Wow if the biggest fan boy of the series hates this,well it is beyond hope.
edit:For anybody wanting some quick impressions from reddit:
have been a life long fan of the Musou series, having played the games since I was five and have played nearly every Musou game there is. Simply put, it would be against my conscience to recommend this game to anyone. It's simply the worst Musou game there is, unlike like Dynasty Warriors 6 ,which I previously considered the worst entry in the series, this entry has little redeeming qualities or features I'd want in a future Musou game (assuming I still want to support this piece of shit of a company).
So first thing, the performance is absolutely jackshit. I have a PS4 Pro in performance mode and it still dips below 30 extremely frequently, and it's apparently even worse on the regular PS4.
The open world lacks details and looks really bad. Things look like dogshit at a distance, and environments all look considerably worse than older games but that's due to it being open world. There's a lot of shimmering and it's especially obvious when you climb onto a lookout tower and the camera pans around showing off the game's nothingness. Sometimes the terrain and building details can probably be fooled for a PS3 era game. Not only that the map is also extremely empty, and feels dead with NPCs mostly standing or running into walls. Unlike Ubisoft games or just any other open world game the filler contents aren't of considerable quality, you just go to X place and kill certain enemies.
The movement system also feels worse imo and the horse feels very floaty to control compared to older games, there is also a auto pathing system but it's just shit, often times it'll just lead you into a wall or something. Camera also feels worse for me personally but that might be a nitpick. Crafting is an important part of progression but getting the materials to do that means you'll need to actually run around the world and pick up mats that are lying on the ground and farm certain enemies that spawn in the open world.
The combat is the dumbest the series has ever had. You don't get the traditional press X number of square and chain into a special attack with triangle. Instead you perform 3 different CC moves and a character special with R1 + one of the face buttons, square attack is closer to DW6 where you press it and it chains endlessly. Essentially you just do CC and chain with square, and press triangle when prompted to perform an arkham style counter that just executes the enemy. It's very braindead and some might like it but I certainly don't.
It also doesn't help that the AI is absolutely dogshit. I played on the highest difficulty with a blank slate character and I can just get through anything by perma CCing the enemy and comboing them, and one shotting by pressing triangle when prompted, only problem is their extremely bloated health making it extremely time consuming to kill them. Special enemies that have aura can't be CCed but the AI is so bad even on the highest difficulty most of what they do when attacked is just block, you can cheese them easily by disabling their aura and chain CC them to death or just spam Musou since you can buy consumables that refill Musou meter. Soldiers have zero presence what so ever, opting to just stand still most of the time. There is a bow system but it's extremely half-assed with a terrible control scheme and inability to move while shooting. The battles really don't give me the feel of a battle tbh. You have side objectives that just lower the levels of enemies in the main objective. All objectives are essentially go here kill someone. You never really get the feel of actually fighting a battle because you can just run straight to the target and kill them. Sieges are a joke because you can just use the grappling hook to climb over anything and go for the target, making all the "different ways to tackle a battle" they advertised pointless. There are certain forced stealth sequences but they don't really work due to wonky AI and detection system, but thankfully can be cheesed with the grappling hook.
No matter what you do you never escape the Musou gameplay loop, and the open world just makes it worse. Enemies are scattered across the map at checkpoints and cities, so if you want to even enjoy mowing people down you have to endure a lot of running around and it disrupts the flow of the game a lot.
Last but not least the game is incredibly buggy. A lot of people have encountered bugs where the models in the game just break and a bunch of grey stuff protrude out of models. Officers sometimes get stuck in other models and shit like that. Some cutscenes break and doesn't work at all forcing me to just skip them. I personally also encountered a bug where I'm essentially stuck in an endless loop of reload-> objective failed->reload->objective failed.
Overall, I can't recommend this game to anyone, no matter new comers to the series or decade old veterans. This is a marvelous example of how blindly chasing the open world trend is butt fucking retarded and can prove detrimental to your game. Koei Tecmo doesn't have the budget of triple A publishers, the technical prowess, nor the manpower to not fuck up an open world game, scaling back on the scale of the game sometimes is just a so much better option. I hope Koei Tecmo die and burn in flames, they have fucked up their classic strategy IPs over the past few years, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Nobunaga's Ambitions, Uncharted Waters, Eiketsuden, and now Musou, pretty much the only thing keeping them relevant in the current age. This company is just slowly burning all the series that made it what is it now, and I urge you all to stop supporting their bullshit.