Swords or Guns?

It's funny how things seem to come full circle. It's been many a year since we've seen the likes of  Kingdoms, the boxed expansion for Medieval II: Total War that had the four mini-campaigns. Instead, downloadable expansions and DLC have been the order of the day, and from the early experiments of The Warpath Campaign (Empire) and The Peninsular Campaign (Napoleon), Creative Assembly has been going bigger and better. For Shogun 2, they started out with the Rise of the Samurai, and now they are on Fall of the Samurai – an expansion so large that's officially a 'stand-alone' product, and so we come back to the boxed expansions once more.
 

Pressing 'H' allows you to take direct control of things like ship cannons and Gatling guns. Which is ridiculously fun...

Like in RotS, we are presented with an entirely new scenario to get involved with, and a larger, more detailed map of Japan to conquer. The year is 1876, the Shogun and the Emperor are at war for the soul of Japan. You are Captain Nathan Algren, a washed out former U.S. Army veteran sent to train the Emperor’s men how to fight using firearms… oh wait, that’s the plot to The Last Samurai. Sorry. The year is actually 1864 – Fall of the Samurai is set during the Boshin War, which was a result of tensions between factions who had differing thoughts on the increased modernisation going on at the time. As before, you have several clans you can choose from, but instead of fighting to become a single dominant ruler, you must fight either for the Emperor, or for the Shogunate, and help that faction win.

Now, I don’t mind admitting that, aside from Rome: Total War, Napoleon: Total War is probably the TW game I enjoy playing the most, as I prefer the Napoleonic era of warfare. What’s interesting and challenging about Fall of the Samurai is that it effectively combines both the more medieval Shogun 2 style of warfare, and the modern warfare of the time. It’s all well and good setting up your firing lines, only to realise you’re being charged with Spear and Sword Samurai units. They may take a lot of casualties, but if they do manage to plough into your units the gun-wielders will be at a serious disadvantage.

Even the naval side of things has changed – Steam-power was very much the order of the day in the late 19th century, which changes the tactics used in naval warfare even more – it won’t be like Shogun 2, and it won’t quite be like Empire/Napoleon either (although after testing it, it is more like the latter than the former). Ships also have an effect on the strategic map as well, with fleets being able to bombard anything on land that’ within range of their guns. If you’re fighting a land tactical battle and have a fleet in range, you can even call in off-map fire support.
 

That nearby fleet would allow the player to call in a limited number of bombardments during the siege battle. Immensely useful, as we found out...

For this preview, we were allowed to play through roughly 3-4 years of game time - the years are longer now, with each ‘season’ lasting around four turns. This immediately will have an effect on things like family and clan management, as children will grow up slower, so you’ll need to rely more on the ‘promote general’ events more than ever in order to get leaders for your armies. We were the Satsuma – descendants of the Shimazu clan from the main game, and we are part of the Pro-Emperor faction to begin with (you can change factions at any time, but this will also have drastic effects).



Being Pro-Shogun and Pro-Emperor doesn’t seem to have too much of an effect on what technologies you can research at the moment – you can freely choose what buildings you build, what ‘techs’ (they’re not really techs anymore) you study… modernisation comes at a price for everyone, even pro-emperor (and thus, pro modernisation) clans. We’ve seen Anti-Emperor factions wielding some pretty decent firearm units, so it won’t be as clear cut as it was in The Last Samurai’s final battle scene.

Oddly enough, being on the same side doesn’t always mean you’ll be the best of friends either. We’ve not sure if this is a good or a bad thing yet, but there’s been several instances where fellow pro-emperor factions have declared war on us, for no other reason that we can think of other than they might have gotten bored or something. This means that the usual play-style of ‘all your territories are belong to us’ comes through again, which we can’t help but feel defeats the point of this particular scenario, but there you go. With new features like railroads, etc… that are meant to help facilitate travel, a new kind of co-op gameplay could easily have been designed, as after all you’re not trying to become emperor (or shogun) yourself, just help that person win.

Anyway, the game’s not even out yet so no use decrying its design right now. We only got a brief go at the early phases of the game, so it remains to be seen how the late-game action holds up. Despite this minor niggle, the points we mentioned before do make this game quite challenging. What’s even better is that the new units and techs will bleed over into multiplayer as well, with players who don’t have the expansion being able to play against people who do. The only real division that we know off at the moment is that FotS players will get a brand new multiplayer-conquest map, to reflect the new setting and the new technologies around. It will be interesting to see how the two communities fare against each other.
 

If you look closely enough, you can see Ken Watanabe there as well ...

If nothing else, Fall of the Samurai will represent a decent reconciliation of the guns vs. swords divide. Much like the clans in 19th century Japan, groups of Total War gamers (like me) will have their preference, and in this expansion you can choose one or the other. It’s not quite the same as Napoleon, as warfare and weapons had evolved a fair bit since then, but its close enough. This isn’t the end either; despite being nicely book-ended, the devs feel there’s still plenty more stories to be told about this lovable nation. Total War: Shogun 2 – Fall of the Samurai is coming out on PC on March 23rd, 2012.

Most Anticipated Feature: We’re just waiting for the announcement of Tom Cruise DLC.