Warriors 8 and its expansions, 10 added in Samurai Warriors 4 and its expansion (excluding Spirit of Sanada), and 6 new characters. The cast's appearance is based on their Dynasty Warriors 8 and Samurai Warriors 4 look.

• Warriors Orochi 4 Ultimate (2019, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PC)

An Updated Re-release of Warriors Orochi 4, adding a new story campaign that details the ramifications of the previous game's story, Sacred Treasures, a deification form, and the return of reincarnation system from 3 Ultimate. It adds seven new characters, including three guests from Warriors Orochi 3, for a total of 177 characters.

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Most of the tropes provided in Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors also follow here. Ones that stand out are:

Tropes A to D

• Absurdly High Level Cap: Of a sorts: In 3 Ultimate after raising a character to the level cap of 100, you can "reincarnate" them, which drops them to level one but gives them the ability to get Upgrade Stones upon leveling up which permanently increase a stat of your choice. You can also do this up to nine times, which means it's entirely possible to max out all stats to at 999 if done properly (i.e. ideally, before doing another promotion). This gets reintroduced in 4 Ultimate.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Okuni seems to have something for evil people:
  Okuni: *regarding Nobunaga* Those eyes... such depth, such evil... How exciting!
• All Myths Are True: This seems to be the case by 4. The Chinese, Japanese, Greek, and Norse mythologies exist in the same universe.
• Always Chaotic Evil:
  • Played With. When given the opportunity, the demon army are perfectly capable of living in peace alongside human beings, after initial mutual rejection. But, this seems highly inconsistent.
  • It's brought up multiple times throughout the story, namely with Yuan Shao trying to form an army with demons to coexist with humans. This ends up backfiring on him, since the demons in question were playing on his naivete. However Yoshimoto Imagawa successfully builds a nation where demons and humans are united in their love of kemari, and Dodomeki and Gyūki willingly joining you after the story does hint that they can live together.
  • Seimei Abe states that such a coexistence is completely impossible and in his world, nobody would think of that as a good idea. The characters present seem to agree. In Ultimate, Zhurong and Ginchiyo Tachibana further condone Yuan Shao's actions to ally himself with the demons, eventually making him travel back in time and set right what he did wrong, stabbing Hammerjaw in the back before he gets the chance to do so first.
  • Also at the beginning of the story of Ultimate, when Da Ji betrays the heroes, Dodomeki and Gyūki join her immediately.
• Anachronism Stew:
  • The Three Kingdoms era is roughly between 220-280 AD, and the Warring States period is between the 16-17th centuries, being more than a thousand years apart. This is repeatedly lampshaded; many Japanese characters are delighted to fight alongside or challenge the mighty warriors of old.
  • The second game onward throws in a few more historical figures from different time periods, including Himiko (who, despite being Japanese, actually does live during the Three Kingdoms era), Benkei, Kiyomori Taira and Yoshitsune Minamoto (all from 12th century Japan), and Sanzang.
  • Yoshitsune Minamoto uses what is basically a Lightsaber.
  • 3 includes Nezha, a mystic cyborg. Plus, there are characters from the Hundred Years War, Trojan War and Modern Day. Locations fall into this as well, such as a modern-day Anegawa.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Rather than being forced to level grind each character individually, you can level up characters automatically from a menu using experience collected from battle. This lets you avoid characters from being left in the gutter completely.
  • In 3 Ultimate, Gauntlet Mode automatically saves if you win or lose a level. In the Story or Free Mode, you will automatically lose all progress you made since the last battle if you don't manually save and you lose the battle, while in Gauntlet Mode losing doesn't impose the same penalty. This may seem a bit odd, but considering that Gauntlet Mode uses Dynamic Difficulty to make everything Nintendo Hard, and add in that winning means finding the one area out of multiple on a stage that could randomly be the exit, this makes the penalty for losing less frustrating as, while you still lose almost all loot from the level, you don't lose anything else.
  • Also in Gauntlet Mode, when you beat the game, you will get three unique levels, marked as "DLC levels", that you can play. the first one is a one star mission. however, if you construct a high enough combo, all enemies will automatically start dropping exp scrolls that go to you. In Gauntlet Mode, a level one character will not be as useful as a level 50 or above character, allowing you to power-level characters quickly for the mode and Story Mode.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: This comment on Da Ji by Kunoichi, said before Wu's second stage in the first game:
  Kunoichi: Look out, boys! Here comes a real foxy lady, Orochi's right-hand gal, Da Ji! She's cruel, she's crafty, and she left the house this morning without any pants!
• Artifact Title: Orochi stops becoming a major character from 3 onward. In 3, the main antagonist takes his form, but is explicitly recognized as a different thing. In 4, the real Orochi appears in two separate battles, but the plot revolves around the newly introduced Greek and Norse pantheons. In fact, for being the title character, the series tends to lock him out from the players until the very end of the game. 2 is the only title where he is a default character.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Hundun is basically the Chinese name of Hammerjaw, a Dodomeki-like Orochi general who aligned himself with Yuan Shao. In Ultimate's Gauntlet Mode, however, he becomes a terrifying demon possibly being a Greater-Scope Villain than Orochi.
  • Arguably Ma Chao and Hanbei Takenaka in the third game, where they and Sima Zhao are the starting protagonists. Sima Zhao is kind of exempt from this for being a leader figure and the main character of the Jin story in Dynasty Warriors 7, but the former two were just a general and strategist in their games.
  • Fu Xi and Nuwa were originally secret characters in Dynasty Warriors 3, where they had very basic designs and dialogue. Here: they are Physical Gods with large plot reverence.
  • In the fourth game, Naotora Ii and Guan Yinping join in the characters (Zhao Yun, Yukimura, Cao Pi, Mitsunari and Nobunaga), who were previously leaders of their factions fighting against Orochi in the first game, as the main protagonists who have Deification forms. It should be noted that Naotora is a retainer of the Imagawa and Tokugawa clans and one of few female daimyo in the Sengoku Period while Guan Yinping is known as the daughter of Guan Yu which is ironic that she gets a Deification form over her father who is deified in Real Life.
• Asian Fox Spirit:
  • Da Ji is called a fox many times and her feet doesn't hide this fact any little.
  • Seimei Abe has a fox spirit sitting on his right shoulder. According to some legends, Seimei himself is half-fox (and indeed the game references this in one of his conversations with Da Ji).
  • And then there are Tamamo and Kyūbi. Her alliance with Da Ji actually makes sense for those well-versed in Chinese/Japanese mythology.^note In some legends, Da Ji, Kyubi, and Tamamo are all the same person impersonating different identities throughout history. The real thing is Kyubi, who first took up the name Da Ji and became King Zhou's consort. While history states that she was murdered by Jiang Ziya (AKA Taigong Wang), in Japanese folklore, she survived and went into hiding, then resurfaced more than two millennia later to become Tamamo-no-Mae, a courtesan of Emperor Toba. In both cases, she went on to wreck the empires her spouses ruled with her cruelty.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Many moves can become this, but the most notable example are, surprisingly Orochi himself. Almost all of his moves are non-elemental, deals small damage, has awkward coverage, and is unsafe in general. The only thing that saves makes him the Purposely Overpowered character that he is intended to be are his C1-1.
• Badass Boast
  • There are several quotes that are quite notable. In one dream stage, Shibata Katsuie calls out to the Orochi forces with "Pathetic gutter trash. You couldn't outfight my corpse!"
  • The final battle in the Shu story of 2 has one from Sima Yi when you finally get to him. If you get to him as Zhuge Liang, though...
  Sima Yi: You will break before my genius!
  Zhuge Liang: I will break before no man, the least of which, you.
  • Lu Bu, true to form, says at least one in almost every stage in which he makes an appearance.
• Badass Family: While true for most families in game, the Sun family gets a special mention. Three of the four endings have Orochi defeated by the team work of multiple Samurai Warriors and Dynasty Warriors faction members, while the Wu ending is notable for having Sun Jian, Sun Ce, Sun Shang Xiang and Sun Quan defeating Orochi as a family without any other assistance.
• Bait-and-Switch Credits: All the openings of three games and its expansion except the fourth one can be misleading but Rule of Cool is in effect:
  • The first game's opening shows Lu Bu and Tadakatsu, dueling and clashing their spears which never happens in the game itself. Also counts as Covers Always Lie as seen in the main image.
  • In the second game's opening, Masamune aids the coalition fight Orochi's forces which never ever happens in the game as he is still loyal to Orochi and is only unlocked in Orochi's campaign.
  • The third game's intro has Yukimura, Zhao Yun and the ninjas fighting on top of Hydra which could have been cool in the game but it never happened.
• Beam Spam: Himiko's and Kaguya's mode of attack.
• Big Bad:
  • Surprisingly, despite giving the series the title, Orochi serves this role only in the first game.
  • Da Ji is the main villain in the second game, as her goal to bring Orochi back serves as the catalyst to the whole plot.
  • Hydra in the third game is an unusual example. Rather than actively seeking to repel the heroes throughout the game, it destroys the heroes in one fell swoop at the start, and the heroes have to scramble and get their shits together until they are ready for round two.
  • Tamamo clearly serves as the main villain of 3 Ultimate.
  • Odin is shown to be the villain in the fourth game. Turn out that Perseus who is actually Loki in disguise is responsible for manipulating the characters on his side since the beginning and is allied with Odin.
  • The expansion of the fourth game reveals that Hades is the one who manipulated Odin into getting the power of the Yggdrasil so he can get himself and use it to rule the universe.
• Big Damn Heroes: WO3 invokes this as part of its time-travelling story, as the heroes travel through time to change events so that their allies would survive battles they would otherwise perish in.
• Bilingual Bonus: If you can read Japanese letters, you will learn that Mystic generic officers in the Japanese version of 3 are named after famous historical and mythological figures. In fact, one of them is named Yang Jian^note renamed Vela in the English version, who becomes playable in 4: Ultimate.
• Bishōnen Line:
  • Orochi. You would think he looks like that eight-headed snake monster, wouldn't you? And let us not speak of Orochi X...
  • Another strange example is with the Hydra itself which, as a manifestation of Orochi's raw power, turns itself into eight Orochi clones once defeated, and then after that the previously mentioned Orochi X.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • The 'true' ending of the third game which also counts as Victory-Guided Amnesia for the humans involved.
  • The second ending of Ultimate somewhat mitigates this. The heroes are still returned without their memories, but whereas in the original the dimensional world is also destroyed, it remains intact here, hinting at a sequel to come (and indeed, it eventually does).
  • The fourth game's ending is similar to the third game's true ending where the humans go back to their time periods with their memories erased again while the dimensional world collapses again due to the destruction of Yggdrasil. However, the mystics hint that they may meet again someday and Zeus, who have learned his lesson, believes that their adventures would be remembered in the next generations.
• Blood Knight: Several characters have no purpose except to pursue as much bloodshed as possible, not the least is the big bad, Orochi. Achilles is another example; he's just not happy unless he's always putting his Super-Toughness to the test by fighting as many guys as possible.
• Bootstrapped Leitmotif: In 4, the characters with Deification forms each have their own Leitmotif; for those who didn't already have one in their home series, a theme that they were tangentially associated with is repurposed as such. For example, Cao Pi's theme is remixed from the theme of Wei as a whole, and Naotora's comes from the Samurai Warriors Chronicles main theme, as she debuted in that subseries.
• Boring, but Practical: In gauntlet mode, equipping every weapon with slay and wind elements can be a must at later stages. At first it's not so bad, and good stats will let you take out enemies even in high miasma, however in later stages enemies can become so tough even a character with a 999 attack stat will only deal Scratch Damage to high miasma enemies. Wind and slay get around that, although there are rare enemy types that can half the power of the elements, by dealing % damage or instant death. This is downright overkill in story mode, even at chaos difficulty, but in Gauntlet mode, it's necessary once you get further in.
• Bragging Rights Reward:
  • If you do absolutely everything in WO2, you can unlock Orochi X, the One-Winged Angel version of the original. However, by the time this is done, it's time to put down the game...
  • In the first game, the fourth weapons are this. They and the fusion weapon system are essentially meaningless when most of the game is getting off your attacks before you get hit, and in the Chaos difficulty, a regular Mook can kill even a Level 99 character in 5-6 hits.
  • Also in the first game, getting all your abilities maxed out is this. By the time you have achieved this, you've already unlocked all of the characters, and by that time, these maxed out abilities are unnecessary when they could have helped in trying to advance through the game earlier.
  • And personal items of all the characters, which involve Guide Dang It! in most of the cases anyway.
• Break the Haughty: Orochi does this to the gods in his final story battle.
• Brother–Sister Incest:
  • Fu Xi and Nuwa, who can probably get away with it, being gods and all. Nuwa needn't point it out though...
  • Aya takes up another notch with her bond quotes to her 'cute' brother Kenshin.
• Butt-Monkey: Varies, but a few characters seem to can't catch a break and be taken seriously. Zhuge Dan is a great example.
• Character Class System: Warriors Orochi, compared to most of the other Warriors games, sorta codifies it. The character type in question mainly depends on how their Type Actions work (which use up a set amount of Musou).
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Another Warriors game to have this trope. While the main games display this from time to time, Ultimate's Gauntlet Mode can sometimes take the cake on higher difficulty stages. In Gauntlet Mode there are unique "formation skills" that can take many forms, from elemental attacks to random buffs, that the player can use. Specific officers can also use a specific one as an enemy, such as Xu Zhu always having the skill that causes Collision Damage when activated. That part is fair. The unfair part is they can spam both formation skills and musou in ways the player cannot. Gantlet mode uses a modified version of the team-up bar from 3's story mode to power the formation skills, however the enemy, if it's feeling cruel, can spam up to 4 uses of a skill that costs 2/3s of the bar to use for the player. They can also chain musou attacks together, an action that is impossible for the player to do without abusing the game due to the fact that no character can pull off a musou attack without a full musou bar, otherwise the character will charge up when you try. ^note  It is possible to replicate this for burst style musou attacks by having triple thrift and The focus belt, as the focus belt will recover the single point of musou that get's used up due to triple thrift, but what you can't replicate the sustain style musou that computers do, once you enter, it has to run out before you can go again, and it's impossible to recover your musou before you've even had a chance to attack.
• Confusion Fu: Warriors Orochi 3 adds in the Wonder-type characters. Their R1 Type Actions either border on Combination Attack or Status Buff (akin to the Power-types with the latter), but via their "combination attack stats", they are able to use the Spirit Charge (AKA Shadow Art in Japanese) from Samurai Warriors 3 (but this time, it can be used any airborne actions), and can also inflict critical hits on a stunned target or a target staggered from the Break Guard mechanic. Expect a LOT of possible combo generation from this type. The fourth game removes this type and returns to the original three types.
• Continuity Nod: At Komaki-Nagakute in the second game, Cao Cao tells Pang Tong — who used a massive fire attack on Orochi's forces — that he was thankful that the hooded strategist was an ally, otherwise it'd be Cao Cao, and not Orochi, who would be "drowning in a sea of flame". In the novel, Pang Tong was one of the Shu officers responsible for his defeat at Chi Bi.
• Continuity Reboot: Warriors Orochi 4 takes this route. The mystics remembered the adventures of the past but thanks to their last actions to wipe out the Chinese and Japanese characters' memories and when Zeus remade the Orochi world, everyone else has to start from scratch where new relationships will be formed, restarting the adventure with a fresh slate.
• Critical Hit Class: Technique and Wonder class types. Technique-type characters' charge attacks and Type Actions alike can critically hit any airborne targets, while Wonder-type characters can inflict critical hits on a stunned target or a target staggered from the Break Guard mechanic.
• Crossover Cosmology: There are gods and demons from Chinese and Japanese legends, but in 3 you also have Achilles, straight out of Greek mythology. The fourth games adds the Olympians and the Norse gods along with mythical creatures. The characters also wield Sacred Treasures based from Greek, Norse, Japanese and Chinese mythologies which are replacement for the R1 attacks while eight characters have Deification forms based on Greek, Norse and in Nobunaga's case, Japanese gods.
• Culture Clash: Ancient Chinese warriors and Warring States Era Japanese daimyō fighting together or against one another. Then there's the use of firearms, courtesy of the Samurai Warriors cast, and there's the Frenchwoman and the Greek warrior. Also, of course, the modern day ninja... And in 4, Greek and Norse Gods start popping in.
• Cutting Off the Branches:
  • Warriors Orochi 3: Ultimate follows up the good ending of the base game where the Chinese and Japanese characters didn't go back to their time periods after defeating Orochi X but stayed in their new world.
  • According to the timeline, Warriors Orochi 4 actually follows up the events of Warriors Orochi 3: Ultimate except that the Chinese and Japanese characters are sent back to their worlds with the memories from Orochi's world erased just like the vanilla True ending in contrast to Ultimate's ending where they still do remember it vaguely. However, the mystic characters who debuted from WO3: Ultimate still do appear in the official roster except that Tamamo and Kyubi are tagged to be unlocked in the Deluxe Edition of the game and as camp bonus which means that they do not have a huge role in WO4 despite that their storyline is canonized. It would also be hard for her to have a role in 4's story' As she became a Sealed Evil in a Can at the end of Ultimate.
• Cutting the Knot: Defied. When Hanbei proposes going back to before the Hydra was summoned and cutting the entire plot of 3 off at the pass, Kaguya explains that the Hydra's presence jams her from sending anyone back that far.
• Darker and Edgier: Although Dynasty Warriors 7 and Samurai Warriors 3 are already somewhat grimmer than their predecessors, the third game turns things up a notch by setting the game in Just Before the End, letting named characters getting brainwashed into servitude or dying on-screen, something that players won't know they can avert until quite a while into the game, and introducing an Eldritch Abomination as the new Big Bad which the protagonists and co. struggle to fight off just to survive throughout most of the game.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • Most of the big names from Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors are dead, brainwashed or unavailable for the early parts of Warriors Orochi 3, so the game gets to focus much more on the lesser-known guys first. The final story mission even brings back your initial three guys —Sima Zhao, Hanbei and Ma Chao— and places them in charge of the army, even including their supposed betters like Liu Bei, Sima Yi or Oda Nobunaga.
  • Similarly, the new scenarios of 3 Ultimate mostly involve lesser-known guys who are given temporary spotlight (possibly so they don't get left in the waiting stage). As usual, you can pick anyone as your team, but only said guys will be shown in the cutscenes.
  • The Dream States in 2 and most of the bonus stages in 3 and 4 focuses on a trio of characters, whose adventure can range from semi-serious to really wacky. The team can be anyone and everyone, which could produce quite a few surprising interactions.
• Decapitated Army: Losing the commander means an instant defeat, both for you and your enemies. That feature makes the commanders' Leeroy Jenkins tendencies quite annoying.
• Defeat Means Friendship
  • Sun Shangxiang befriends Ina after defeating her in combat.
  • In the third game, a number of characters initially start off as Brainwashed and Crazy. After defeating them they come to their senses and join the heroes.
  • Defeating the demons in the third game has them reluctantly join with the coalition. Camp dialogue implies that, even if a character has been sealed away or killed, they still are part of the same army.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Playing a stage using characters other than the recommended ones will usually bring some changes into it, which generally includes generic officers taking their place (if they are allied NPCs in this stage) and some new dialogues. Heck, playing the Rescue Battles in WO3 with the character you're supposed to resuce in your team even creates some hilarious Time Travel confusion.
  Tadakatsu Honda: Ina, you're all right! Then, the monsters must have captured...
  Ina: Ina!
  Tadakatsu Honda: Huh?
  Ina: Yes, I am Ina... But so is the prisoner!
  • A more significant case was with Wei's Battle of Komaki-Nagakute in Warriors Orochi 2. Under normal gameplay conditions, you're not supposed to reach Orochi as the gates leading to him are locked, and Kiyomori teleports his lord away before you have a chance to fight him. With cheats, however, you can walk past the wall to fight Orochi, here, you actually run into dialogue exclusive to running into him there, and defeating him will still end the stage normally.
  • In 3, if you enter The Slaying Of The Hydra before Chapter 2 is cleared, you get a borderline impossible version of the stage, with no Yashi’ori and only ballistae to fight the Hydra, like in the prologue version. Unlike said prologue version, this one is actually beatable, though you would need a ton of Save Scumming and near perfect performance to have any chance of killing all Hydra heads in the time limit. Should you actually succeed though, there is unique dialogue to accommodate the fact that the Resistance don’t know about the Hydra spawning Orochi clones upon it’s death at this point.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: A major part of Bonds in the third game, where you can invite anyone to a pleasant banquet (from the Tea House, no less!), even if the other party is the Omnicidal Maniac responsible for creating the world the characters currently reside in or his dragon. Amusingly enough, you can do this on a more literal level by inviting them to a "Tea Party", which is the initial way to rise affinity in the game.
• Disapproving Look: Yukimura gives one to Yuan Shao for thinking his enemies are ghosts.
• Distressed Damsel: A lot and occasionally overlaps Badass in Distress:
  • First game: In Wu's last stage, Sun Shangxiang can grab a Distress Ball and charge in to Dong Zhuo's base, resulting her getting kidnapped and tied up until you beat him.
  • Second game: That Dream Mode which involves several girls saving other girls (and Cao Pi) from Dong Zhuo.
  • Third game: Dong Zhuo once again kidnaps girls, this time Oichi, Nene and Xingcai, forcing Nagamasa, Kiyomasa and Liu Shan into the Demon Army (and Zhang He is kidnapped too. Ina is also kidnapped by the Demon Army in the middle of her training when you try to unlock her.
  • Third game's DLC has two scenarios where Dong Zhuo attempts kidnapping ladies of the game for his paradise of beautiful women: First, Dong Zhuo's Ambition where he kidnaps Aya, Kai, Joan of Arc, Cai Wenji, Wang Yuanji, Kaguya and Ayane. And eventually thwarted by a team of Magoichi, Hayabusa and Taigong Wang. Second, Zhong Hui's Pride, which is the same but Dong Zhuo had Zhong Hui to do the dirty job of kidnapping Nuwa, Ina, Da Ji (even if they're allies or sorts), Wang Yuanji (again), Diaochan, Zhurong and Gracia (the last two escaped), until Zhong Hui has had enough and storms off, driving off would-be rescuers, Dong Zhuo, as well as the ones Zhurong and Gracia called for help (Meng Huo, Mitsuhide, Motochika). There's also another scenario where you play as Dong Zhuo's forces fighting the resistance forces... and showing that you've captured Sun Shangxiang, Zhenji and Ina to immobilize Sun Jian, Cao Pi and Tadakatsu. Just be careful of Hanzō and Zhou Tai trying to rescue them.
• Distressed Dude:
  • In the first game, Liu Bei and Sun Jian are captured by Orochi which forces Zhuge Liang and the Sun siblings to fight for him in exchange of their freedom. In the Wu chapter, Sun Ce with the help of Hanzo are able to rescue to his father and brother from execution while in the Shu chapter, Zhao Yun with the combined effort of Zhuge Liang and their allies defeat Orochi and save Liu Bei.
  • In the dream stage from the second game, Dong Zhuo seems to capture Cao Pi with the other female officers, possibly to lure Zhenji out of the open. After saving him, Cao Pi muses that he's never going to live down with this.
  • In another dream stage, Daqiao, Sun Shangxiang and Oichi have to save their husbands from Da Ji's forces. They also help Zhurong protect her husband, Meng Huo and in return, they help out in the rescue.
  • In the fourth game, Athena takes Liu Shan hostage, forcing Zhao Yun and younger Shu officers (excluding Guan Ping and Yinping) to fight for her. After Bao Sanniang and the ninjas (minus Nene who is on the Olympians' side) save Liu Shan, Zhao Yun and the rest of the officers immediately side with the coalition.
  • Also in the fourth game, Hideyoshi nearly suffers this knowing what had happened to Liu Shan which is also his reason for accepting Ares' deal on "King of Men". Of course, he's aware of Ares' deception and once Mitsunari activates his Deification form, he requests his loyal retainer to come up with a plan to escape from the Olympians.
  • The side mission "Family Bonds" in the fourth installment has Hayakawa and Sun Shangxiang saving their fathers from being run over by their enemies with Lu Lingqi's help.
• Divergent Character Evolution:
  • In the third installment, characters who share a weapon moveset in Dynasty Warriors 7 possess different charge attacks similarly to earlier Dynasty Warriors titles. Some of them are moves from these earlier titles.
  • In 2, Orochi X was just a One-Winged Angel form for Orochi, in 3 Orochi X is the manifistation of the Hydra and by extension, an embodiment of Orochi's raw power and desire for destruction.
• "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune:
  • For the very first time, Warriors Orochi 4 has a theme song entitled, "Kakumei no Masquerade (Warriors Orochi Version)" by Athena's voice actress, Suzuko Mimori. However, the song is actually from her 4th album, "tone" which would be adapted for the game.
  • Warriors Orochi 4: Ultimate also has a theme song entitled, "Statice" by Gaia's voice actress, Saori Hayami.
• Double Agent: Zhuge Liang seems to work for Orochi at first in the first game.
• Downer Beginning:
  • This happens in the beginning of the first game where Orochi merges both the Three Kingdoms and Sengoku Periods and defeats the leaders of those time periods which is shown in his own campaign in the second game. This leaves several characters being forced to serve under him while the rest are scattered across the battlefield.
  • In the first stage of the third game, we are thrown into a battle where it's just Ma Chao, Sima Zhao and Hanbei Takenaka (and some generics) against the Hydra. None of the siege weapons do more than Scratch Damage against it (and it just regenerates said scratch damage), and the weapons are destroyed in just a few hits, with each destroyed weapon drastically lowering your allies' morale. On top of that, they're all being pursued by the massive Demon Army under Kiyomori; you will lose your generic allies no matter what you do (generic allies who happen to have really depressing death quotes specifically for this stage only) and your only escape route is promptly sealed off by Da Ji. It takes a practically-literal Deus ex Machina to bail the characters out of this situation, lest Warriors Orochi 3 become the shortest, most depressing full-priced game ever.

Tropes E to L

• Earn Your Happy Ending: If you want to get the best possible ending of 3, you have to recruit 124 out of 132 characters in the game (the others are unlocked after you get the aforementioned ending). These include all the DW and SW characters. You either have to save them from death, thoroughly find them, get them out of retirement, beat the shit out of them so they'll change sides, etc. If you know the ending, it makes sense when you think about it. The world is destroyed, and the mystics send everyone in the Resistance back to their original worlds. If you leave even a single soul behind, that means you will deny them the right to live in their original time, and, worse yet, cause a Ret-Gone since all of the mortals' memories of the dimensional world are wiped out in the process. No One Gets Left Behind.
• Empty Shell: The Hydra is revealed to be partially this, as it is a manifestation of Orochi's raw power without his consciousness. This is even more apparent when the Hydra heads transform into clones of Orochi upon defeat.
• Ensemble Cast: Given that there are 170 characters in the fourth game, the game tries its best to give screentime to all of them. Despite that the eight characters who have Deification forms are given more appearances in the cutscenes, they're not really considered as the main characters. Out of the eight, Yukimura is possibly the closest of being the protagonist due to his close friendship with Perseus. Even the coalition doesn't have a definite leader and out of the leader characters, Liu Bei and Nobunaga maybe considered as the top leaders.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: A significant chunk of the cast are dead by the time 3 starts. Others are either missing, brainwashed, taken hostage, or willingly join the Demon Army, either for personal gain, honest loyalty, or pragmatism. The only members of the Resistance still standing are Ma Chao, Sima Zhao, and Hanbei Takenaka, plus several generic officers and Mooks.
• Evil Power Vacuum: Because of Orochi's demise at the end of the first game, several warlords, such as Dong Zhuo and Lu Bu, ravage the lands while Da Ji allies with Kiyomori to resurrect her liege lord.
• Excuse Plot: So. We have a powerful demon who wants to fight the best that East Asia has to offer right. So what does he do? Take Three Kingdoms Era China and Warring States Era Japan, then ram them together. Eventually Subverted in Warriors Orochi 3, which gives a somewhat more fleshed-out plot with emphasis on the relationships of the characters.
• Expy: Himiko has only appeared in one other Koei game outside of Orochi, Kessen II, (an extremely loose, fantasy-version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms that is not in canon with Dynasty Warriors) and there, too, she was a spoiled, petulant brat with supreme magical powers. This Himiko isn't the same one, but she's gone from being clingy over conqueror Cao Cao to being clingy over Da Ji the devil lady.
• Extreme Doormat: Diaochan is like this towards Lu Bu in the second game. However, she will rebel against him if she feels that he's straying far from his own ideals.
• Face–Monster Turn: Ultimate reveals that Orochi is a victim of this, courtesy of Tamamo.
• Face, Nod, Action:
  • In the opening of the third game, Sima Zhao, Sima Shi, and Wang Yuanji do this. A moment later, Yukimura Sanada and Zhao Yun do it.
  • In the fourth game, Fu Xi and Susan'o do this as they rush towards Orochi.
• Fake Defector:
  • Cao Pi and Mitsunari in the first game. They volunteer to work with Orochi but they are both working together to destroy his forces from within.
  • Once again, Cao Pi plays this role in the fourth game where he collaborates with the Olympians but he's bidding his time to sabotage them from within and learn of their plans which he leaked to his father. Unlike in the first game, he doesn't team up with Mitsunari due to different circumstances.
  • In the fourth game, the humans under the Asgardians pretend to serve for them so they can discover Odin's true plans. It's through them that the coalition finally learn the extent of his goal. The only exceptions are Lu Bu who just wants to fight stronger opponents and Yoshitune who owes Da Ji a favor for saving him and Benkei.
• Fake Difficulty: Chaos difficulty is no different from Hard, for the most part. Enemies have the same HP (more or less), AI is the same, they deal the same amount of damage... the only difference is that their attacks completely ignore defense. A regular Mook can now kill you in four hits. Did we mention you will often be surrounded by a few hundred mooks, with a few officers in the middle to spice things up? Enjoy.
• Fanservice: Many of the females characters have impractical, fetishy outfits, most blatantly Da Ji, Nuwa and Kyūbi. Naotora wins this trope after she receives her Deification form.
• The Fellowship Has Ended:
  • In the vanilla third game's true ending, Orochi X's demise causes the world to collapse so the mystics send the human characters back to their time periods with the memories of their teamwork erased. Ultimate's ending is also the same but the world remains intact after Kyubi is sealed back into the mirror.
  • The fourth game's ending shows that the world is also collapsing due to Odin and Orochi X's deaths and Yggdrasil's destruction. Zeus gets the eight bracelets back from the heroes having fulfilled their mission and thanks them for their alliance before he sends them and the rest of the humans back to their time periods with their memories of adventures together erased.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: Characters are classified by three categories: Power (who hit harder and are Immune to Flinching), Technique (who can sidestep while blocking or being attacked and can deal Critical Hits on airborne enemies) and Speed (who can Air Dash as well as jump cancel their attacks). The third game adds Wonder (who can cancel any of their attacks with a forward dash that breaks guards, along with dealing Critical Hits like Technique characters).
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: Fu Xi, Nuwa, and Taigong Wang represent these three elements. Also, the three leaders of each group: Cao Cao, Sun Quan/Jian, and Liu Bei as well as Nobunaga Oda, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu Tokugawa can be organized much the same way.
• Forced into Evil:
  • It's easier to say who's not in this trope when Orochi appears the first time.
  • In the fourth game, the humans under the Olympians and Asgardians are compelled to fight for them. Except for Lu Bu as he's interested in the fighting itself.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When Yukimura receives his Deification form in 4, Perseus notes that his bracelet contains the power of Tyr, who is a Norse god and not the only one in the game.
  • In 4, Taigong Wang and Kaguya are shocked that Orochi X returned. This causes the former to wonder what is the purpose of bringing him back unless the person who resurrected him desires total destruction. Turns out that is what Odin really intended.
• Fragile Speedster: Speed-type characters. They can air dash and jump cancel their charge attacks, but their main Type Action mechanics differ from game to game. In 1, 2 and Z, they had two Type Action Specials, a Combination Art 1 (Neutral R1) and Combination Art 2 (Direction + R1) are made available to them, which may or may not cost Musou depending on the Speed-type character and/or the Type Action in question. However, in 3, they now all only have one Type Action given to them that will always cost Musou (which costs the least compared to other types). They also sadly, tend to lack in durability.
• Funny Background Event: WO3's opening CG. After the "Hydra breathing fire" scene, if you look closely, you can see Yoshimoto trying to put out his ablaze kemari ball in panic.
• Futureshadowing: One stage in 3 Ultimate takes place long before the events of the series and depicts Fu Xi, Nezha, and Yinglong against Kyubi and her army of demons. Basically all dialogues in there are loaded with futureshadowing, either referring to the present conflict with Tamamo or Yinglong's outlook in life and eventual fate. This bit particularly stands out:
  Yinglong: Anyways, when will the war against the demons be over?
  Fu Xi: I am afraid it will continue for quite some time. Things are already turning against us.
  Yinglong: I want to protect the Mystic Realm...I will do anything in order to make it so. Even if it means I must fight against the humans as well.
  Fu Xi: There's no need for it to come to that, Yinglong. I'll always be there for you. No matter what happens, you can always talk to me. I will always believe what you have to say.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: In 4, when Zeus first joins the coalition, Keraunos, his weapon and sacred treasure, has been stolen. Despite this, Zeus becomes playable immediately, and can be used in combat, with Keraunos still being wielding by him.
• Gender Flip: Sanzang. This may be a nod to Saiyuki, a Tactical RPG produced by Koei for the PlayStation where you could choose the gender of Sanzang.
• Girl's Night Out Episode: A handful of the Dream Stages focus solely on the girls.
• God Is Flawed: Regardless that the Mystics and Gods have omnipotent abilities, they still have limits. Some of the Mystics seem to accept that they made mistakes in their part while others such as Susan'o and Nezha rarely acknowledges them. The Olympians take this lesson the hard way after Odin shows up and in the end, they recognize that they too have flaws.
• Golden Ending:
  • In 3, the Good Ending, (after beating the Demise of Orochi X) which has the officers coming together to create a world of peace and leads into the plot of Ultimate.
  • In 4: Ultimate, collecting all of Perseus' fragments would lead you to the True Ending where Perseus reveals that Hades is true Big Bad and he must be defeated.
• Gotta Catch 'Em All:
  • This is how Warriors Orochi 3 is set up. Instead of having stories for different "sides," all player-controlled characters are on one side, and your mission is to travel backwards to earlier events and collect as many warriors as you can before the big Hydra showdown. Every single battle you complete will give you at minimum one new warrior, possible three or five! To get the Golden Ending you need to get everyone you possibly can. This trope is also one of the reasons Warriors Orochi 3 is so fun to play; Gotta Catch 'Em All is an inherently addicting trope.
  • Gauntlet/Unlimited Mode takes this further by having the famous officers you defeat automatically join you if you complete a set of stages. You also only start the mode with 5 characters and you can only unlock characters in the mode even if you haven't unlocked them in the main story.
  • The same thing happens again in Warriors Orochi 4, which despite having a perfectly serviceable team system in-story still opts to use a linear story mode. At the start of the game, you only have Naomasa, Naotora, and Tadakatsu, out of 170 characters. Their goal is to gather as many allies as they can for the fight against the villain.
• Grapple Move: Characters from Samurai Warriors (starting from with SW2) and Dynasty Warriors retain whatever grab move they had in their respective game, like Lu Bu's choke slam move from 5 and Wang Yi's ground "aerial slash" musou and aerial "ground pin" from 7. Of course, like in SW 2, this was a improved mechanic from DW 4's more buggy grab attacks.
• Great Offscreen War:
  • The destructive war Orochi instigated in the human world centuries ago that led to his imprisonment is mentioned often but never shown. In 3 Ultimate, we briefly see the prelude to it at the end of Chapter 7.
  • Ragnarok is a significant backstory in 4. It explains why Odin and Loki are the only survivors of the Norse pantheon and why the former is so deathly afraid of his mortality.
• Greater-Scope Villain:
  • Orochi himself is relegated to this in the second game onward. In 2, he is dead so obviously he can't actively act, but Da Ji's attempt to resurrect him is what drives the plot. In the third, his will created Hydra and everyone in the dimensional world feels his presence in one way or another. However, throughout the story, he is dead and remains dead.
  • Tamamo, especially in the first and second games. She was the person responsible for the birth of Orochi.
  • Hundun is a low-key example. As the personification of chaos, he facilitated the collision of the worlds of Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors and the creation of a whole new dimension, although he personally has nothing to do with the plot itself.
  • In the fourth game, it turns out that Loki is responsible for manipulating the characters since the beginning and tricks the likes of Naotora, Yukimura, Guan Yinping and everyone in their faction under the disguise of Perseus. All of this was to ensure that celestial conflict among the humans and the mystics would open a path for Odin to enter their world. When Yukimura and Yinping learn the horrible truth, they're very distraught that they had been fooled and used by the God of Mischief himself. However, he has a last-minute change of heart, thanks to Yukimura's influence.
• Guest Fighter: Since 3, they started introducing characters outside the both Samurai/Dynasty Warriors series or original creations, starting with Joan of Arc, Achilles and Nemea... and due to the merging with Tecmo, they're able to put in Ryu Hayabusa and Ayane. As they gave out more additions, they started giving out Rachel, Momiji and eventually as of Ultimate, they also brought in Kasumi, followed by Sterkenburg. All of them are Koei-Tecmo properties... when suddenly, they introduced Sophitia, who is from a Bandai Namco Entertainment property. That's some high level of 'guest'.
  • Averted with 4, which leaves out all the guest characters that were included in 3 in favor of bringing in more characters from Dynasty and Samurai Warriors, as well as more Original Generation characters.
• Hailfire Peaks: The landscape is often a mash of multiple different ones with Hydra-shaped lava flows between them. In levels where we meet Joan of Arc or Ayane, we see bits of Medieval France and a modern day beach resort also crammed into the levels alongside Japanese castles and such.
• Happy Ending Override:
  • The second game ends with the defeat of Orochi and the Chinese and Japanese characters living happily together in their new world. Then the Hydra shows up at the beginning of the third game, killing the majority of the characters while the rest are either brainwashed or missing which leaves Hanbei, Ma Chao and Sima Zhao as the only ones left to fight against the Hydra.
  • The Ultimate version of the third game ends with the Chinese and Japanese human characters returning to their time periods with their memories of the WO universe intact. But that's not the case in the fourth game because those memories are actually wiped out just like in the vanilla ending. Then, there's this Greek god who thinks that it would be more fun if he merges both worlds again, forcing the human characters to fight their former allies again.
  • Speaking of the fourth game, the new story scenario of its Ultimate version retroactively sours the original ending by establishing that Odin's soul is being held separate from his body, so destroying him as the heroes did there would just lead to him eventually returning to life.
• Hard Mode Perks: Like in Dynasty Warriors, higher difficulties drop better equipment. This also includes getting any of the rare equipable items in the third game, which require you to get 1000, 1500 or 2000 kills in a level on Hard or Chaos while also having at least one character out of five or so in your team.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • Lu Bu, of all people, changes sides in Wu's scenario during the second game, though it's presented less as a heroic thing and more of Lu Bu's Chronic Backstabbing Disorder flaring up again. The Dragon, Kiyomori, lampshades this. When a random henchman tells him that Lu Bu has betrayed them, Kiyomori replies, "Betrayal? No, that man... is being true to himself."
  • In the third game however, if Diaochan comes to his side during one of Lu Bu's fights with Nezha, he'll automatically defect to the Resistance at her urging.
  • Considering that Shuten Dōji is the conscience of Orochi, which essentially means that he is Orochi, one might argue that Orochi himself makes a face turn after joining the Resistance against the Hydra, which is Orochi's raw power without his mind.
  • Also in the third game, Keiji and Masamune, after two titles being unrepentant servants of Orochi, eventually defect for good after one Hydra head is down and they realize that this is not the Orochi they used to trust. This is before the reveal about Shuten Dōji (See above).
  • Subverted with Dong Zhuo, though. He did join the Resistance, but that's because Zhuge Liang forces him to so he doesn't bother the resistance with his petty ambitions and dreams.
  • Once the Normal Ending is unlocked in the third game, you'll find Gyūki and Dodomeki in the camp, stating that they were press-ganged by the Resistance to atone for their crimes. They're actually OK with this and even get a DLC mission about proving themselves.
  • In 4, other than Odin, all of the Greek and Norse gods eventually become pals with the humans. Ares even goes so far as to call Zeus out for toying with humans, even though he started out as a very vicious humanity-hater.
• Hero Antagonist:
  • Xingcai in the Wu campaign in the first game.
  • Basically everyone you fight in the Orochi campaign in the second game, because of its nature as a Perspective Flip.
  • Nezha and Susanoo in the third game are downplayed examples. They are hunting for Da Ji, which is completely justified...had they not overstep their methods.
  • Several side stages in 3 are Perspective Flip of the main battles, in which the Resistance Army are the antagonists. The Ultimate expansion adds many more of these.
  • Nobunaga in the first two chapters of the fourth game as he is allied with the Mystics who knew the events of the previous games and the forces behind the reemerging of Orochi's world. The player characters don't know about this yet and are wary of his motive until Nuwa shows up and explains everything.
• Historical Beauty Update: Wasn't Taigong Wang supposed to be an old man? (Then again, those times are Shrouded in Myth and Taigong Wang's name is actually a reference to how the future King of Zhou's father had told him to keep an eye out for a good strategist, so his name means "the one hoped for by my honored father".)
• History Repeats: The some of the events in Chapter 3 and 4 of the fourth game are somewhat similar to what happened in the first game:
  • Athena holds Liu Shan hostage to ensure that Zhao Yun and the younger Shu officers cooperate with her which is exactly what Da Ji did to Zhuge Liang and the Sun siblings by imprisoning Liu Bei and Sun Jian. Likewise, Liu Shan's rescue is also similar to Sun Jian and Quan's rescue where Hattori Hanzo himself participates.
  • Once again, Cao Pi and Mitsunari made an alliance with a foreign entity (Ares) which force them to fight their fellow humans while appearing loyal to their lord. However, these two are bidding their time to sabotage them from within. The difference is that the two men are not working together unlike in the first game; Mitsunari does the same thing that Cao Pi did in first game which is openly rebelling against his master and defecting to the coalition. Similar to Zhuge Liang in the first game, Cao Pi remains loyal to Ares but he does this to find out their weak points so he can leak them to the resistance and eventually sides back to humanity once the Greek gods put their guard down. Even Jia Chong does the same thing that Zhuge Liang did to Da Ji which even includes a burning castle except that the latter already suspects his betrayal and commands Gyuki to crush him.
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: Moon Princess Kaguya shows up in WO3 to help the last remaining three heroes save everyone who was killed by the Hydra by traveling back in time. One restriction, though: she can't time-travel to before the Hydra emerged because it's created a rend in space/time, so no going back to before its birth and blowing it up then. (Even later, when you find someone who can time-travel further in the past, it turns out to not be so simple.)
• Homage: Benkei collects a lot of weapons and has Jun'ichi Suwabe for Japanese voice. Now say it: I am the bone of my sword...
• Humanity Is Infectious: How majority of the mystics and gods feel when they are with the humans for a long time. Some of the mystics become fast friends with the humans characters. Even some of the demons such as Da Ji, Gyuki and Dodomeki slowly feel this way when they side with the humans. But for Da Ji's case, it was only temporary and she rather enjoys messing with the humans than be friends with them.
• Humans Are Special: A common view shared by the mystics which is one of the few reasons why they help them against Orochi. Of course, some of them such as Nezha and Susan'o don't see it that way until they are defeated many times by them and by the fourth game, their view on humanity improved thanks to that experience. Even Orochi seems to hold this view too because they are Worthy Opponents.
• I Have Your Wife: This is commonly deployed by the antagonists in order to force the humans to follow their orders:
  • In the first game, Da Ji holds Liu Bei and Sun Jian captive which forces Zhuge Liang, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei and the Sun siblings to fight for Orochi.
  • In the third game, the Demon forces coerce Liu Shan, Nagamasa and Kiyomasa to work for them by holding Xingcai, Oichi and Nene hostage.
  • In the fourth game, Athena kidnaps Liu Shan to force Zhao Yun and the younger Shu officers (except Guan Ping and Yinping) to fight for her.
• I'm Cold... So Cold...: One of the enemy officer death lines is 'Such a cold embrace...'
• Improbable Weapon User:
  • Taigong Wang uses a fishing for a weapon, while Sanzang uses her detached sleeves. There's also Da Ji and Himiko with their mystic balls of death. WO3 adds a tree branch & floating mirrors and a drinking gourd.
  • Of course, you kinda of have to mention the characters from the two base games. Easy ones to point out are a flute, an ass kicking flute, feather fans surprisingly good at smacking people, and then you have a spear that houses a massive laser canon in its slightly engorged head. You can also add the bench, the steel boat and the giant mushroom.
  • The third game gives nearly everyone the option to do this by introducing Big Star weapons with very silly skins. Guo Huai, for one, has his Chain-Gun takes the appearance of a giant syringe. (and it's named "Night Nurse", no less!) They will however, as noted below, become Infinity Plus One Swords after you spend the time to max out their Proficiency.
• In Name Only:
  • The Dynasty Warriors factionalism is nearly meaningless here. Characters can and do cross over into other alliances, sometimes in opposition of their original factions. The Samurai Warriors side is more stable (mostly since faction is defined more as clan, of which there are many), although of course there are exceptions. In-story, it's explained that when Orochi attacked, he tore apart their original homes. They took refuge separately and met different people in different terms. And there are those who said "screw it" and went on alone. The original faction system is retained only so you can easily keep track of them. Exaggerated in 3, where there is only one scenario. It's useless to have any faction when literally everyone is on your side at the end of the game. The fourth game somewhat averts where the characters are initially divided into four factions; though, you can recruit other characters or convince the enemy characters to join your side as the game progresses.
  • Despite the fourth game being entitled Warriors Orochi 4, it focuses more on the gods from the Greek and Norse pantheons than the titular character himself who doesn't do much in the story asides from his actions from the previous games being felt. While Orochi does factor into the plot, he's no longer the Big Bad.
• Interface Spoiler: In 4’s Showdown with Zeus stage, the opening cutscene has Zhao Yun, Yukimura, Mitsunari, and Naotora emphasise that they need to be kept safe in order to break the barriers. The stage’s conditions do state that the defeat of Zhao Yun, Mitsunari, or Naotora will be a loss for the player, but Yukimura is not considered vital, making it pretty clear that his bracelet is not one of the ones needed to break a barrier.
• It's Personal: When you first encounter Lu Bu in 3, he is singularly obsessed with killing Nezha. The reason for this? Not because Nezha beat him, though he did, but because he then proceeded to casually kill Diaochan in front of Lu Bu. Lu Bu has been out for his blood since before the Hydra even appeared.
• Jack of All Stats: Technique-type characters. They are able to use R1 in the place of the Triangle button to enhance any of their charge attack finishers via the Enhanced Strike/Extra Charge Attack mechanic (one of the said EX Charge Attacks acts as their main Type Action Special depending on the Technique-type in question). They also have an Extra Counter with R1 that can be used when they suffer damage, but all of these actions cost Musou, and most normally enhanced charge attacks are merely sped-up versions anyway (Warriors Orochi 2 makes it so that enhanced C1 and C2 attacks are the only elemental activation C1s and C2s out there, but some Technique-type characters' enhanced charge attacks have a lot more added effects in that said game). Like the Speed-types, in 3, they have reworked mechanics with only one R1 Type Action (that acts mainly as an auxiliary-based possible Launcher Move to setup for their crits on juggled foes), while also having a sidestep mechanic that can be used to proc instant versions of their dashing square attacks. While forcing them to be limited on offense in the vanilla game, Ultimate adds in a new item that allows them to sidestep cancel their charge attacks and Type Actions for very solid offense (as well as a new mechanic with being able to dodge around the opponent when getting hit). Their charge attacks and Type Actions can also deal critical hits on airborne targets.
• Jerkass Gods:
  • The Mystics towards humans, though it is not too hard to see why. Nezha is the worst about this (despite being half-human), with Susanoo as a close second. Nuwa and Taigong Wang are more subtle, but still not much better. Even Fu Xi and Kaguya can sometimes become overly patronizing, although the two do feel sorry for it and attempt to get better (and in Kaguya's case, you can attribute it more to her naivety). The only one who completely averts this is Shennong.
  • For the Olympians and Asgardians, Ares never trusts half-humans and sees humans as tools while Athena is subtle on her attitude towards humans. Zeus has a huge interest on humanity but doesn't realize his manipulations affected them. Odin isn't better as he's interested in total annihilation. Perseus is the only one who lacks any malice towards them as he is half-human except that as Loki, he sees them as pawns and doesn't understand the goodness in them. However, his time with the humans as Perseus seems to influence his opinion on them and ends up helping them to defeat Odin.
• Knight of Cerebus:
  • The Hydra is suitably The Dreaded of 3 because of this simple reason: it manages to kill off established characters of DW and SW, something that none of the villains from the previous games were able to do. Much of the plot of 3 revolves around time travel because let's face it, you can't bring someone back from the dead, at least without resorting to nefarious powers.
  • Whenever the Norse gods are brought up in 4, things get dark real quick.
• Lampshade Hanging: One of Magoichi's quotes to Zhao Yun is "Stop hogging the lime-light." Zhao Yun is Dynasty Warriors' poster-boy.
• Large Ham: Too many to list. It would probably be easier to try to list those who were actually playing their role straight. Though a shining example of this trope is Zhang Jiao and his 'Wrrrrrrath of the HEAVENS!!'
• The Last Dance: Meta example. KOEI actually didn't want to continue the series, but the fanbase demanded. So they decided to put everything in 3 as the ultimate Grand Finale of the Orochi series. The results thus far has been positive... so positive that they had to churn out another expansion that makes the True Ending non-canon and opens up possibilities to continue the story. And more guest characters.
• Last of His Kind: Loki and Odin are the only confirmed survivors of Ragnarok. After both die in the climax of 4, the Norse pantheon is probably extinct.
• Late Character Syndrome: All the time. Unlocking characters in the series is akin to a stage progression; you won't finish it until near the end of the game (and in a few cases, exactly at the end of the game). And those characters will start at Lv. 1 and with the most basic weapon available upon unlocking as usual, so if your favorite character is unlocked only at the end of a scenario, prepare to be disappointed. Thankfully, the game mitigates this somewhat by giving you the option to spend unused EXP points to level up the character before each battle.
• Leitmotif: Several characters have their own theme which plays whenever you are near them or in their stages.
  • The titular Orochi has his own theme along with his resurrection, Orochi X; and his past self, Yinglong.
  • Susano'o, Tamamo, Hundun and pretty much any new original character except Nezha has their own theme.
  • Lu Bu has a version of his theme specifically for this series.
  • Tadakatsu typically reuses the current version of his theme (except 4, which uses the version from Samurai Warriors 3).
  • All of the guest characters from 3 have an arrangement of their theme or of an iconic song from their series.
  • The Deified characters in 4 all have personal themes:
    • Lu Bu has yet anonther arrangement of his own theme.
    • Nobunaga has Destiny (the Honnoji theme from SW4)
    • Yukimura has Twin Cherry Blossoms (the Sanada clan theme from SW4)
    • Zhao Yun has Crush'em all (the main theme from DW7)
    • Guan Yinping has Solo (the Fan Castle theme from DW8)
    • Cao Pi has Tales of Wei (Wei's theme from DW7 and 8)
    • Mitsunari has the eponymous theme for Sekigahara from SW2
    • Naotora has War Chronicles (a massive extension of the opening from SW:Chronicles?)
  • Finally, while the god factions have their own collective themes, Perseus (Loki in disguise) has his own theme.
• Lethal Joke Character:
  • Gracia. Her attack power and range are both horrible in the second game, below decent at best, and her cavalry skill is easily shut down due to the absence of the no-dismount-when-hit horse. Then you discover that single technique and proceed to kill the enemy commander from full health in under a second. Oh ho, even Orochi's trembling at the sight of her.
  • You'll loathe having to fight against Himiko. You'll be massacring entire armies and shiver in fear at that little girl when she activates her Musou attack and wrecks your crap.
• Lethal Joke Item: In the third game, the Big Star Weapons tend to start off with very low attack power and occasionally have very silly-looking skins. However, after a bit of grinding they become Infinity Plus One Swords.
• Let's You and Him Fight: This is a common thing in the fourth game because some characters encourage the players to fight them if they want their questions to be answered. Some are doing a Secret Test of Character on them just to see if they can defeat the bigger threats.
• Lettered Sequel: Only exist in the Japanese version though, the PS3 port of the second game is originally titled Musou Orochi Z.
• Lighter and Softer:
  • Koei sure not only wanted these characters battle each other, they have made them have senses of humor talking to each other. The Dream Stages on WO2 furthers this up a bit more, since they're no doubt even more lighthearted than usual.
  • Inverted for Orochi's story on WO2, where, instead, it's Darker and Edgier, most notably on the final battle against Wei.
  • Zigzagged for WO3, which starts with The End of the World as We Know It and requires you to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, but also features goofy side missions.
  • WO4 plays this straight as no one dies here and regardless of the Let's You and Him Fight scenarios, the heroes are very happy to have new allies. It's only when the Asgardians and Orochi X appear that it gets very dark.

Tropes M to P

• Magikarp Power: "Big-Star" weapons in Warriors Orochi 3 start off weak but gain rapidly in ability once your compatibility with them goes up.
• Magitek: The Yashio'ori in Warriors Orochi 3. It is powered by Shuten Dōji's power.
• Massive Multiplayer Crossover:
  • Series-wide, between Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors, obviously.
  • Warriors Orochi 3 and its expansions add guest characters from BladeStorm, Warriors: Legend of Troy, Z'ill Oll, Atelier and Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive. The most surprising add is probably a guest from the Soul Calibur games.
• Master of Illusion: Da Ji, Kiyomori, and most of the new characters are capable of creating harmful illusions.
• Mêlée à Trois:
  • The fourth game borrows the system from Warriors All-Stars where the characters are initially divided into four groups. Namely, Perseus (Wu, Shu under Liu Bei including Guan Yinping, Takeda, Uesugi, Tokugawa), Zeus (Athena, Ares, Wei under Cao Pi, Shu under Liu Shan including Zhao Yun, Toyotomi), Mystic (Nu Wa, Cyborg Nezha, Hojo, Oda, Date and Jin) and Odin (Lu Bu's faction, Da Ji, Munenori, Kiyomori, Abe no Seimei, Yoshitsune, Jia Chong, Zhong Hui and Kanbei).
  • The fourth game's mission, "The Rescue of Perseus", has the coalition facing both Athena and Da Ji who are fighting each other over Perseus. The mission ends with Perseus still in Da Ji's clutches but of course, this is his ploy because he is actually Loki and Da Ji is working with him.
• Mighty Glacier: Power-type characters. While they are tanky with very powerful and-or-offensive Type Actions, they don't have any special cancel mechanics and they may take too much unneeded damage, despite having Hyper Armor (only charge attacks, Type Actions and Musou Attacks can make them flinch until you have enough attack power).
• You Monster!: Himiko says this to Zhong Hui in the forth game after he defects from Loki's army to join the Coalition during Chapter 5.
• More Deadly Than the Male: Twofold.
  • First, there is Da Ji. Yes, Orochi engineers most of the destruction befalling upon the humans, but bear in mind that it was Da Ji who freed him in the first place. And in the second game, it was her idea again to bring him back.
  • As of 3 Ultimate, we have Tamamo, who is responsible for a lot of stuff it borders on hilarious. She is the true mastermind of all events in the series by falsely leading Yinglong to attack the Heavenly Emperor and stole the Divine Mirror, which transformed him into Orochi. It's also heavily implied that the Demon Army is rightfully hers, considering that they have existed long before Orochi ever came to be. This is without counting the stuff she does as the Big Bad of 3 Ultimate, which is an entirely different can of worms.
• Multiple Endings: Aside from the different story modes in the first two games, the third game has three endings. A normal, a good and a true ending, the latter of which you unlock by obtaining practically every character you can in the first three chapters. 3 Ultimate expands on the good ending, by offering four more chapters to the story, and features two endings: One after defeating Tamamo for the first time and one after hunting down Kyūbi at Odawara Castle. The fourth game averts this due to being linear and having one ending. Fortunately, 4: Ultimate gives two endings: one where the coalition destroy Odin's soul and the other where after collecting Perseus' fragments that would resurrect him, he tells the coalition that Hades is true Big Bad and must be defeated.
• My Grandma Can Do Better Than You: Variant: Katsuie Shibata occasionally taunts "You can't outfight my corpse!"
• Names To Runaway From Really Fast: Names for several Demon and Mystic officers in 3: Ultimate ignore their respective theme naming and instead opt to use "as long as it sounds cool/menacing" names, such as Death, Pestilence, War, Storm, Brimstones, Ocean, Thunder, Victory, etc.
• Nintendo Hard: You can expect the games to be very challenging.
  • To be more specific, the last two stages of the first game are hell to clear because even though the mooks can be taken out easily, the officers' stats are insanely higher than the mooks, being able to take the player out with only a few hits, even if you're playing on normal mode with high level officers.
  • Missions where you have to chase an enemy down or protect someone from dying are especially challenging as well. As an example from the first game when you have to stop Sun Ce in Wei's story mode. When you actually reach him, his stats will be far higher than yours, even if you're playing with high level officers, he will kick your ass unless you use a power character as they have higher defense than speed and technique. And if you don't kill him soon enough, Zhou You will appear with two sub officers and while you don't have to kill them, they'll cause you a great deal of trouble trying to kill Sun Ce.
• Noble Top Enforcer: Ina serves as this to Dong Zhuo in the Samurai path of the first game.
• No Campaign for the Wicked:
  • Played straight in the first game, averted in the second. Ah, to crush your enemies, break the wills of the legendary heroes of history, and beat up a few gods... Too bad the Orochi campaign is a prequel to the first game, instead of being set during the events of everyone else's campaigns in the second game.
  • The third game doesn't even have different sides, at least not different sides not controlled by the player. Instead you're collecting as many warriors as you can to fight off the Hydra, and in some demons' cases this means capturing them and impressing them into your service. Some of the guys you collect are pretty evil, though, including Da Ji, and at the end of the game, camp dialogue implies that even the incarnations of Orochi and Tamamo are now part of your army.
  • Some what-if stages in 3 and it's re-releases do feature a stage from a different view, sometimes the villains'. Ultimate especially has several characters remembering a particular hard loss who then revisit the battle in their minds, making the former opponent's side playable. There's also a DLC stage dedicated to Kiyomori, Dodomeki and Gyūki setting out to find victims for Kiyomori's brainwashing sorcery.
  • The fourth game plays this straight due to being very linear which means players never to get to play the characters who are under the Olympians and the Asgardians....unless there might be an expansion or DLC.
• No One Gets Left Behind: Also see Earn Your Happy Ending above. The requirement for the True ending of 3 is obviously designed so you already have recruited all DW and SW characters, since the ending shows the dimensional world being destroyed and the mystics sending everyone present back to their original time while wiping their memories of the dimensional world clean, thus making their exploits in the original series possible without leaving any kind of Series Continuity Error.
• Numerical Hard: Although enemies already do receive substantial stat boost at the maximum difficulty in the two base games, this crossover turns things up several notches by increasing the stat boost to the degree that even a maxed-out character will die from a dozen blows from the lowest mook. Granted, the player can boost up their damage as well with the tons of weapon attributes they can imbue in this game.
• Old Save Bonus:
  • For the PSP versions. Allows characters in the sequel to gain their first ability immediately.
  • Ultimate can inherit your character stats, weapons and other progressions from the vanilla WO3.
  • The fourth game lets you unlock the DW9 outfits of Diaochan, Daqiao, Yueying, Zhenji and Wang Yuanji as long as you have the old save bonus from Dynasty Warriors 9.
• Ominous Latin Chanting:
  • Used in two stage themes in the third game to great effect, especially when you consider their premises...
  • Used and abused along with Cherubic Choir and Victorious Chorus in the fourth game thanks to the presence of Greek and Norse gods as well as the Deification feature, adding new chanted remixes of various songs as the themes of those subject to the feature.
• One Game for the Price of Two: Warriors Orochi 2 is not considered a sequel in Japan, but rather a standalone expansion pack, with focus mainly on adding characters and story. This explains why Warriors Orochi 3 (the actual second game in Japan) is much more different than its two predecessors.
• Only the Chosen May Wield: This is in-universe explanation on how the bracelets choose their owners, giving them their Deification forms. According to Perseus, it only activates when the wearer has intense emotion or resolve. In Naotora's case, she finds the bracelet by chance. For Yukimura and Guan Yinping, the bracelets go to them while Athena and Ares provide the bracelets to Zhao Yun, Cao Pi and Mitsunari as an exchange for their services. As for Nobunaga, the mystics are the first to find his bracelet and by coincidence, it went to him which is why his Deification form is a Japanese one. For Lu Bu's case, it's hinted that Loki may be responsible for giving the bracelet to him at the beginning which also explains his Deification form being based from a Norse god.
• Our Angels Are Different:
  • Nuwa has a halo. She's also a Stripperific fighter who allies herself primarily with Cao Cao.
  • In 4, the Greek soldiers and generic officers have wings on their back. They can't fly so it's probably for aesthetics.
• Out of Focus:
  • In the third game, if you go a while without using character, you can listen to them talk about how they're bored or angry at being kept from the battlefield. The game tries to remedy this by suggesting a recommended team for each stage, which is usually the characters most plot relevant to the stage; however, you can choose to ignore this recommendation and field whoever you wish.
  • This happens in the fourth game due to having 170 characters in total which means that not all of the characters are going to have focus in the main plot. Only around 20-30 characters, including the new ones, have involvement in the main storyline while the rest are either used as backup for bonding and have more screentime in the side missions.
• Party Scattering: This is done in Orochi's campaign where he defeats the warlords, forcing several faction members to scatter after losing their leaders. It's not a surprise that some characters from other factions join another group asides from their own.
• Pet the Dog: Generally, it's the younger female characters that play this role across various scenarios; for example, Xiaoqiao gets a pat on the head from Nobunaga in the Sengoku ending.
• Physical God: Starting in the second game, several gods from the Chinese and Japanese mythologies became playable. The fourth game includes Greek and Norse gods too.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • A frequent problem in WO3. Once the team uses Da Ji's memories to go back in time to before the Hydra appeared, the rest of the world maneuvers to attack them as collaborators and refuses to listen to reason until beaten into submission. Da Ji does have her own agenda, but the allies are hardly fooled.
  • Ultimate gets it even worse, with Tamamo sending out evil doppelgängers of everyone to stir up fights between factions. And it works very well thanks to trivial misunderstandings getting several Hot-Blooded characters so worked up that they attack based on false information with no regard whatsoever.
  • WO4 sets this problem again except this time, the characters from different time periods are randomized and grouped into four factions and there's no brainwashing involved. This led family members and friends to fight each other. This is also Zeus' biggest flaw because he never told his children about his true intentions of rebuilding the new world. Had he been open to his plans, then Ares would have never sided with the Norse gods.
• Popularity Power: In WO4, the Deification form is usually given to those who scored spectacularly in many popularity polls Koei has given in the net. Aside from the obvious mascots (Zhao Yun and Yukimura), we also got Mitsunari, Cao Pi, Guan Yinping, Naotora and Lu Bu getting them. However, Nobunaga himself also gets a Deification despite not being on the top ten of polls; but again, he IS a very popular figure in Japan.
• The Power of Family:
  • In the first game regardless of how they're forced to fight each other by Da Ji, the Sun family always sticks together as evident in the Wu storyline ending where they all deliver their final blows against Orochi.
  • In the fourth game, this happens to the Guan family as well thanks to Guan Yinping, who possessed the Ouroboros bracelet containing the power of Freya, the Norse goddess of love. Because of this, Guan Yinping's love of her family cause her brothers, Guan Suo and Xing, to defect to the coalition where their father and older brother are.
• Power of Friendship: a running theme in all four games as well as a gameplay mechanic in the second, where hanging out around allies boosts your Healing Factor.
• Public Domain Artifact:
  • The fourth game introduces the Sacred Treasures which allows the characters to conjure magic attacks. These sixteen objects are based from several mythologies such as Greek (Poseidon's Trident, Harpe scythe, the Bow of Artemis, the Nectar, Hermes' Caduceus staff and Talaria boots and Cerberus flail), Norse (Lævateinn sword, Dáinsleif sword, Freyja's Brísingamen necklace, the Gleipnir whip, Thor's Mjolnir and Gullinbursti boar) and Asian (Taijitsu mirror, Purging pestle, Totsuka-no-Tsurugi). The five new characters from the Olympian and Asgardian pantheon also have their Sacred Treasures which are also their main weapons such as Zeus' Keraunos staff, Athena's Aegis shield, Ares' Typhon spear, Perseus' Mistilteinn staff and Odin's Gungnir spear.
  • The mounts in the fourth game which are available via pre-bonus content and DLC are named after known folklore and mythological creatures such as Kelpie, Behemoth, Sleipnir, Fenrir, Catoblepas, Pegasus and Unicorn. Some of these mounts even give special attacks such as the Behemoth shooting cannonballs and Fenrir producing wolves.
• Putting the Band Back Together: In the fourth game where after Zeus rebuilt Orochi's world and brought the humans back, Nuwa rebuilds the coalition by first making an alliance with Nobunaga and later the rebel forces under Liu Bei, Shingen and Kenshin.

Tropes Q to Z

• Rage Against the Heavens: Orochi's main motivation, as his story mode reveals.
• Relationship Values: A major part of the third and fourth games. Each character has a group of other characters with whom they share a bond to. Increasing it via fighting together or holding feasts will lead to unlocking various passive bonuses and even special stages to unlock new characters. The fourth games adds the training camp where you can send three characters for training which increases their bonds and levels and brings new weapon, gems and weapon attributes.
• La Résistance:
  • Gets formed eventually in the first game. However, Nobunaga Oda is the one who jump-started it.
  • Also the center point of the third game's story. Almost every battle marks the player's forces as "Resistance Army".
  • In the fourth game, the resistance wasn't formed yet due to the characters being randomized and grouped into four factions. It's only at the end of the second chapter where Nobunaga and the Mystics join forces with the rebel forces under Yukimura and Perseus after Nuwa informs them of their past relationship from the previous games and the Greek gods' intention.
• Resurrect the Villain: After Orochi's death in the first game, Da Ji teams up with Kiyomori to resurrect him using Himiko as a catalyst. The revived Orochi is in a different form but he's subsequently put down by the coalition. In the fourth game, he's resurrected again by Odin using Shuten Doji's body as a catalyst; however, it is Orochi X who is resurrected much to Da Ji's dismay while the original Orochi is revived somewhere.
• Revenge Before Reason: Wang Yi appears to be controlled by Orochi, but when she broke free of it, she's still vengeful on Ma Chao and attempts to kill him until Nō and Oichi stop her. She does this again in the fourth game except it's Nuwa and Nene who tries to reason with her.
• The Rival:
  • Yoshitsune gets this, naturally, with Kiyomori. More surprisingly, he gets another... in Lu Bu. The latter however, isn't a clear-cut rivalry in the traditional sense. The third game adds Shuten Dōji to a minor extent.
  • Also, just about every pair of rivals from their respective games, still retain that sense regardless of what side they're on.
  • Ina and Lu Lingqi get this as they're the daughters of the strongest warriors in the Sengoku era and Three Kingdoms era.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: To have any hope on Chaos difficulty you need to get your team to the point where they can one-shot anything, due to the fact that practically anything can quickly kill them since enemy attacks ignore defense in Chaos.
• Sadly Mythcharacterized: Koei Tecmo took a lot of liberties when it comes to portraying the Mystic and God characters from several mythologies such as Nezha being resurrected as a cyborg rather than out of lotus roots and Typhon being Ares' weapon instead of being a monstrous serpentine giant that challenged Zeus and the Olympian gods.
• Secret Test of Character: This is another common thing in the fourth game:
  • Nobunaga battles the rebel forces under Perseus and Liu Bei but he's doing this under the orders of Nuwa just to see if they are ready to fight against the Olympians. Once this is achieved, they can now rebuild the coalition.
  • This is Zeus' true goal all along; he just wants to check if humanity is strong enough to defeat Odin. He is also testing his children because he wants them to loosen up a bit and see mortals in a different way.
• Sequence Breaking: In the third game's Gauntlet Mode, the DLC stage "Heavenly Emperor's Palace", Hundun can be defeated by having the in-game messages pop up to the point the game cannot keep up with the script! ^note Normally, you're supposed to disable four power crystals to weaken Hundun. But the player has the option to skip but one to attack Hundun, who is buffed up and revives after his HP hits a certain range with a message. However, players using the "Getaway" formation skill will have the game state "This formation is locked" each time they try to use it. This has a side effect of stalling the script of the map, and the game cannot keep up with the messages needed to automatically restore Hundun.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The entire storyline of the third game. Also, most stages may involve a character dying outside of your control, after which a few characters will try to help them out in a stage that will result in a Redux version of the previous stage where the character can end up surviving and join the Resistance.
• Sinister Scythe: Orochi uses a large scythe as his weapon.
• The Strategist:
  • From the second game onwards Taigong Wang takes it upon himself to plan most of the battle against Orochi. Hanbei takes this role in the third game. Da Ji acts as one for Orochi's forces throughout the first two games and to a minor extent in the third game.
  • All of the strategists have their fair share of the pie in the fourth game as they each give their contribution in the fight.
• Stealth Pun: In 4 Kyubi, an unlockable character detached from the plot, has a giant pestle as her magic artifact. She uses it to smash the ground for area of effect damage. Due to the way mechanics work killing enemies gives you charge for a super attack called a Unity Attack. You're literally grinding up enemy units for unity charge.
• Stellar Name: In the English version, the Mystic generic officers are named after constellations.
• Stripperiffic:
  • To the point that every new female, except Himiko, has this. God, for a monk priestess, Sanzang sure doesn't dress up so purely...
  • Averted with Kaguya, who was designed to reflect Heian era sensibilities for the most part: they only made her skirt shorter so she could "move" more easily, but it still has 12 layers!
  • Naotora's Deification form in Warriors Orochi 4 is, to her own chagrin, the most Stripperiffic outfit from all of her alternate costumes due to being based on Aphrodite, which shows her having more skin than her default outfit.
• Super Mode: Warriors Orochi 4 introduces the "deification form" which is based from several Greek and Norse gods whose attributes and skills reflect on the characters chosen; though in Nobunaga's case, his form is based from a Japanese god. However, only eight characters (Zhao Yun, Yukimura, Cao Pi, Mitsunari, Guan Yinping, Nobunaga, Naotora and Lu Bu) who are important to the story can only have them. Characters in their deification form can do more damage than their normal form. They can only be activated once you have the Rage Musou which you can only get from a gold drop that only appears once you have 300 hits. Aside from that other characters still have Musou Rage and Awakenings that work much like their home series.
• Super Special Move: The Musou Chain, a stronger variant of the traditional Musou attack. When one character is in the middle of a Musou, they can tag out with another character, who immediately activates their Musou, causing an automatic True Musou, with bonus attributes based on the character types in use by the team.
• Surrounded by Idiots:
  • Dong Zhuo is hilariously blustery when his minions lose a stronghold. "What were you doing! Drag your sorry carcass back up there and reclaim that mountain!"
  • Sakon in the Battle of Kyūshū.
  Mitsunari: "You got yourself some... interesting followers there, Sakon."
  Sakon: "So interesting I feel like tearing out my hair."
  • After the same battle, Sakon complains about his followers' incompetence when Nobunaga's forces capture him.
  Sakon: If they'd only just listen...
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: In Warriors Orochi 4, the extra misison named "The Genpei Demon War" has Yoshitsune teaming up with Kiyomori and Da Ji to defend the castle from Odin and his forces.
• Theme Music Power-Up: With both Lu Bu and Tadakatsu Honda in the crossover, naturally they would carry over their theme tunes (The former has a remix specifically for this game). It wouldn't be until Musou Orochi Z, when Orochi himself would finally have his own. Played with in the new DLC for Warriors Orochi 3 "Keiji's Theme" this is where Keiji Maeda wants a theme song for his own. Note that this is the only DLC scenario where you cannot change the BGM (at least in the Japanese edition). In the third game and its expansions, Susano'o, Seimei Abe, Shennong and the guest characters also feature introductions with their themes replacing the stage music. Tamamo and Kyūbi regularly have their themes as BGM in stages they star as boss in. Even the Olympians and Asgardians have their own theme song.
• Threads of Fate: In the third game, a person's thread of existence is a necessary component for Kaguya's Time Travel powers, since they work as a form of Mental Time Travel, allowing them to transfer their consciousness to their past selves. This leads to a limitation that prevents the time travel from becoming a Story-Breaker Power, as the appearance of the Hydra distorted the existence of the fused world, cutting every human's thread of existence to the exact time the Hydra appeared, so they can't simply go back and prevent it from appearing. This also leads to an eventual Enemy Mine with Dragon Ascendant Da Ji, since her mystic nature gives her a stronger thread of existence, meaning it was not severed by the Hydra's arrival, allowing her to bring the coalition further back in time.
• Time Travel: Courtesy of Kaguya in WO3.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Even ignoring the native eras of all the characters, trying to wrap your head around the changes made to the timestream in 3 will make your head explode. The what-if stages thrown into the mix in Ultimate don't make it easier.
• Title Drop: Joan of Arc gives us "A storm of blades shall part the enemies before us" if you kill an officer in her presence (but she's not in your party).
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • For the first time ever, Xiahou Yuan is both competent and has a few significant story moments in the second game. Dong Zhuo has arguably also received this treatment, becoming an actually competent (albeit still whiny and pampered at times) villain who is also a vital figure in Orochi's army. Arguably Nuwa and Fu Xi from their first appearance in Dynasty Warriors 3, where they were secret characters without background or story, when they are now deities from the mystic realm.
  • Back in Bladestorm, Jeanne was a mere Hero Unit in a game about commanding troops. Now, she picks up a spear and has her chance to rack up multitudes of KOs all by herself.
• Too Long; Didn't Dub: Warriors Orochi 3 is the first Warriors game released internationally without any English dubbing, and with the ample amount of new vocals added in by the expansions, chances are it's probably stuck this way for good...
• Tragic Villain:
  • Orochi, even before you find out about his backstory in 3 Ultimate (which turns him into a massive Woobie). Yinglong was essentially cursed to become what he is because of his strong sense of justice, and for that, he will never be redeemed. While the Heavenly Emperor takes pity on him, he all but states that Yinglong's curse can't be removed, because the demons corrupted his soul.
  • Himiko, who doesn't see her actions as bad, but rather as a way to appease her best gal Da Ji, whom she genuinely loves (whether or not she loves her back is up for debate). As 3 indicates, if Da Ji is endangered, Himiko Ain't Too Proud to Beg and ask the heroes for help.
  • Even Tamamo receives a degree of sympathy from a few characters like Shennong (although the fact that the guy always tries to see the best of anyone helps), despite the horrible things she committed. She originally didn't want to do what she did, but if she did not, she would cease to exist. Other people's anger and sorrow are the only things that keep her alive. You cannot blame her to become mad and jump off the slippery slope. In a way, her ultimate fate is probably the best thing that could happen to both parties. On one hand, the heroes would no longer be manipulated by her. On the other hand, Tamamo continues to exist and can create her own "perfect world" in the Mirror Realm.
  • In general, most villains in the series either did not start out as one, have no choice but to become one, or become stuck in friendships with people who are already evil. It really places an emphasis on Rousseau Was Right. The only exception is Da Ji who does evil things because she likes it.
  • Initially, Loki aids Odin in his plans for total destruction of all life. However, he wants to avenge the deaths of his friends who were killed by Odin during Ragnarok. His time with the humans help him change his view on them which causes him to secretly provide the tools needed to defeat Odin. In the final battle, he is able to get Odin off guard until the latter controls him to fight his former human friends. Knowing that he can't escape from his control, he requests Yukimura to slay him which the latter complies.
• Two Guys and a Girl:
  • In the second game, Taigong Wang, Fu Xi, and Nuwa are the team sent by the Mystic Realm to help the heroes. Although they mostly don't interact with each other (since they are assigned to help different groups of people), you see them team up in Orochi's final stage, where they act like close acquaintances.
  • The third game retcons the Mystic team-up to be Shennong, Fu Xi, and Nuwa. Taigong Wang still has a role, although he is no longer close with the the latter two. This is in fact closer to the original Chinese myths, where the former three are known as the "Three Sovereigns" who created and essentially led humans to civilization, whereas Taigong Wang is a deified historical figure.
• Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny:
  • The long awaited rivalry between Lu Bu and Tadakatsu Honda. Toss in Achilles for good measure.
  • Also, a number of the Dream Stages in the second game and DLC stages in the third game play out like this. The Three Kingdoms leaders vs. the Unifiers of Japan, the legends of the Heike vs. the Daimyo of the Sengoku, the gods vs. the best of the mortals, Tadakatsu Honda, Lu Bu, Keiji Maeda vs. Orochi... the list goes on!
  • Ramped up again in Warriors Orochi 3. Take all those, add the bona fide Greek Badass Achilles, and the badass Video Game Ninja Ryu Hayabusa and you're in for an ultimate showdown. (Mildly disproved in that Nezha apparently > Lu Bu and Achilles though.)
• Unblockable Attack: Warriors Orochi 3 adds in the Break Guard mechanic, a guard action that allows you to grab the opponent mid-attack and push them away into a stun for a free followup.
• Underboobs: Da Ji has an outfit in Musou Orochi Z and the third game that shows this off. Diaochan also has her Dynasty Warriors 6 outfit.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The third game gets this in the form of the Yashio'ori, which you have to man and use to defeat the Hydra in the same fashion of using a ballista. While this is foreshadowed somewhat in the intro level, after spending hours in the typical Warriors tradition grinding your characters up to scale, it is quite surprising to see the gameplay jumping from the usual hack-n-slash to a Rail Shooter-esque Attack Its Weak Point level.
• Unholy Matrimony:
  • WO3 has Da Ji and Achilles with serious affections for one another, mostly a case of In Love with Your Carnage. One camp conversation has Achilles sweet-talking Da Ji by saying that a cruel and beautiful woman like her needs to be surrounded by the screams of combat.
  • Hundun also shows genuine interests towards Kyūbi out of similar motives.
• The Vamp:
  • Zhenji, Nō, and Da Ji. The three of them can even perform a special triple attack together in the second game.
  • Tamamo from 3 Ultimate is a darker example. She doesn't use her beauty to enchant men (although hers undoubtedly helps), but she can attract sympathy. Problem is, that sympathy was given by a certain dragon god. Her actions basically caused the whole series to happen.
• Video Game Perversity Potential: The new Color Editor added in Ultimate can be used to turn every character outfit Stripperiffic, even by this game's standards.
• Villain Episode: Several gaiden stages in 3 Ultimate involves taking control of the opposing side in some fights of the main campaign, as well as stages that explain what the villains were doing before and during the appearance of the Hydra, and some other What-Ifs. Also the first mission of chapter 5 involves Da Ji, Sun Wukong, and Himiko finding a mysterious stone and after capturing Jiang Wei, using the stone to make a clone of him, leading to many misunderstandings and the release of Kyūbi-no-Kitsune.
• Villainous Friendship: While in the first two games it was left up in the air the third makes it pretty clear that Keiji, Masamune, Da Ji, and most of the demons truly respected Orochi. Even long after his death they still hope for his return. When they realize what the Hydra truly is their disappointment at it's mindless, hollow state is so great most of them pull heel-face turns to help destroy it just because they view it as an affront to the man they used to serve.
• Wake-Up Call Boss:
  • In WO3, Yuan Shao and Himiko are this, depending on the route you take. Yuan Shao is a competent fighter, having quick, strong attacks, strong bodyguards, as well as having an unblockable Musou Attack which deals great damage, hits twice and has long range. It's a OHKO/2HKO at this point for all your characters. For the other route, there's Himiko, who has the strongest Musou Attack in the game, however it can be blocked (If you are fast enough to react). Unless your character is Lu Bu or Ryu Hayabusa, you are pretty much dead if you get hit by it.
  • In the Gauntlet/Unlimited Mode in 3 Ultimate the level that unlocks stage 2 because it's the first set of levels that has 3 battlefields and the last one is battle with Nobunaga and his army with some scripted events that can make you waste time and allow the Miasma Level to rise.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Brísingamen's Charge Magic in 4 is essentially this, firing a long-range laser straight ahead.
• Weaponized Ball: Da Ji attacks with a pair of balls which she commands to spin around her with ballet. Guo Jia uses what seems like to work like a billiard cue to set large orbs into motion.
• We Cannot Go On Without You:
  • If the character currently controlled dies, it's Game Over, even if the other two characters are still at full health.
  • Averted in Gauntlet Mode in 3 Ultimate, where you control a squad of five characters that are all out. If one of them dies, you can still use one of the others. However unless if you revive them before the exit, you will lose them for the stage.
• Wham Episode:
  • WO3 starts off with almost everyone dying, with the story being to go back to avert this incident.
  • Near the end of Chapter 3 we have the reveal that Da Ji had been hiding the body of Orochi X, which turns into the Hydra, which is revealed to be a manifestation of Orochi's raw power. Oh, and Shuten Dōji is revealed to be a manifestation of Orochi's conciousness.
  • Ultimate further reveals that everything that had happened up until then - including events in the mystical characters' past - was a result of Tamamo's machinations. Even Orochi himself was a victim!
  • The middle of Chapter 4 in Warriors Orochi 4 reveals that Perseus is actually Loki, the God of Mischief and he is on Odin's side all along, manipulating the likes of Naotora, Yukimura and Guan Yinping and everybody else including the Olympians.
• What If?: This is the basis for many of the Dream Stages, set scenarios that allow for cool, strange, and outright peculiar combinations, and also give some depth to some of the characters.
• Wistful Amnesia: In the fourth game, the Chinese and Japanese characters lost their memories of their adventures together in the three previous games. As the game progresses, they slowly remember their old partnership and the past (e.g.: Sun Jian seems to remember his friendship of Ujiyasu while Xingcai recalls fighting against Orochi X). It's only when the original Orochi returns that they finally remember.
• Wolverine Publicity: Same as with their source games, Zhao Yun and Yukimura Sanada are in front and center of the covers of the later games. Especially egregious in 3 where the main protagonists are Ma Chao, Sima Zhao, and Hanbei Takenaka, yet none of those three are on the cover at all. Another example is the first game that had Lu Bu and Tadakatsu Honda on the cover. The duo never really fight in the story and you have to fight one of them in Free Mode with the other to get a special cutscene.
• The Worf Effect:
  • Nezha manages to inflict this upon Lu Bu several times in the third game.
  • Nezha himself gets this from the player. Even after you've beaten him a couple of times he'll still talk about how "impossible" it is for a human to beat him. In Ultimate, the player travels back in time to see the then-human Nezha charging straight at the newly born Orochi, who then proceeds to wipe the floor with him. The subsequent result is Nezha getting himself vaporised and had to be revived as a cyborg. Guess he never learned...
  • Despite being War Gods, Ares and Athena gets their asses constantly kicked by the humans. Justified on Ares' case as he is an arrogant Blood Knight. But for Athena, her single-mindedness to pursue Perseus and her lack of understanding on human behavior cost her every victory despite being known as the goddess of wisdom and strategy.
• Worf Had the Flu:
  • The reason why the Tokugawa got creamed by Orochi: Tadakatsu was away during the invasion.
  • In the third game, this is the reason that certain characters end up dying in the original timeline, having sustained a grievous wound in a previous battle. Thanks to Kaguya's time powers, the characters can go back and provide some much-needed backup so that the character will survive the events and join the Resistance.
• You Are in Command Now: The first game starts like this for the three factions: Zhao Yun for Shu, Cao Pi for Wei, and Sun Ce Wu; Liu Bei and Sun Jian are imprisoned while Cao Cao is presumed dead. Samurai faction is the only one that avert this, where Nobunaga is the main protagonist and leader of his own army before forming alliance with other clans/coalition armies.

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