Like most consumers I admit to repeatedly buying the same products. Tide detergent, America's Choice popcorn, and watermelon flavored Gatorade have been carried across my threshold more times than I can remember, but unlike Koei's Dynasty Warriors series, those items serve a purpose. Tide gets the stains out, that popcorn is pretty damn tasty, and watermelon Gatorade reenergizes me after a tough DDR workout, but there's absolutely no use for Dynasty Warriors 5 Xtreme Legends, not even with the smattering of new content. In fact, this game is just as mindless and boring as Dynasty Warriors 2 and that means only one thing: This series needs to evolve or die.

Xtreme Legends is basically aDW5 expansion disc except you don't need that game in order for it to work, and what you're basically getting are five beefy modes that amount to the same bare bones gameplay that we've all been experiencing for several years now. There's 18 brand new maps in Legend Mode, a Destiny Mode where you can create a character and take part in a series of battles, upgrading him or her over time , an Xtreme Mode where you can cooperatively destroy waves of soldiers with a friend, Challenge Mode (which contains two new courses in addition to the four DW5 ones), and finally an Edit Mode that lets you construct the ultimate warrior. It's enough content to make longtime Dynasty Warriors fans grin as wide as the Cheshire Cat, the only problem being that you have to be a fan (and maybe a bit masochistic) to want to torture yourself with this game.

Aside from the Edit Mode, everything in Xtreme Legends, regardless of how fresh it may seem, eventually leads to the same destination, the familiar place that this franchise has traveled since this series stepped from its one-on-one fighting roots and into the action adventure arena. The fog is pretty much gone but the bland gameplay remains, where you run around annihilating groups of soldiers that often times just stand around. The AI does get more aggressive but it never comes off as being intelligent. Of course, brain power has never been its strongest suit because none of these games feature a meeting of the minds. It's all about dispatching entire battalions with one super flashy special move, something that Koei hasn't been able to move past for years. In fact, the developers have spent so much time working on these brutal combos that they forgot to add a Quit function, which is something that agitated the hell out of me. Every time I pressed Start I was taken to the Options screen where I was encouraged to resume play but not to return to the main menu.