This things first, ive played a metric shit ton of "grand"startegy games. grand Grand staregy meaning that we who play it have to spent altleast 10 hours to teach it to someone else before they stop beitching about what their king does. I have atleast 4k hours eu4, 2k on ck2, maybe 2k misc other miscellaneous grand strategy BS all about.
Now onto taishi, i havent played, the past games , which is a deep mark in my reviewers credit.
The game has issues (but hold on baby), but these other grand strategy games have the same issues often.
Also ignore the entiere review if i'm complaining about something that is easily accessible on the internet or in the games own help ssystem, WHICH, btw is reaaaallllly good, you wanna have a chill time 90 percent of the time, that in game wiki thing probably has your answers.
But for stuff for when i'm trying to shoot my muskets which i build up for a year or so, and i want to do some Oda Shredding. I have no idea how to do it, i go thru a few battles about getting lame answers online them just being tactices, after having a spear unit for a couple battles, occasionally he can just turn on the jets when the officer of that unit decides he wants to shoot, whether its because of your expert positioning, or just random fact at some point he will want to do it, and it will be glourious. There are many such weird unexmplained and unsimplified things, which i wont cover, beside not being able to join 2 Hosts together. its bizzare, every other game can bring together troops, my 9k arm gets 2.5k army next to it, and i expect to rape and pillage with 11.5k but it doesnt work that way....
anyways, beyond weird game design, the game takes the cake in design, the art design is great, the history design is beautiful. the voices, ateast on the japanese side fill me with the fire of victory... oh and dont forget the gorgeous music track, from what ive heard, its fantatisc.
The basic management of society is pretty well done, i wish i understood more about how trade areas grow, but i assume thats how you grow int other game, nobody figured out trade nodes in eu4 overnight.
What this game really needs is tooltips, perhaps it cant be that easy, but man, some tooltips woulda been great.
but no more shitting, the game does a great job of interlocking rts and turn type games, think total war or civ 5 mixed with EU4, during turns you can still take actions, and people move about and you can respond in between turns, reallllllly..... this sorta thing, tho almost impossible to bring into multiplayer, should be spread to total war and maybe the civ games.
All and all if you like a challenge, or already took one so this is just another game, play this one, there are many things which keep this game up, But few legit grips which take it down.
7/10
based on my heart, and not 5 years with a major in journalism and a minor in womens studies.