Dynasty Warriors Training Video
So, you're a generic who wants to be a playable character in Dynasty Warriors? If so, fear not! For the DWTV is here to help you with all you need to be a (not necessarily loved) good (to Koei's standards) playable character! Oneshot.
Hi there! My name is Ace, and I'm a director of Koei, the creator of the Dynasty Warriors series, which is the game series you're in. You may have or have not known me before, but that is irrelevant.
So, I heard you're a generic who wants to be a playable character after being stuck in the generic limbo for so long. And well, it's not hard to see why. After all, a lot of you generics were historically-relevant figures who made large impacts on the Three Kingdoms era, but we kept ignoring you anyway and preferred more and more historically-irrelevant Shu adds to pander to our Shu fanbase so that we can obtain more money!
But that's beside the point. After all, no matter whether they're from Shu, Wu, Wei, Jin, or even Other, we all make playable characters the same way. Though admittedly we spend more time on the Shu characters because BENEVOLENCE! Hey, the amount of time spent on a character doesn't automatically indicate how good or bad that character is, so you Shu-haters shouldn't be mad! Okay, right onto the point!
First of all, is your appearance. Right now, you're only wearing some boring brownish armor/robes, along with the most stereotypical Asian-looking face ever (not meant to be racist). Well, time to fix that shit up!
Firstly, your clothes. As you've seen already, your status as a playable character needs to be reflected in your clothes. The layers, patterns, the shapes and the trimmings! And it doesn't have to be 'historically-accurate' either. Pfft, screw that! As long as they look somewhat Chinese and you have way too much time on your hands, you're good to go! The more complicated and pointless they are, as well as more screams of frustration heard from fanartists attempting to draw you, the better!
Now that you get your very own intricate-and-fancy-but-pointless-and-highly-inaccurate-historically playable costume, the next thing to fix is your face! Yeah, you think you're gonna attract any fans with a face like that? Fuck no.
First, we're gonna check your status first. Are you a ruler? A warrior? A strategist? Your historical personality? What notable thing you did? You see, all of this data is indeed necessary so that we can get to determine whether you're gonna be a pretty boy or not.
Why yes indeed, being a pretty boy is a DEAD SERIOUS business in this world. After all, since the majority of our fanbase is composed of horny fangirls who picked the game simply because of seeing Zhao Yun's pretty face on the cover despite having no slightest idea about Chinese history whatsoever. Your face is the judge of whether you deserve the fan's love or not. If you were historically accomplished but has no pretty face to go with it, you're expected to hit the absolute rock-bottom of the next popularity poll. But with a handsome face, you can immediately steal all the fangirls' hearts no matter whether you actually did jack shit historically or not.
But of course, this isn't always the case, since some of the non-pretty boy characters are actually quite popular among the fans, thanks to the next important factor: personality.
You see, here at Koei, personality has always been a tricky thing for us to do. For the most part, we're just borrowing from history for a character's personality, but since historically a lot of the characters' personalities were alike anyway, we sometimes run into trouble. But! Whenever that happens, we've got just the right solution for that!
Why, just take one word that fits the character's image the most (read: the word we get by drawing straws), and make that into the character's entire personality! Yeah, no need to add more depth or complexity into it, that'll surely set that one character apart from the others and make him unique!
But of course, there are times, very few and rare times where we got showered by Kongming's wisdom and actually put some effort into a character's personality beyond a single word. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. More often the latter, which is why we tend to stick to the first method.
Still, there are times when we make the characters' personalities too diverse, and then we remembered that we should give a kingdom a certain single word as their entire identity! Which means that if you're in Shu, you're expected to say BENEVOLENCE! With Wei, AMBITION!, and Wu, FAMILY!
And speaking of Wei, I gotta say that if you're a Wei generic about to be made into a playable character, you're lucky! No, seriously! Since Wei has been given such negative image in popular culture nowadays, we are here to bring justice into Wei once again by trying to make them into sympathetic anti-heroic figures! Sure, we still give more attention to Shu and still trying to hammer into your heads that they're just THE BEST kingdom around in order to not enrage the fanbase that gives us most money, but the thing is that now both Shu AND Wei are good guys! Ain't that good? Haha! Eh, Wu? What's that?
Ahem. Now that we got those two out of the way, onto your playstyle. You remember those rusty, boring old swords, spears, fans, and knives you used to use? Well, time to say bye-bye to them, since here, EVERYTHING you can imagine can be your weapon! Once again, don't even bother with historical accuracy! If it can be used as a weapon, no matter how ridiculous, there's a potential you will use it by the time the next game rolls around!
Then there's magic. At this point you might be confused brainless at the thought of MAGIC, but worry not! Here, once someone is a playable, they use magic of any sorts of crazy and fantastic! Fire, water, lightning, wind, and even earth! And not just elemental either! Shadow clones, teleportation, super speed, or even telekinesis, anything you want! Again, don't even bother figuring out the 'rules' to this magic! Remember the rule number one in the DW-verse: there are no rules.
Now, onto your role in the story. You see, here at Koei we prioritize the fans' demands the most. Meaning that if one character isn't well-liked enough, we're gonna try finding any way to reduce that characters' screentime as much as possible to replace them with a far more well-liked one, again, ignoring the historical basis! We're only here to satisfy the watery-mouthed fangirls who only want to see their favorite characters being AWESOME! Oh, and god help you if you're in Other.
Now, up until this point, I've always assumed that you're a male generic, since there are no female generics. But, if you, by some miracle, ARE a currently unplayable female, well now we're going to explain how we make our female character!
'Huh, there's a difference?!', you must be thinking. This might be a little sexist, but I thought you've already figured that out from the fact that there are no female generics in the series anyway. Still, knowing that we tend to not care about the historical accuracy at all, we still want to make up for it by adhering to one certain value at the time: misogyny.
Why yes, you heard that right! After all, it does serve a purpose of creating more authenticity, knowing the blatant inaccuracies we've already made so far, anyway. And it's good enough we actually include female playable characters who didn't even fight historically! But enough useless chitchat, let's jump straight to the topic!
As you can notice, we create a lot of diversity among our male characters. A varying range of faces and personalities. However, we can't do the same thing with women! No! We tend to divide the females' appearance into three categories: big-breasted waifu, moe loli waifu, and actually interesting females.
When creating their designs, we tend to make them show as much sex appeal as possible, no matter how impractical they might be. After all, we pretty much also treats our males as eye candy for our female audience anyway, so it'd be sexist to not do the same to the females now, wouldn't it? Sure, there are times when we create modest outfits, but most of the times it doesn't work. So, slutty costumes and boobies for the win!
Since most of the females here were pretty much spouses or daughters to important figures historically, we too also make it as a central theme of their personality! Sure, sometimes we add some semblance of depth, but they still essentially live for their husbands and fathers! Who cares about independence for females!
And, good luck trying to find any recognition if you're female. Yeah, it's cool and all when you tear through those peons, but you obviously can't have proper roles in the progress of things! 'Tis a man's world!
Ah, yup, I believe that covered all the important things you need to know if you want to become a playable character. What, you wanna be a playable character now? Well, too bad. We still got a lot of thing to do (read: adding more pointless characters while trying to find some way for the fans to love them somehow), so better be patient. Nevertheless, I'm glad to have this moment with you. Wish you luck to be playable someday, generic.
static
Generic: ….
Another Generic: …so?
Generic: ….how long is the next battle gonna start?
Another Generic: Oh, eager already? You're not a playable yet, and-
Generic: Not that. It's just….
Another Generic: ?
Generic: …..come to think of it….I might just want to be killed by a playable for 255362th time rather than becoming one….
Another Generic: Count on me for it.
The End
Yowza! What's up guys? Okay, so I'm sorry for not uploading anything yesterday. Basically I'd already typed this halfway through yesterday, but I went out for a lot of shopping and thus hella tired and not having enough time to finish this. Nevertheless, here it is!
Also, please do note that all of the stuff I typed here is SATIRE. It's just my own, twisted view on Koei's design choices on their characters, so please don't take any stuff I wrote here seriously. As if you couldn't tell from the way I write it, I actually HATE it, and this fic was made to mock some of their more…questionable decisions.
Sincerely, please leave a review and have a good day!