Samurai Warriors 4 Empires continues Tecmo Koei’s fascination for augmenting the strategy-lite elements of their feudal-era Musou series into something a little more substantial for armchair generals to sink their teeth into. To that end, the proportion of strategy versus actual fighting is weighted far more in favour of the latter when compared to previous entries in the series, with the player taking on all matters of political and strategical responsibilities away from the battlefield.
As in previous Empires titles, the default campaign mode has players picking out a feudal warlord and a bunch of officers before taking charge of a particular region within mainland Japan against one of the many historical battle scenarios that are unlocked the more you play. Once you’ve planted your sword in a particular location you can then scoot off and start getting your house in order, which basically means assigning different officers and folk to various positions within your overall power structure.
From here, players can enact a number of proposals and policies across the territories owned by your clan in order to ultimately increase the prosperity of your bunch of feudal tough nuts. One proposal might bring in conscription to increase your ranks while lowering the morale of the populace, while another, might focus on agriculture; prodding your farmers to increase their efficiently and thus provide your territories with a larger yield of food and supplies for the months ahead.
Compounding the idea of dictating policy to your subordinates is the fact that Empires runs on a yearly clock with time passing on a seasonal basis. What this entails is that not only can you use just a single proposal in each season, but once a year has passed you get the chance to shuffle your ranks about; seizing the opportunity to put people with better politicking and military skills in offices that better utilise their abilities depending on how they’ve developed in the year previously.
The whole idea is that quite unlike the regular Warriors games, war comes with a price in so far as everything needs to be tip-top shape at home before you can go out to war and expect to win. Your forces, for example, require supplies and gold to be fielded while enacting effective battle formations takes away from other more economic proposals that you might want to make. In either case, showing up to a battle with an enemy who has a far larger force than you have doesn’t exactly bode well for your chances of success.
Layering the political and tactical management side of things is the relationships between your magistrates that can affect the overall potency of your proposals. Pairing up two magistrates will result in particular traits being enforced, with certain magistrates getting on with certain types better than others and so their overall performance improves as a result. Once all your affairs at home have been resolved, you can get to the business of fulfilling the ambitions (essentially objectives) of your chosen general, with each leader having different ambitions that must be fulfilled in order to successfully complete the scenario. Simply put, the policies and strategies that you enforce at home will directly fuel or dismantle your war effort and in implementing such a dynamic, the developer has made such strategizing feel like a meaningful part of the overall experience rather than a pointlessly tacked on afterthought.
In fairness though, while it’s all quite straightforward stuff if you’re new to the Empires games and/or have no real interest in the strategy side of it all, you can always consult your magistrates for advice, or even delegate such decisions to them entirely, thus automating the whole thing in the process and allowing you to get stuck into the nitty-gritty of caving in heads and invading territories.
@page
The problem though, is that once we get down to business of the battles themselves, the original hallmark of Tecmo Koei’s whole Musou formula, they feel all too brief and rarely last anything longer than twelve minutes or so before you’re thrust back into the politics and tactics screens. This is aggravating chiefly because you never feel like any battle is ever really epic enough and that, perhaps most troublingly, their scope is reductive to the point that true opportunities for dynamic battlefield stratagems seem few and far between. Naturally, the emphasis on tactics was to be expected but not so much to the point that the actual combat feels sidelined.
In the battles themselves and complementing the hand-cramping action that the Warriors games are known for, the developer has included a number of new features. In addition to banners that when earned by defeating certain characters can change the look of your castle residence and even grant additional buffs when utilised, players may also now marry their characters off in marriage events that create unique dialog in battle depending on whether the characters involved are historically accurate or not.
Despite such incremental upgrades however, it’s impossible to escape the notion that those folks who are looking for extended amounts of Musou-flavoured thrills would be better off satiating their more violent cravings with Samurai Warriors mainline series entries, rather than the Empires spin-offs such as this one. Ostensibly, while the sensation of sending hundreds of armoured lads flying with a single, thunderous special attack all the while J-rock strings strum about in the background is as tenable and oddly satisfying as it always was, so little has changed in the core of the game that it feels like it is increasingly becoming the realm of the hardcore fans and nobody else.
Speaking of long-time franchise fans, such folks will be delighted to know that Empires allows them to transfer their characters from save data for both Samurai Warriors 4 and Samurai Warriors 4-II into the game, though sadly the progress from those warriors is not transferred over; owing to wildly different stat system that Empires employs versus those two earlier entries in the series. Still, the recognition of save files from other games in the franchise proves to be a welcome gesture all the same.
From a longevity standpoint, Samurai Warriors 4 Empires offers a veritable metric ton of stuff for players to get stuck into. From the many different scenarios presented by the default Empires campaign mode through to the Genesis mode that allows players to fully tailor their own campaign and the game’s extensive create a character suite, it’s clear that those who embrace Samurai Warriors 4 Empires will certainly get their money’s worth and then some.
A further reminder about how little the series has really progressed comes in the form of the game’s rather lacking visual presentation. Seemingly unable to shake off the graphical DNA of previous generations, Samurai Warriors 4 Empires looks just how you might expect – a low-end PS3 title brought kicking and screaming onto PS4 in 2016 with 1080p visuals that does little else other than expose its antiquated canvas for all to see. Including such delights as recycled animations from previous generation Warriors titles to hair clipping through armour and the same, annoying janky and hilariously quick horse animations, it’s quite clear that Samurai Warriors 4 Empires hasn’t been designed with the significant graphical muscle of the PS4 exclusively in mind.
And this really encapsulates Samurai Warriors 4 Empires as a whole – it’s well-known idiosyncrasies and established formula kept have been kept perennially appealing to its passionate fan base on account of the entertaining, though ultimately incremental upgrades that have been fashioned upon it. For everyone else wondering what all the fuss is about though, much like those titular honour bound warriors of old, Samurai Warriors 4 Empires feels reminiscent of that old guard; doggedly clinging onto the bygone traditions of its past glories while furiously rattling its scabbard at a world that has evolved far beyond them.