Dynasty Warriors Online

Dynasty Warriors Online is an MMO based off of the Dynasty Warriors games. It has the controls of number 5 as well as the movesets with a few extra added. The Japanese version and the English version have a gap in available weapons and armor, but they keep scenarios close together, a few months apart between the Japanese updating and the English updating the servers for a new scenario.

Dynasty Warriors Online tells the eternal tale of the three kingdoms of Wu, Shu, and Wei. This time it takes the perspective of a commander, one who has abilities beyond the normal Mooks. Each player makes their own commander using character customization much like the ones from the "Empires" games. Unlike those games, they can use any moveset by picking up the appropriate weapon.

Each battle works like the main games. you choose a battle and go into the field to fulfill the objective. It deviates in that you can be joined by up to 3 other friends and 4 other enemies, and that can mean a whole lot of waiting. Once you start you need to upgrade your weapon in battle. You pick up flasks, gourds filled with an unknown liquid, and upgrade mid battle, meaning you have to start over each battle.


 * AI Breaker: There are plenty of breaks in the A.I, but the most glaring one is their inability to air-recover. This is a common recovery method for getting out of combos for players, but it's lost on A.I, making them bad sparing partners.
 * Anti-Grinding: Not inherit in the the game mechanics, but the arena payout has been reduced. It used to be that arena was used to farm items quickly, but it was dropped to one to prevent this.
 * This didn't stop people for grinding anyways, so it was removed entirely. It's still on the english server for now, and no ones sure if it'll be removed or not.
 * It should also be noted that items are not the only thing people use the arena to grind. During bonus honor arena farms will tend to spike, and people will use it to get uses on their weapons.
 * And Your Reward Is Clothes: While most armor you get is from battle, specific quests will also give you armor too.
 * Alt-Itis: Common practice.
 * Annoying Arrows: To a ridiculous extent. Even the arrows shot by Xiahou Yuan and Huang Zhong barely do anything.
 * It should be noted that arrows coming from an arbalest in supply bases do a lot more damage. However, these can't technically kill you...
 * Authority Equals Asskicking: The higher up they are in the army or government the stronger they are, where the highest ranked generals are the character example of this, as they are the strongest, but not smartest, enemies on the battlefield. Just be glad they don't appear too often when not arranged.
 * Area of Effect: the 5th charge combo of weapons, with varying results. Also the cymbals are the masters of this.
 * Armour Is Useless: In general, you get a small boost from it. It's not noticable unless all your armor is made to increase a specific stat.
 * Artificial Stupidity: The A.I., and we use this term loosely, is very bad. They wait around to be hit and only attack occasionally. This is the commander (normally a player character) A.I. As said above they make horrible sparing partners and have horrible self preservation skills.
 * Bag of Spilling: Downplayed. After each battle you will lose your in battle upgrades, but nothing else. Only arena and showdown averts this by starting you up at full.
 * Battle Amongst the Flames: It is possible to set entire areas on specific maps on fire. During showdowns, you can also set fire to the enemies supply base to reduce their score.
 * Blatant Lies: Wang Tong, when he creates 3 copies of himself, all of which claim to be the real one, while he sheepishly says he isn't.
 * Blind Idiot Translation: Not as bad as most examples, but common spelling mistakes, things being said at the wrong time, and entire descriptions being incorrect are far too common.
 * Body Count Competition: The point of defeat (kill 2k or 3k enemies as a team first). Also a common judgement on capture when time runs out. Possible with your own teammates, since whoever does the best in the match gets a little more honor.
 * Boss Battle: Musou generals are arguably this. Specific enemies in quests are straighter examples.
 * Boss Banter: Generals will often have a comment over what's happening on the battlefield. They have a set conditions to say these, and change comments weather it's their side or their enemies that the even happened on.
 * Bonus Boss: Some quests have bosses you don't have to fight, but give you a better ranking if you do. Special mention go to the Nanman tribe, who may send out generals in later scenarios if you fight them.
 * Booze-Based Buff: Drinking wine will give you character full musou bar. Also, the flasks you pick up in battle are filled with an unknown liquid, possibly also playing this trope as well.
 * Cast from Hit Points: The special ability that both heals and buffs your allies, sacrifice, runs on your own HP as long as it's activated.
 * Critical Status Buff: Once you are in red your Limit Break is more powerful, and includes fire.
 * Common Character Classes: Played with. Each weapon has it's own stats for upgrading automatically, meaning that unmodded they could be compared to classes, but by no means are they limited to it.
 * Warrior: Shimitar, twin rods, Hand axe, Vision Staff.
 * Rogue (speed only): Flute, Claws, Twin swords, Pirate blade.
 * Ranger: Up for debate, as each weapon has its perks, but the steel fan is commonly used for ranged strikes, and war blade has long range attacks but its stats say it's warriors, as it is still a sword.
 * Support: Cursed deck and trident, They have automatic abilities that heal and buff your teammates. Chakrams and nunchucks also count, because they have the ability to heal teammates.
 * Nuker: Iron rod is most commonly used as this, but twin pikes and vision staff also count, because they are all used for the Limit Break Musou attack that is rather good at clearing crowds.
 * Competitive Balance: Due to the stat system, you never peg down a weapon to just one class, and the way you build your weapons can easily change it, but a few examples of unmodified weapons for each class.
 * Jack of All Stats: Iron sword, all stats, aside from muosu but that's a means to a unique attack rather than an "ability stat", have a chance to surpass each other, meaning you can use it for whatever you want.
 * Fragile Speedster: Twin Sabers. They are fast, but their focus isn't defensive, but rather more aggressive fighting.
 * Glass Cannon: Iron Rod. its focus is in attack and mousu, meaning it can deal a lot of damage done well, but its defensive stats aren't too good, meaning that against another opponent you better hope you hit first.
 * Lightning Bruiser: Twin Maces, fast, focus on HP and attack, and hit a lot. Their range is pitiful so you generally have to close a small bap in malee to hit somebody.
 * Mighty Glacier: Hand Axe. This weapon has a strong natural attack, and unless the enemy has high defense you will do noticeable damage when attacking, despite the low upgrades. It moves slow, and the attacks take up some time.
 * Stone Wall: Buckler Blade. This has high defense and life, meaning that you can take quite a few hits, but don't expect to be dealing much damage with it.
 * Squishy Wizard: Cursed Deck. The highest stat boost, attack, is lower than a medium boost for most, but despite that this weapon can use plenty of abilities in battle, from fire to range to healing allies at the cost of more of your own power, and is more of a utility rather than a weapon.
 * Continuing Is Painful: Flasks, the in battle upgrade, can be made to be lost. This means you have to work on grinding again and that can take up a good chucnk of time, or it can be quick and painless depending on your setup.
 * Death Is a Slap on The Wrist: It's possible (and constantly made) during melee's to lose nothing, or almost nothing, upon death in terms of flasks. This can randomly happen during campaigns as well, possibly altering any strategy you could have.
 * Cutscene Power to the Max: As expected of dynasty warriors. About the only accurate thing from the opening cutscene is that you fight people. And sometimes Lu Bu.
 * Counter Attack: The musou block not only stops an attack, it can stun him (or use one of your elements on him).
 * Damage Sponge Boss: Generals have ungodly health that adds to their difficulty. It's difficult to find an unmodded weapon that can take them down quickly.
 * Decapitated Army: Subverted. If you manage to defeat a commanding officer, your allied troops receive a boost in stats for the rest of the match.
 * Easy Levels, Hard Bosses: Random troops and sometimes other players are simple enough. While players my stimulate this, nothing quite prepares you for taking out a bunch of mooks and having an enemy that can take more than 3 hits and doesn't flinch like normal.
 * Elaborate Equals Effective: Natch. There is not one single weapon that goes from fancy to plain the stronger the version is. Also adding an element, that makes some charge attacks stronger, changes the color. But there are a few subversions. The LT's clothes stay the same the whole time, even as they level up, and upgraded items just get a background update rather than changing. Also armor is a slight inversion, in order to dye it, and thus make it appear elaborate, it has to be a lower level to improve the chance of doing that.
 * Enemy Mine: If two major factions have few players, they may be allied against another faction.
 * Experience Points: It's called honor here, and it only increases your rank, not stats. (Although your rank determines what tier weapons and gear you can get, so in a way, it still kinda does increase stats, just not directly.)
 * Field Power Effect: The current weather can affect elemental orbs. For example, when it's raining or snowing, fire is next to useless, but electricity and wind (and ice when it's snowing) is more powerful.
 * Final Battle: Every scenario ends with a final campaign among all of the other factions (this in itself is handled like a tournament. For example, Sun Quan vs. Liu Bei, winner fighting Cao Cao). Whoever wins this ultimately unites all of China. Even if they only have one city at the time.
 * Flunky Boss: The generals have 4 guards with them, all of them are Boss in Mooks Clothing enemies because they look normal but also have flinch resistance and deal lethal damage, just not as much as the boss.
 * Forced Tutorial: The first few quests you do are tutorials. It's not very well done, as it makes sure that you know how to attack with a basic attack. Then it makes sure you know how to use a charge attack. Then a 2nd charge. Then a 3rd charge. Then a fourth charge. Even if you've managed to actually kill troops before this point. Thankfully, it stops there, and it teaches you musou during a fight, but the time it takes to teach you the attacks? 2 MINUTES!!! What's worse, if you do well enough, you skip the other tutorials. Ya know, the stuff that teaches you the stuff exclusive to the online version. Including flasking, which is necessary to win any match against actual opponents.
 * Fridge Logic: It's possible to play chronicle quests, stories about what happened so far in the three kingdoms, before the actual event happened.
 * Friendly Fireproof: Played straight aside from, well, a certain fire attack. Bombs, a charge attack that shows up on a few weapons, can hurt your allies if they are in the blast radius. They can't K.O. so the last hit has to be more direct, and there are no attacks other than bombs that do this making it impossible to finish off your own teammate.
 * Go-Karting with Bowser: The peach garden can be accessed by anyone at any time. It's not only the only way to meet everyone in the game (without alliances or alt accounts), but it also has the Kun Lun mountains, where you can complete challenges with anyone.
 * Grievous Harm with a Body: Any attack that throws enemies will make them knock into other enemies. There isn't any damage in this but it does knock them down. This is the only way to knock down very powerful officers, such as Dian Wei, Huang Gai, Guan Yu, and LU BU!!!
 * Heel Face Turn: Happens in certain quests. The opposite also happens from time to time.
 * Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: We have Novice, Veteran, Musou, Elite. What difficulties are they? low rank, medium rank, free for all, upper tier respectively. Musou much is elite in the english server, since there isn't an elite setting there.
 * Info Dump: Given that there isn't much story when you go in fight, most narrative is delivered like this. You'll just get a large chunk of exposition and then go around doing everything else.
 * Instrument of Murder: The flue and cymbals are just as deadly as blade weapons, even if the flute is frilly.
 * Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Well, you can jump over them. The computer, on the other hand...
 * Large Ham: a lot of shouts can come off as very hammy. Some of them even more so the voices, which are undubbed, seem to be a lot longer than the translated text.
 * Level Up At Intimacy 5: The more you interact with your LT, by bringing it to battle and feeding it, the more skills it builds up. These skills are released when it uses a Limit Break and can tactically affect both you and the enemy, ranging from useless skills that don't seem to do anything to something that is most useful when your lt is lined up to use the limit break.
 * Luck-Based Mission: There's almost a guarantee that you will avoid doing a specific mission or two because getting an S rank means not being screwed by the Random Number God. Rescue the Apprentice and The Prisoner and the Goods are large offenders.
 * Luck Stat: Some of the communal ability work as this, but distribution is the most notable, as it supposedly affects the chance to get quality items from the battles.
 * Man On Fire: The fire orb lets you set things on fire. So does true Musou.
 * Multiple Endings: Along with the obvious "whatever faction wins in the end", there are also endings for every general in the game that you obtain by working for them when the scenario ends and having at least 5000 honor.
 * Nerf: Compared to it's original stats in Dynasty Warriors 5, the cursed deck gets one hell of a downgrade. This is a good thing.
 * Should be noted that bombs, the iron rod's jump charge and moon emblem, used to have musou armor breaking properties, meaning that you could make generals fly, allowing for juggling. They later patched this out, and it's now just a normal charge attack. One problem that remains is that it can still damage teammates.
 * Mounts also got nerfed really badly. So much that they had to be buffed again to be useful.
 * The cursed deck was nerfed so badly that it had to be rebuffed to get more people to use it.
 * Mirror Boss: Somewhat, generals are the basis for the movesets, so they can have the exact same attacks that you do, with possible variation. This means that they can use the entire moveset.
 * New Game+: A variation. Each time a new scenario begins, you are back at Guard with everything from the old scenario, meaning you have to rank up to use any weapon above level 2. The bonus of new game plus is that no only do all quests reset, aside from the intro, and you can get that faction's capes as you complete promotion quests. You also receive the high quality rewards from the promotions.
 * Also counts as Restart At Level One because, for some reason, you've forgotten how to used that level 3+ weapon you've been using to get your rank.
 * Sometimes makes sense when the scenario takes place earlier than the last one did...but that opens completely different questions there...
 * No Export for You: It took Koei FIVE YEARS for them to decide releasing one for the west was a good idea.
 * Noob Quest: The first couple quests when you first log into the game. No matter what, you have to do the first one, but the rest can easily be skipped by anyone who's played a Dynasty warriors game before.
 * Also, pretty much any quest with an E ranking in difficulty.
 * Noob Bridge: Somewhat. It's a bridge for anybody already aware of the mechanics of dynasty warriors, MMOs, or both. Because of the unique level and stat system, some people can easily be overtaken in a real match because they don't know how to get better stats. What's the difference?  Anybody who can beat the opening mission can miss out on this fact easily if they don't talk to other players, and most likely will if they don't read the instructions in games because they expect to learn this in game.
 * Oh Crap: Run into an enemy musou general? What's that? You're unflasked? Well, ya better hope you're faster than him, cause otherwise you won't come back in one piece. Hell, they pretty much captured it in the fricken background music.
 * Palette Swap: Random mooks change depending on their faction, and there are different colors for armor and weapons.
 * Pimped-Out Cape: You get capes as you promote, and they get more and more flashy as you get them.
 * Playboy Bunny: One of the armor sets for females. No, seriously. (Okay, to be fair, it isn't nearly as revealing)
 * Purely Aesthetic Gender: Seemingly subverted, but pretty much played straight. Both genders can use any weapon, and the armor sets, while they look different, generally have a counterpart for each gender, and that's arguing that armor has a use.
 * Random Effect Spell: The flute and war scythe, the latter not yet released in English, have the special "fate" that replaces ALL specials on the field when used. It's random and you won't know until you use it. during a regular match it will swap all weapons around, so when they use the special it will be the same as another weapon on the field, but during a solo mission it will take from ALL abilities released.
 * Reason You Suck Speech: If you disconnect it will say " has shown cowardice by running away by disconnecting." Even if it's natural, but so people D/C to avoid a blemish on their record.
 * Repeatable Quest: Almost all of them. Which isn't a bad thing, since it's otherwise impossible to max domestic stats.
 * Revenue Enhancing Devices: It uses this to skid over Allegedly Free Game. You can do anything you want without paying real in game cash, but more inventory space, the ability to trade, furniture, and speeding up the process of tempering a weapon (allowing it to upgrade more in battle) then you need to pay real money. But YMMV on how much you need to pay real money.
 * Rummage Sale Reject: There is some...interesting...armor in this game.
 * Scarf of Asskicking: There a couple of capes that do indeed look like a scarf. These can generally only be gained at high ranks.
 * Self-Imposed Challenge: You will not see anybody doing this during an actual battle, but during mocks with friends they may use these because the competitive edge is cut off. A few include a "no musou", "no items", "Combo match" in that you can get all the combo upgraded but you can't improve any of your stats during the battle, making the battles much longer and more challenging.
 * Spin Attack: There are plenty of examples, but one mention goes to the battle axe. The preferred combo finisher is a spin attack, but the jump charge has the holder imitating a helicopter by spinning with the axe held out.
 * Sheathe Your Sword / Skippable Boss: Just because a general appears doesn't mean you have to fight it. Unless that is your objective then you can still win just by turning an running, and given how powerful they are it's a very good idea to do just that. Given the avoidably of them, all you have to do is run near another group of NPCs that are enemy to the general, it might be very easy to get away.
 * Schmuck Bait: Both part of the game and player bait.
 * Similar to the main games, "lu bu has appeared", but by the man himself making the announcement, might make some people just run over to where they saw he was to get a piece of the "legendary warrior". Sometimes lesser officers may appear like this even if Lu Bu had already given you a hard lesson. "Dao Qiao has appeared." Guess what, only slightly less difficult.
 * Players can sometimes do this as well, such as leading another player into an ambush by sending a weaker character to bait them, or if they have their own general there they might lead the enemy to them.
 * Stat Sticks: Erm... kinda hard to say what this game does with the trope. It might be downplayed, it might be exaggerated, it might be simply playing with a trope. all of your stats, as well as your moveset, are tied to the weapon you use, barring the bonuses from armor and items which are much lower than an upgraded weapon can give. There are a few weapons who play this straight, and the weapons are only used for their stats, their moveset being only a second thought. Weapons, through the in game weapons modding, can also be turned into stat sticks.
 * Stylish Protection Gear: You can change the color of your gear to specific styles.
 * Tactical Suicide Boss: While it wouldn't make them invincible, if the mages in troublesome mages weren't so happy to tell you their rank, their bosses wouldn't be able to resurrect them, making the player spend more time guessing and possibly outlasting the time limit.
 * Take a Third Option: In one of the chronicles, where you play out known scenario from the three kingdoms, one cover Sun Ce's death. In the book it was an illusion cast on Sun Ce that caused him to see things, but in a few games they go with Sun Ce's death being because of an assassination by his retainers. In the chronicle, it's played out that both were the cause.
 * The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: The computer has no problem teleporting over mountains and rivers. Except during treasure. Doesn't stop em from trying.
 * The End: What makes this game interesting is that it's divided into scenario's, each of which last for a limited amount of time (roughly 9 months in real time).
 * Title Drop: Kill 1000 enemies total, mooks and other players and generals all count, and at the very least your partner will say it. If your general is there they will also make note. One of the default sayings in battle is also that.
 * Too Dumb to Live: Captain Yuan of the Smuggling ring. No bonus points for guessing what he does.
 * The Undead: Present in some of the quests, which is very odd for a DW game.
 * Video Game Weapon Stats:
 * Attack: Determines how much damage you do.
 * Damage: determines how much damage you do.
 * Confused? Attack is damage vs. organics, so other people and animals. Damage is against constructions and buildings. Also, aside from a single enemy type, damage is only affect by direct attacks, where are enemies are affected by all attacks.
 * Defense: decreases damage received.
 * Life: Another form of defense. Increases your life bar. Higher life also extends your critical zone.
 * Musou: Recharge rate/Ammo Capacity. Gives you a longer musou bar, allowing you to Limit Break for longer. Musou bar recharges faster the bigger it is.
 * Seeing as all stats are dependent on the weapon, speed, as in your foot speed, and jumping ability also count. Those more fall under weight.
 * Speed
 * "Wake-Up Call" Boss: Arguably, every musou general. Eventually, any that have better hyper armor. Some bosses in quests also apply.
 * Warrior Poet: The name for a title. It has little to do with actual warriors who write poems.