Ilaiyayaya - Twitch Giant android #4623 mows down thousands.

Stream time! I'm playing evil satanic PS1 tower defense game while taking a short break from DW4 streams to grind off-stream

www.twitch.tv/ilaiyayaya

"I'm still nowhere close to being a true gamer..." But I will be a true gamer after playing Tecmo's Deception: Invitation to Darkness!!! That's right, the only way to know which game I'll be streaming next is by reading the alt text! Good job for reading the enclosed instruction booklet!

I don't want to stream Dynasty Warriors 4 right now because I'm in the really boring part of the game where all I'm doing is mindless grinding, and I prefer doing that in super short bursts, but I do still want to stream so I feel like that's the best alternative for now.

A few months ago while I was still working through Warriors All-Stars I mentioned that I wanted to eventually stream at least 1 entry in all of the series that have crossover characters in that game, I think tomorrow I'll finally start that!

And this almost entirely comes from minor adjustments to his hitbox ranges and added effects to existing moves, none of his new attacks are particularly great, but his old attacks were already *fine* on paper, they just needed some adjusting to be good in practice, and they made those adjustments!

Easily the biggest case is Zhuge Liang, he fucking SUCKED in DW3, borderline unusable character imo I hated him so much. In DW4 he's still not amazing, but those slight adjustments were enough to make him go from the worst character in the roster to like, kinda alright I guess. HE'S VIABLE NOW!!!

Originally I was kinda disappointed by how minor the character moveset changes were in Dynasty Warriors 4 compared to DW3, but I was wrong. Most characters are barely changed, with maybe 1 new strong-attack or some stat changes, but for a few characters that alone is enough to make them way better!

I'm not sure whether to stream today or not, because on one hand I do have the free time this morning to be able to, but I'm also now in the super boring part of Dynasty Warriors 4 where all I'm doing for the next 30 hours is grinding.
Maybe now is the time to find another non-musou game to stream 🤔

Now all that's left is the few Challenge Mode leaderboards (but I may wait until 4XL to do those since Xtreme Legends adds way more Challenges), grinding character stats and weapons to max, and unlocking the level 10 weapons for everyone, then it'll be Xtreme Legends time >:)

Most guides weren't *entirely* wrong about how to unlock all of them, most often they would include unnecessary additional criteria that isn't actually required, but there were a few that I had to spend way too long attempting over and over because some guides were completely off the mark.

I do have 1 big complaint about all of the Tales stages tho, and it's not even the fault of the game itself: Why is every guide online wrong about their unlocks???? I had to reference 5 different guides because all 5 had at least 1 thing wrong about almost all of their unlock conditions it's crazy

BUT IT'S DIFFERENT! IT'S UNIQUE!! NO OTHER MISSION IN THIS GAME OR THE LAST IS LIKE THIS!!! Sure the actual stage itself isn't amazing, but it's fun enough on a first play and it's so memorable compared to all of the standard Musou Mode stages. Tales stages are neat :)

As I said before, this stage is awful on repeat playthroughs, the item you're searching for isn't randomly placed within 1 of the 99 boxes, no you have to destroy *all 99* for it to appear. It sucks, and unless you're using a map it's very possible to run out of time, severe collectathon syndrome-

The Imperial Seal is even weirder, you could theoretically win this stage without ever defeating a single enemy unit, because the stage isn't focused on fighting anyone, it's about searching for and destroying 99 boxes across the map to find an item before the enemy army does.

But what makes this battle really fun is that at the end of the stage, after both enemy commanders meet they take control of all of your troops, so you're effectively put on a timer to win before your own allies kill your commander. It's not actually hard at all to win but it's such a cool concept!

Eliminate Zhang Jiao! technically still has that basic "Defeat _" objective, but in reality you can't kill that commander until a certain point, if you do they revive infinitely. You need to survive and whittle down enemy troops until both enemy commanders meet several minutes into the fight-

Two of my favorite Tales stages are "Eliminate Zhang Jiao!" and "The Imperial Seal" because of how strange their objectives are. Honestly, actually playing both of these stages more than once sucks, especially The Imperial Seal, BUT TRUST ME THEY'RE SO FRICKING COOL THE FIRST TIME!!

Almost all battles in Dynasty Warriors consist of defeating the enemy commander, obviously getting to that point can be different for every stage so it's not as homogeneous in practice as that sounds, and a few Tales stages still retain that objective, but some get fucking *weird* and that's great!

"The Yellow Turban Rebellion" stage.

"Dong Zhuo in Ji" stage. Despite being listed as 2 separate maps, this one is just the lower portion of the previous map cropped into its own individual map.

About half of them are normal battles but with an exclusive map (although a lot of these "exclusive" maps are really just slightly cropped versions of other stages, something I think DW4 has a really bad habit of doing), but the other half are super interesting with really unique mission design.

At least the Tales stages were fun, so today's session wasn't a complete bust! Ngl, Musou Mode in 4, while better than in DW3, is still only mildly interesting, the Tales stages improve that a lot tho. There are 18 Tales stages and almost all of them are great, way better than the main stages!

I know that 4XL adds a ton of other entirely new stuff to make it worth buying on release, so I think it's kinda unnecessary to also lock old items behind the expansion. In 3 Xtreme Legends it made sense, those items were created for that expansion, but that same excuse doesn't work for 4XL 😔

Most of the rest are barely worth unlocking, which was also the case in Dynasty Warriors 3- before Xtreme Legends, 3XL added a ton of great items and none of them are here! I'm sure they're added in 4XL, but I see no reason for them to not be included in the base game, they're not new anymore!

Not all of them are bad, there's enough good ones to fill a character's kit, of course the Red Hare is just as broken as in DW3, and the Shadow Harness works as an alternative, Way of Musou and Wind Scroll are still great (although it's weird that the Wind Scroll is a rare item here, unlike in DW3)

The full item list in Dynasty Warriors 4. Ignore the unobtained item in the 2nd row, that's a common item not a rare item so getting it is entirely up to RNG.

Ok, finally I have every Tales stage and every rare item collected in Dynasty Warriors 4! Of course that doesn't include Xtreme Legends' items, but ngl, the item unlocks in this game were way too easy and boring, also very few of them are actually useful in my opinion lmao

This Trans Day of Visibility I'll not only be increasing my opacity by 28%, but also my brightness and saturation by 400%!!

For the rest of this 24 hour period you will be unable to avoid my blinding presence, run if you wish, however you will not escape my wrathful aura. Yippee!!!

There are so many unexpected 360 exclusives it's hell.
Idolm@ster... it's especially bad for that series because it's not just any random entry, it's the *first* entry which makes it so much harder to get into those games if you like playing a series in release order 😔

Ilaiyayaya - Twitch Giant android #4623 mows down thousands.

I've gotten so little Dynasty Warriors 4 grinding done over this past week... 😔 BUT TODAY I'LL MAKE UP FOR IT BY PLAYING AT LEAST *2*, THAT'S RIGHT, 2 HOURS OF DYNASTY WARRIORS 4 LIVE TO THE PUBLIC!!! Some of these Tales stages are so confusing to unlock ;-;

www.twitch.tv/ilaiyayaya

Luckily 4 does have other new side stuff to make up for it, the Tales stages in particular are really cool, easily the best addition in DW4 so far. Musou Mode in general is a lot better, swapping to a per-kingdom system instead of per-character makes it a lot more focused.

One of the repeated missions from DW3 is to defeat Xiahou Dun on Guan Yu's Escape, and this is actually one of the missions I love, however 4 adds a 2nd rare item that's basically the same objective but from Xiahou Dun's perspective. There are only 13 rare items why is 1 of them a clone mission???

I'm going through all of the rare items in Dynasty Warriors 4 now, and to be fair most of the rare item objectives in DW3 weren't amazing, but they feel even more lackluster in 4... A few are almost exactly the same as their requirements in 3, and the rest are either boring or slightly confusing.