The Dynasty Warriors gameplay can be boring on in-home consoles, but on a portable system, it's perfect.
Nothing is more satisfying than wiping out fifteen soldiers at once with one big combo. The feeling of entering an area to reinforce my teammates, or having a friendly General enter the area to help me out when things look grim somehow really makes the gameplay more fun.
Though fighting foot soldiers consists entirely of pressing the attack button over and over, watching in glee as they go flying (REALLY fun for some reason), enemy Generals, officers, captains and even flame-shooting tank-like juggernauts can be randomly challenging (depending on the personal strength of the enemy), changing the pace from slaughtering tons of enemies at once to duking it out with just one in a tough fight, requiring a lot more skill than just pressing the attack button.
These challenging enemies, thrown in randomly with the easy enemies, give you clean transitions from easy to hard so you don't get bored by the satisfyingly easy, or frustrated by the annoyingly hard.
The graphics are great, with plenty of enemies and allies being on the screen at once without any loss in the framerate. Enemies fade out to save memory, but it somehow never gets annoying, because the only enemies that fade out are the ones that are of no danger to the player. Important enemies- that is, enemies that are a threat to the player- always appear, so there's never any weird invisible attackers or annoying surprises.
One weird thing about the graphics is that they cut off 1/4th (maybe even 1/3rd) of the screen. It was probably to save memory, but it seems kind of unnecessary. They fixed that in the game's pseudo-sequel, Samurai Warriors: State of War. This cut-off doesn't put too much of a damper on the gameplay.
The limited camera view can make it really difficult to spot enemies, as it's pretty much limited to a close-up view of the player's character, with one side being fully visible and the other side being completely unseeable. It also angles downward, making it hard to see what's ahead of the player uphill.
Luckily, though visibility is low, the player can just swing violently in directions he can't see if he fears he might get attacked from that side.
The storyline is pretty much non-existant. A few paragraphs describe the situation, with absolutely no character dialogue. In-game, there's no spoken dialogue of any kind (except enemies shouting when they get hit), though captions will appear in the bottom left of the player's character's leaders or allied Generals saying, "Nice job!" when he gets enough KOs.
Though the sound effects are decent, and the game stays faithful to the inappropriate rock/metal music the other Dynasty Warriors games live by, having your volume up doesn't feel like a necessity without the spoken dialogue you'd hear in the console games.
There's no multiplayer at all, so the game is strictly limited to the Musou mode (storyline, if you'd call it that much), or the "free battle" mode, which is just Musou mode's levels, playable on a whim after they're beaten in Musou mode.
As a portable game, Dynasty Warriors is perfect, because you can put it down at any time and just start it up in the same place you left off, giving you a fresh start so you're ready to slap some more enemies around with the same button over and over, unlike on the Playstation 2 where one level can last at least an hour, and you have to sit in the same place for a long period of time to play the game, making the gameplay very repetitive.
Dynasty Warriors is a must-own for action lovers that get a kick out of sending huge amounts of enemies flying with great and satisfying ease. I didn't like the PS2 Dynasty Warriors very much at all, but on the PSP, I couldn't put it down for too long before I was compelled to play it again.