This is one of the better Dynasty Warriors games in my opinion. I have been playing this series since DW3. I personally felt like 3, 4 and 5 were when the series was at it's best and DW8XL feels more like it took inspiration from those. Than of DW6 and DW7 which in my opinion had major issues. DW8 had fixed what I would consider the issues I had.

In this game there are 83 playable officers, each with their own weapon, 3 Musou attacks and 2 Ex attacks (double strong attack after chaining a given amount of light attacks). Each character feels unique in their own moveset and each character has 2 special challenges they can complete on the hard difficulty or higher to unlock even more powerful versions of their weapons.

This game also has a 3rd mode, Ambition mode. Regardless of how you feel about it, this area is a significant area of the game as you get to build a camp. With enough upgrades to your camp you can enhance weapons and characters greatly. If you wanted to you could even go as far as to create Best in Slot weapons for any character and raise any character to maximum stats, a cool feature, however does require a considerable amount of playing to achieve.

The story mode is great, there are a lot of stages to play across 45 different locations. Each kingdom has it's own story mode, with 4 main kingdom stories, A Lu Bu faction story, and, Other officer stages. Each stage will highlight different characters, as you see new characters you can unlock them.

The free mode allows for any stage to be played with any character provided you have unlocked these things.

Overall I feel like this is one of the better Dynasty Warriors experiences.

This is one of the better Dynasty Warriors games in my opinion. I have been playing this series since DW3. I personally felt like 3, 4 and 5 were when the series was at it's best and DW8XL feels more like it took inspiration from those. Than of DW6 and DW7 which in my opinion had major issues. DW8 had fixed what I would consider the issues I had. In this game there are 83 playable officers, each with their own weapon, 3 Musou attacks and 2 Ex attacks (double strong attack after chaining a given amount of light attacks). Each character feels unique in their own moveset and each character has 2 special challenges they can complete on the hard difficulty or higher to unlock even more powerful versions of their weapons. This game also has a 3rd mode, Ambition mode. Regardless of how you feel about it, this area is a significant area of the game as you get to build a camp. With enough upgrades to your camp you can enhance weapons and characters greatly. If you wanted to you could even go as far as to create Best in Slot weapons for any character and raise any character to maximum stats, a cool feature, however does require a considerable amount of playing to achieve. The story mode is great, there are a lot of stages to play across 45 different locations. Each kingdom has it's own story mode, with 4 main kingdom stories, A Lu Bu faction story, and, Other officer stages. Each stage will highlight different characters, as you see new characters you can unlock them. The free mode allows for any stage to be played with any character provided you have unlocked these things. Overall I feel like this is one of the better Dynasty Warriors experiences.