"A warrior worth a thousand men!"

Dynasty Warriors 2 was Koei's first DW for PS2, which would soon be followed by other great sequels. Some of the DW veterans still consider the difficulty and stages in DW2 as best in series. When DW2 was released in 2000, the graphics and story weren't that good but action in it was something that no one had experienced before. Perhaps that's why the game was so popular and liked by many players.

Dynasty Warriors 2 only has two different game modes, Musou Mode and Free Mode. In Musou Mode, you can choose to play as the kingdom of Wei, Shu or Wu. Each kingdom only has 3 characters at the beginning, but more characters are unlocked by completing Musou Mode with different kingdoms and characters. Musou mode is 5 stages long with all kingdoms and first two stages are the famous Yellow Turban Rebellion and Hu Lao Gate. Rest of the stages are Chang Ban, Guan Du, Chi Bi, He Fei, Wu Zhang Plains and Yi Ling (stages are different with each kingdom), so in total there are only 8 stages, but fortunetly all of them are quite big, challenging and fun to play. In Free Mode you can play the stages that you have unlocked with any character you like. Free Mode also allows you to play with the "Other" characters like Zhang Jiao and Yuan Shao, who you can't use in Musou Mode. It's also excellent for building up your characters if you get stuck in Musou Mode for example. You can raise three stats in DW2: Life, Attack and Defense. Attack and Defense ups (+1, 2, 4 or 8) are found from enemy officers and Gate Captains (they always give you Defense up). Life ups (+10) are a bit harder to find. You can only find them from jars or certain officers.

The battles and combat are quite simple in DW2. In each stage, your main goal is to defeat the enemy commander, while you have to make sure you or your own commander doesn't get killed. To ensure the safety your commander, you need to defeat hundreds of enemies. Square button is the button you're going to use a lot in this game, because it allows character to attack up to 4 times. Triangle button allows you to use Charge attacks, which can be linked with normal attacks to create even more damage to enemies:

C1 (T): Clears enemies around you.
C2 (ST): Lifts enemies up into air, giving you time to juggle them.
C3 (SST): Enemies are stunned and can't move for a while.
C4 (SSST): The most powerful Charge attack, which is an excellent crowd clearer when you are surrounded.

Then there's also a powerful Musou attack, which allows you to create damage to multiple opponents at the same time. Musou attack varies with each character and can have different effects (some can juggle or stun e.g). When your Musou bar under life bar is filled, press circle to perform Musou attack. If you hold the circle Musou Attack lasts longer. Besides normal, Charge and Musou attack, there's also a bow to use. Press R1 to aim with bow, square shoots normal arrows, triangle Charged arrows and circle Musou
arrows. If you happen to find a horse in the battlefield, you can run over
enemies and attack with the same three buttons.

DW2 also features some CG scenes, which are only seen in Musou Mode. Nothing special in them, but you can see some of the characters with better graphics at least! Music is excellent as well. Each stage has the right music and they vary from each other really much. Actually, sometimes you want to play the stage a bit longer to enjoy longer from the music!

Something that you might hate in this game really much are the annoying Bodyguards. At the beginning, you only have 2, but when your character reaches to max rank, 8 of them are bothering you really much. They can usually ruin your combos or steal your precious enemy officers. To make things worse, you can't remove them so you just have to try to play with them (unless they get killed, which is rare). You might find them useful on Hard difficulty, but you're not probably going to play with that difficulty so often, because Hard is indeed quite hard! The game also features "clone" characters. In fact, most of the characters share the exactly same moveset with others. Zhang Liao and Lu Meng for example are exactly same. They just serve different force and have different stats at the beginning. However, if you are someone who also pays attention to looks and voice, then you might find another one better.

In another words, Dynasty Warriors 2 is a game which introduced many DW fans to series. The action in game was so fun and interesting, that you easily got addicted to it. I myself played the game back in 2000 with my friend and I have been hooked to series since then. If we compare game to sequels, DW2 is lacking much of the current features (weapons and items for example), but that's the thing which makes this game so fun to play!