In the 30 years since Akihiro Suzuki started at Koei, he’s spent 20 of them overseeing Dynasty Warriors – progenitor of the musou genre, one of gaming’s longest-running series, and one whose every entry bar the fifth Suzuki has been involved in. It’s a success that the team could never really have anticipated – how could they, given how the series had its start in a different genre entirely.
Released on the original PlayStation back in 1997, the first Dynasty Warriors was a Soul Calibur-like one-on-one fighting game and was met with positive reviews – so much so that Omega Force, the division within Koei Tecmo that Suzuki was a part of, stuck with the genre with its next project Destrega. “Within the team we all thought it was really good, but it didn’t really sell well,” says Suzuki.
There was some doubt as the team embarked on its next project, a follow-up to Dynasty Warriors. “We went from the fighting game to Dynasty Warriors 2 for the PlayStation 2,” says Suzuki. “When we started development on the game, we actually had the intention of making a sequel to the fighting game.
“But, you know, once we got our hands on the PS2 and we saw the technical specs we figured we could probably do a lot more with this technology. And so, as a team, we decided we wanted to take the game in a different direction to harness the power of the technology. That’s how the Dynasty Warriors series as we now know it came to be – that switch from fighting game to action game was a big challenge.”
Coming in the early days of the PS2 – it was a launch release for the console’s North American release – Dynasty Warriors 2 was a showcase for what was possible in the new generation, with battlefields swarming with enemies and dense action that earned it comparisons to classics such as Golden Axe, while its liftings from 14th century novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms gave it a flavour all of its own. Suzuki was deeply involved with what would be the genesis of an entire genre of its own – and it’s a project he remains deeply fond of.