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Capture enough territory and you enter the Realm Divide phase, where every other faction immediately declares war on you. You can spend the entire game building alliances, vassals, trade networks and a stable economy, only for it all to disappear. Life is futileĪnd that brings me to maybe the best thing about Shogun 2 and its expansions: its sheer futility. They are both genuinely challenging while their interweaving historical narrative makes them a highlight of the game rather than an ignored extra.
#TOTAL WAR SHOGUN 2 SOUNDTRACK SERIES#
It allows Fall of Samurai to feel completely different.Īdd to that its series of historical battles that follow the story of legendary warrior Saigo Takamori (the actual last ever samurai warlord).
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A mixture of complex battles, a genuinely hard-to-master strategic campaign, a swathe of new units, complex fighting, a strong theme and powerful historical narrative really puts Fall of Samurai into its own.įall of the Samurai explores a realm of history so different from the original Shogun 2 that all they really have in common is a map. The best standalone DLC in Total War historyįall of the Samurai could have been its own game and it would still be one of the better entries in the entire Total War canon. Or even bowmen that have longer range than riflemen, which can pepper your army from just out of reach. That means you find yourself having to plan your armies and battle strategy prepared to confront not just other riflemen in stale shooting matches, but hordes of angry samurai. As a result, the units are massively diverse. The campaign depicts a culture clash and pits modernity against tradition. Not only are gun units actively more deadly than in Napoleon or Empire, but their functioning diversity allows you to build up a much more complex strategy around how you position and use different gun units. Yet given the amount of work that goes into playing the game, from converting to Christianity and being hated by everyone, to expending a disgusting amount of time conducting research, the bugs are easily ignored.īut the standalone Fall of Samurai expansion is another matter. The bugs were endless.Īnd to be fair, that pretty much held true for the guns in Shogun 2’s main campaign. I would lose count of the number of battles where immaculate lines of high-quality riflemen would just decide against firing their guns for reasons beyond mortal comprehension. I love Napoleon: Total War, Empire: Total War and the rest of the modern history entrants as much as the next guy, but they never properly functioned. While some future Total War games would go onto overcomplicate things again, Shogun 2 struck a fine and enjoyable balance. There’s a limited number of ways to play, but even within that there’s lots of room for various approaches and strategies. Unlike series like Europa or Crusader Kings, there weren’t millions of potential cogs playing out at once.
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Its economy, too, involves enough complexity to remain interesting but strips away the more superfluous parts of the previous games. It added a patchwork diplomacy system, where you find yourself making agreements with countless minor factions in a more transparent and understandable way than in either Empire or Napoleon: Total War. On the strategic level, Shogun 2 was a huge leap from its predecessors. Streamlined yet complex strategyīut Total War games are about more than just grand battles. Put simply, it perfectly captures a somewhat romantic ideal of what it was like in feudal Japan. More than just making the combat better though, these fluid duels embody the ideal of Japanese samurai and bushidō. In a series used to brutal warfare, capturing that fluidity of classic samurai combat is a massive test which the developers passed admirably. It means the clashing of two units amounts to thousands of engrossing one vs one duels that are amazing to watch. Without delving too much into the technicality of it all, the game came with an improved Warscape engine that made for almost beautiful combat between warriors. To somewhat justify that sad fact, then: just what is it about this game that keeps it so fresh, even a decade after its first release in 2011? Fluid samurai battles Given my easily distracted nature, this could be the single individual past-time I’ve dedicated the most of my time to over the last decade.
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A perfect mixture of fascinating mechanics, beautiful combat and engrossing historical realism makes it a game I literally cannot stop playing. But in my mind Shogun 2: Total War is unrivalled. An ungodly amount of time to dedicate to any one game, especially one that is a decade old and has countless follow-ups.