Checked
Jim Sterling's review (only one I do for musou) out of curiosity, and this was the biggest negative section he had on it:
He ended up giving the game a six. But
PSP offerings were superior to the 3DS game? Sheesh. I'm curious how they manage Hyrule Warriors. DW8 PSV at least has some ugly as sin environments and legitimately begins to chug and drop frames when you engage large amounts of enemies
The environments being bland is mostly a game design issue. Most stages in Chronicles 1 came straight from SW3, and I played both and they were actually rather close to the original. Some lower quality textures, but that's it.
Now, the character models themselves were significantly worse though, and the enemies were much more sparse. However, it should be noted that turning off 3d increased the amount of enemies (still very small) and for the VN-like segments they had much more higher quality models - even better than the ones used in SW3 itself.
Anyway, I think his complaint about the objectives is really misguided, IMO. SWC is a heavily objective focused game. They exploited the fact that you control multiple characters in different points of the battlefield, and also noticed that the number of enemies was low for a musou game, and clearly designed the stages and goals around that. High morale gives the enemies, in their territory, super armor, increased hp and attack, and the only way to lower that is through accomplishing those objectives (differently from SW4 where you just need to knock down some flags). SWC absolutely isn't a game where you can just ignore the objectives and mash to victory.