decided to call it on samurai warriors 5. there's a lot i liked about it, but i feel like it lacked that final oomph to push it over the top. the way the game gates upgrades is definitely a big factor- you deal with unimpressive maximums of potential until you trivialize everything. i don't mean the usual satisfaction of breaking the game, either. you gradually get stronger and peel the difficulty away at such a consistent pace that there's no big jump! enemy officers breaking out of air combos into a hyper armor state is a constant across all difficulties too, so the only difference comes from how many times you deal with that before they go down.
compare this to samurai warriors 4, where i could gain about 15 levels in one map with proper item usage. like age of calamity, the game is perhaps too biased towards making measured progress spread across a wide cast. unlike that game, you do eventually get overpowered, but then unlock way too many missions with no added elements to account for that. the nightmare difficulty is unlocked way too late, then fails to provide notably better rewards, too. at least they went back to having more models for the weapons, so each character had a preferred weapon tied to their look.
i finished the entire story mode, but i don't think the added focus on nobunaga and mitsuhide was especially better-written than the shorter versions we got in samurai warriors 4. like spirit of sanada, the story is simply longer, not better. nobunaga seemed to develop in his arc to defeat the imagawa, which was an improvement over it being the easy first step in his SW4 story, but his change from fool of owari to demon king still happened on a dime. mitsuhide was a little better, but having to replay many of the exact same stages as nobunaga for one or two different story scenes was a huge drag.
i don't mind the idea of starting over to give lesser characters time to shine, but you really need to nail it if you're ditching the wider context of SW4's multiple clan storylines. at least the in-engine dialogue scenes make way better use of 3D than SW4's very rigid and bland ones. they're finally better than the simpler visual novel-esque dialogue in previous musou titles, but not so much better that they'd be remiss in going back to save money.
overall, i think samurai warriors 5 is good: the new art style is great, the movesets are fun, and the new music is fantastic (the preparation music is a great example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1SpjpGK36w). but it's not the full package that usually kept me playing in other titles. it's a fine thing to dip into here and there, but i had real trouble digging into it the way i did with previous entries.
just take a look at warriors orochi 3 ultimate to see how much they could put in a game. say what you will about games being heavy on Stuff, but if there's any genre that's served by putting more Stuff into individual features (versus adding more features), it's musou, isn't it?