I think I'm starting to remember why I found Samurai Warriors and DW5 so fun a few decades ago, because while Sanada Maru has it's fair share of problems like
>Exploration maps and the exploration tasks
>The weapon upgrade shop opening up grinding rather than having multiple weapon drops with various weapon mods, thus leading to either needing to grind gold or Iron Sand and gold to up attack/speed/etc.
>A metric asston of reused assets in the exploration maps and the castle towns
>No siege battles(as in no actually storming the castle)
>Completely glossing over big shit like Oda's assassination, multiple characters dying through illness without fanfare(With nothing but a literal "Dude died a week later" line to send them off) or fucking Okehazama
>Sweeping characters like Kotaro Fuma, Tadakatsu Honda and Naomasa li under the rug for the last few chapters without any closure for them
>Chapters 9 and 11, in which no actual battles occur and all that happens is the game establishes Yukimura Sanada as a pussywhipped faggot who has nothing better to do than dote on some cold bitch who eventually ruins everything and also a fair amount of exploration map backtracking for nothing
It also was a blast from the past and it had a lot of things I wanted from SW/DW back then.
>That hyper attack mechanic
>All those characters with excellent movesets including my old favorites Hanzo and Tadakatsu and making some like Saika(the rifleman mercenary dude) really fun to play, outside of say Chacha, Katsuyori Takaeda, Hideyoshi and Mitsunari Ishida everyone played really good
>Mighty attacks giving a bit of risk reward for attacking with slow windup stun moves or perfect blocking
>Mechanics like shadow dodge and charge giving some sick combo potential and actually giving some form of variety to fighting beefed up officers on the highest difficulty
>Masayuki Sanada and Sasuke in particular were absurdly fun to play as new characters, and Masayuki while being a clear as day mary sue was a great character who carried the story
>Those last few chapters with that one music track playing
>that entire 100/10 soundtrack
I want to get back into musou. All I played were Samurai Warriors(normal and XL, loved everything about that game), Dynasty Warriors 5 XL(Loved a lot about that game, especially the dynasty and extreme modes) and Dynasty Warriors 8(Was pretty divded on it, I hated how everyone could use every weapon thus not really differentiating every character that much, also ambition mode was a joke and outside of being flashier I didn't feel like it added much to what I liked about DW5, without even having Xtreme/Dynasty modes to boot). Is Samurai Warriors 4/4-II any good? Orochi, All Stars, any of the anime licensed ones?
What makes these game and gameplay style so appealing? I had the same thing with some of the later party Ys games, where they were clearly inferior than the previous titles but they were still inexplicably so fun to play despite a flood of problems.