Would you recommend it to someone who's never played a Dynasty Warriors game before?

Quite frankly, Dynasty Warriors tends to recycle their stories, so it's better to just play one, and be done. That being said, HW was a pretty unique experience. Short-ish story, but playable character diversity (something Zelda games never do) was definitely one of the things that made it interesting. There's also a challenge mode you can play to unlock new weapons and stuff. Co-op multiplayer is also pretty fun, and no need to share screens like in MK8 either since you can have one player's display on the game pad and the other on the TV screen.

All characters have their own unique fighting styles, so it is pretty different from standard Dynasty Warriors in that aspect as well. Sheik with her harp is one really good example of this, since certain combo finishes with Y basically attune her to an element (BY will attune her with water, BBY with fire, BBBY with wind, etc.) and then pressing just Y will play one of the warp songs from OoT, depending on which element she has ready. BBY and then Y will make her play the Bolero of Fire, which causes an explosion. No attuning just makes her play random harp notes, which does a little damage, but not much.

tl;dr I would definitely recommend it, and I would get it myself if I had a Wii U. Until then, I'm pretty much just co-oping through the story with friends whenever I'm with them.

Thank you, then I'll go check it out if I get the chance

It's the ultimate Zelda fan-service. It's also a nice appetizer for Super Smash Bros. 3DS on Friday. I'm gonna spend my entire week-end on it. <3

So much referencing to the past games... and Lana. Fanservice at its finest.