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Most of the time, you'll be attacking or defending a solitary outpost, or a city's high stone wall—unless you choose to rush out and meet an enemy on the open field. Conflicts can never last for more than a month, leaving the defenders the easier task of enduring the siege for a mere thirty days. Though, in order to do so, they'll need to keep attackers off their walls and away from their gates, which enemy armies will mercilessly smash and burn to reach the heart of the city. All of this takes place on a grid with three basic unit types: foot, horse, and bow, each of which can be upgraded in a number of ways once they've gotten some hard-earned battle experience. They can even transform into catapults or battering rams for greater destruction, while their abilities can be further increased if they're directly commanded by officers with special tactical options, driving enemies to fear or ordering a devastating cavalry charge.
However, you don't have to wait for the enemy to come to you. If you see an ally in danger of losing their capital, or another on the warpath, you can join into their melee to boost their morale and earn more glory for yourself. They just might return the favor later on when you charge out to crush your hated rival.
Freedom that comes at the cost of depth.
For the tenth installment of a very long-running series, Koei has offered players the option to become a free officer with his own rogue army terrorizing the populace, a loyal vassal to one of the men who will unite all of China or die in the attempt—a prefect with his own city to manage and defend, or a power hungry ruler out to crush everyone in his path. Yet no matter what destiny you choose, or which among the hundreds of historical or custom characters you select as your avatar, you'll still have to face the same dozen missions at every tavern.
Let me put it to you another way. If you chose to follow the path of a prefect, you'll need to manage your officers, recruit more officers, develop the city's army, start an aggressive domestic improvements campaign, answer the unreasonable demands of your ruler, plot against neighboring cities, and...ugh, respond to the complaints of the citizenry. The problem here is that there's only about six different citizen complaints in the entire game, which you'll receive once every two weeks. Since it takes at least ten days to do just about anything, they can pile up pretty quickly, though after about the 20th time someone complains about the roads, you'll never want to see them again. However, let these stack up and the order of your city will go down. Soon, it'll start tearing itself apart from the inside, leaving you ripe for invasion—so you're never truly free.
At the same time, this game features nine complete scenarios (each playable in both historic and fictional modes), hundreds of playable officers (complete with parents, wives, friends, back stories, and personal agendas), forty two skills to be learned and earned (which is an adventure in itself), close to fifty upgradeable cities to explore and conquer, dozens of animated events that allow history to unfold (if you choose to leave it unaltered), the ability to add up to a hundred and ten personally customized characters into the mix (letting you form your own fictional empires), as well as three sub-games developed in the form of dueling, debating, and turn-based warfare. With so much to pack into this game, it's not surprising that some minor elements come up a bit short.
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