And let the Chromecast slideshow do its cheaper work.The 20th year anniversary of Omega Force probably wasn’t the banner year they maybe anticipated. If you want to watch a series of overexposed landscapes streaming in succession, skip this film. The visual narrative choices make the underlying story to Dynasty Warriors incomprehensible, adds unnecessary fat to a bloated two-hour runtime, and barely provide the aesthetic quality of a low-res screensaver. And then repurposed the already shot footage for the film. It’s as though he began designing a game first. Even if one affords such excuses, this is a film, and that carries a certain expectation of style and quality - both of which Dynasty Warriors lacks.Ĭhow further disrupts the line between cinema and gaming through cheap, repetitive compositions meant to mirror the game’s cutscenes. The charitable inference would say these shoddy graphics are meant to hark to earlier gameplay iterations. Likewise, the soldiers’ robotic movements, akin to barely rendered stick figures, distract from the vicious scale of the carnage. The large-scale confrontations between armies are rife with ghastly visual artifacts. With regards to the ragged visual effects, the onscreen production value barely rises to the level of The Last Airbender. But unless you’ve played one or more of the games, you’ll be totally lost. It’s why the characters are without any type of backstory: how the trio of warriors came to unite or their individual origins. Chow and screenwriter Chi-long To expect viewers to have a healthy dose of prior knowledge. Three traveling soldiers Liu Bei (Tony Yo-ning Yang), Guan Yu (Geng Han), and Zhang Fei (Justin Cheung)-drawn together by honor and loyalty to the Han dynasty-work to restore the child emperor Liu Bian to the throne following the takeover of his nefarious chancellor Dong Zhuo (Suet Lam). The script for Dynasty Warriors is tragically underwritten. But director Roy Hin Yeung Chow’s Dynasty Warriors is a two-hour slog, missing the dumb hijinks and sharp fighting precision needed for an ultra-fun adventure. And the historical lore ought to imbue the proceedings with a potent aura.

The epic world-building allows plenty of creative flexibility. For one, the over-the-top battles should equate to big-screen action sequences. Dating back to 1997, and composed of nine separate games, the hack-n-slash action franchise is a single-player tactical role-playing game that on first blush lends some potential for a cinematic rendering. Dynasty Warriors isn’t the video game-to-film adaptation you’ve been waiting for.

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