This is the first time I’ve played a 4x game, so this post will be less “is this a good game?” and more “will you like the genre in the first place?” After all, if you’ve enjoyed other 4x games in the past, chances are, you’ll like this game, too.

For those of you who haven’t played a 4x game, it’s basically a cross between a simulation/management game and a Real Time Strategy/Turn-based Tactics game (for this game specifically, the overworld is turn based and the battles are in real time (I specify that since I heard the Civilization series is the opposite)). I’ve never been a big fan of simulation/management games, but I’ve enjoyed RTSs and Tactics games in the past, which is why I thought I’d check out a 4x game. The overworld is the simulation/management part of the game: you have a certain number of provinces under your control, and you have to build various structures (or just garrison troops there) to keep the citizens from rioting. You can also open up diplomatic relations with other clans (whether or not they accept your proposal is another matter). This is also where you recruit and move troops to defend your provinces or invade and capture other provinces (to capture a province, you just have to assault the castle town). You can also recruit agents, who can be used to take out other agents or do one other thing specific to the agent’s type (ninjas can sabotage, metsukes can bribe, monks can calm religious unrest, etc.) When one of your divisions encounters enemy troops, the game transitions into a battle, where you have to micromanage your troops to defeat the enemy…or you could just click the “auto-resolve battle” button if you don’t feel like battling (which, as the game goes on, you won’t). When you have nothing else to do, you end your turn manually, at which point all the other clans make their moves, and the game progresses by one season.

The first thing you’ll notice when you boot the game is its loading time. You have to wait for it to boot, then it shows a splash image containing the title and copyright info, at which point you’ll have to wait for the title screen to load (which takes almost a minute). After that, it’s time to load the campaign map, which can take around 10 seconds, and every time you get into a battle, it has to load the battle arena, which can take another 10 seconds (and whether you win or lose, once the battle ends, it has to reload the campaign map). This isn’t a deal-breaker, but it’s really annoying (especially that minute of loading at the beginning just to load the title screen!).

Moving on: something you should know going in (and this is one of my major complaints) is that the tutorial is garbage. It barely teaches you the controls, much less the basics of the game. I’m not asking for Advance Wars level of detail in the tutorials (although that would be nice), but at least let me know what melee units are effective against what other melee units. I beat the game and I’m still not sure how to use half of what’s in it. What really got on my nerves were the “advanced” tutorials, where it just said “here’s a bunch of new units you’ve never seen before, now you’re on your own LOL BYE.” I’m still not sure how to beat the advanced land tutorial (the one where you have to capture the fortress), and when I first started the game, I tried for, like, two hours before finally giving up and just hoping that I didn’t have to know whatever the game was failing to teach me (I didn’t). In fact, that’s why I chose to play as the Hylians Hojo clan: they had a passive bonus for siege weapons, presumably making it easier to capture forts.

I think I know why the devs didn’t put much effort into the tutorials: the player is expected to begin a new game and figure things out through trial and error. You see, as you play the game, pretty much every “new” thing you encounter will cause a dialogue box to pop up with a narrator telling you what the thing does. Plus, these tooltips pop up again randomly during loading screens, which is something I’ve never understood; if the player already knows it, then it does nothing to alleviate the wait, and if the player doesn’t know it, there are better ways to teach it to the player.

On top of tutorials, loading screens have a chance to display quotes from historical figures. As you play the game, you’ll see quotes from The Art of War, Maxims from Hagakure, and various poems and proverbs. The one that really stuck in my head was “the reverse side also has a reverse side,” mainly because that sounds less like a proverb and more like a smart ass. After all, the reverse side of the reverse side is the front side, which is the side that’s getting all the attention and consideration in the first place. Saying that the front side needs more attention is just foolish, and if people refer to the front side as the reverse side, they’re just being idiots (and if there are more than two sides, the proverb is just poorly worded).

Anyway, on to the game-play: no matter which clan you pick, you start off with a province or two, as well as a few army units. The game has fog of war, so you can’t see much past your own borders. You also start off at war, with your soldiers in range of enemy soldiers, and you have to fend off the soldiers as your first battle. After this war is settled, you’ll be at peace for a few years, giving you some time to devote funds to buildings (or building up your army), until another clan randomly decides to declare war on you (or the unlikely event you declare war on another clan). Once you get into your second or third war, you’ll realize that enemy clans implement the same strategy: build up a large army or two, and invade other provinces while leaving captured provinces undefended. You’ll also realize that there’s a clear way to counter this strategy: garrison your own troops in a castle town, route the large invading armies when they come (even if you have less units, you still have an advantage since a few soldiers get killed just by climbing the walls), and capture the now defenseless provinces afterward. What’s especially repetitive is that the exact same forts, complete with their exact same natural surroundings, get reused, so you’ll only see the same few forts during your bid to take over 25+ provinces. Kyoto’s fort might be unique, but by that point, I was tired of fighting essentially the same battles over and over, so I just used the auto-resolve battle button to take that province. Also, I suspect that the auto-resove battle button completely ignores the bonuses that forts provide, meaning that as long as you outnumber the opponent, you can take their base with an auto-resolve. In other words, despite all the different unit types and buildings and agents and diplomacies, there’s really only one winning strategy, and it doesn’t involve knowing any of that.

I should also point out that, even though this is a combination of simulation and strategy games, it’s a simulation first and a strategy game second. I already mentioned how the game expects you to figure things out as you play the campaign through trial and error, but the game also doesn’t have a consistent difficulty curve (if anything, it has a reverse difficulty curve; things get easier the further you make it in the game). In particular, the fog of war can result in cheap shots that the player could realistically anticipate, but simply won’t have the resources to cover for. For example, early in my playthrough, two clans declared war on me, and my measly four provinces were being attacked from two sides, so I positioned what few soldiers I had in those forts in order to fend off the invasion. However, after I managed to rout those two armies, a third army came from beyond the fog of war to attack a third province, and this army had just enough units that I wasn’t able to distribute my soldiers to be able to rout all three armies. My only hope was that I happened to have a ninja, and ninjas can sabotage an army, which prevents them from moving for one turn. After this moment, I never had to deal with more than two armies at a time, and when those parts of the game did occur, I had more than enough units to deal with it.

Also, going back to the subject of agents: not only are successful agent actions based on a percent chance, but when you first hire them, that percent chance is super low (the game may claim that it’s a 27% chance, but it’s closer to a 2% chance in practice); the percent chance increases as they get experience. Yes, that’s realistic, but it isn’t fun; it’s gambling. Why isn’t there an option to let agent actions be performed by the player? We can micromanage armies during battle, so why can’t we do the same for agents? For an assassination, it could be a stealth mini-game; for political actions, like bribing or convicting, it could be a Phoenix Wright-esque mini-game. Anything but a game of chance! I want a game of skill! Game of skill! Game of skill!

Besides, even if players don’t like the mini-games, there could always be an “auto-resolve action” button the same way players can auto-resolve the battles, and it could work the same way they work in this game: via percent chance. It’s a win-win: players like me get their interactivity, and players who don’t like the change get the original implementation as an alternative.

Now, given all of these flaws, you may be wondering what the developers tried to do in order to mitigate them. Well, they implemented the quick-fix to end all quick-fixes: save-states. At any time outside of an RTS battle, you can create a new save, and if your agent action fails, or you realize you’re about to be ambushed by a massive army, you can just load up your previous save and make adjustments with your newfound knowledge. Of course, this also means that any challenge the overworld segments could provide is eliminated, but at the same time, it can be the only way to deal with some of the nonsense the game throws at you during the beginning (see above).

Speaking of the beginning of the game, I’d like to bring up a pet peeve I had: during a siege, it’s possible to damage certain parts of the castle town. For example, if you damage the gates, your army can enter the fort without risking climbing the walls. However, if you damage any part of the castle town at all, and another army attacks that fort on the same turn, the gates will magically be completely damaged, even if you never touched the gates during your siege.

Lastly, here’s a couple other minor details I thought I’d mention. First, as you play the game and capture provinces, your fame increases, and once it reaches max (which happens a little less than halfway through the game), an event known as “realm divide” occurs, where all the other remaining clans will start to band together against you. Of course, by this point, there’s not much the game can do to completely screw you over like it could before, so it doesn’t really work as a way to increase difficulty. However, it does completely remove diplomacy from your options, making the game even more repetitive. Second, during battles, there’s a timer in the upper corner that counts down from one hour. If it reaches zero, the invading army loses and the defending army wins. In other words, you could theoretically rout the game’s massive armies by deploying a single unit and having it run around in circles, waiting for the timer to run out. This is especially feasible during sea battles, where you don’t have to worry about fatigue. I know that because I put all my war money into armies, so I’d only build one ship to transport them to the islands, and when it got attacked by bigger fleets, I’d just hug the border of the arena until time ran out. What’s especially funny is that the AI tries to flank the fleeing ship, but since the border of the arena is right there, the enemy ships would keep bumping into it, slowing them down even more.

Overall, I can see the appeal of the genre, but even if some of my issues were properly fixed, I don’t think I’d get another 4x game; the genre just isn’t for me. If you like simulation/management games, check this out; you might like it even if you’re not a fan of RTS/Tactics games. However, if you’re expecting things like a decent tutorial, a proper difficulty curve, or non-repetitive game-play, look elsewhere.

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(mood music)

THE NEXT STORY!

ALTHOUGH THE NINJA’S TIME IS LIMITED, HE MUST COLLECT ALL THE GOLD HE CAN BEFORE HE ESCAPES!

COMING NEXT SCENE:

“PLATFORMING TO THE Nth DEGREE”