While your other two characters fold away, they quickly refuel their health and musou meters. The both meters refill a little too quickly, to the point where it is entirely possible to unleash a powerful musou attack with one character, flip to the next and do the same, flip to the next to attack again, and then flip back to the original character with a full musou meter ready again. This only adds to the incredibly simple and repetitive feel to the game, making what should be challenging situations easily overcome by cycling through your characters enough.
The game attempts to distract you from the tedious button mashing by providing seventy-seven playable characters. They do genuinely play differently, but with the overly repetitive gameplay makes the joy of finding new moves with new characters too dry. Your characters level up based on experience gained during battle, but the moves never really get much different from one another. The game's other light RPG elements come in the form of weapon upgrades, performed by combining similar weapons with one another to create a stronger one, with no real options or choices for you to make regarding how the weapons meld together. It is about as generic and uninventive as it sounds.
The background music is awkwardly frantic, with a flair for jagged, electro '80s arcade nonsense. The out-of-place soundtrack may be a much-needed stimulant to keep you upright during the game, but let it drone on too long and you will quickly jump to your own music, or for the mute button. The voice acting is hit-and-miss, with some moments that work well to pull you into the convoluted story, only to be thrown back into reality with cheesy dialogue and oddly misplaced trash talking mid-battle. Visually, the game looks like a throwback to the Dreamcast era, though the fluid fighting animations make up for the dated look most of the time.
Overly repetitive, simplistic games can be a good time if a friend can share the pain. Sadly, you will have to find a friend in-house to help slash through the game, as the game's only co-op support is over the same console. Live support certainly would not have saved this title, but it would have helped make the bland gameplay tolerable.
Warriors: Orochi is the very definition of shallow gaming. There is not much to like here, at least not anything that you will not get very tired of half-an-hour in.
