[Review] Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires for Switch & PS Review

You can recruit officers in 11 scenarios (though they're cut due to a 10-chapter limit) and 25 battle maps to fight alongside you as allies. If they're family members, you have a very high chance of poaching them from enemy factions. Sometimes, unaligned officers cause rebellions, which can happen in your allied territories or enemy ones. If your castle's defense is depleted, it will fall, so it's good to defend if you can. NPC factions only chip away a certain amount of defense when they attack, but their castles will still fall if their defense reaches 0. Whether it's historically accurate or not, each faction has allies, and enemy nations might even request alliances first. Some officers have unique friendly or hostile dialogue, triggering special lines when they meet. The difficulty levels are Heaven, Easy, Normal, Hard, and Extreme. Heaven to Normal are manageable, but Hard starts to get tough, and Extreme is the highest difficulty because enemy generals dodge your techniques by rolling. There's also a marriage system where children inherit their parents' weapons.