Thankfully the characters become far more compelling as times goes on, and we ended up really enjoying the cast and their sharply written banter. Had we not been reviewing the game, we’re unsure if we would have stuck with it it really is that monotonous, with uninteresting characters, and cliched plot hooks. This type of ” front loading” means that the first two hours (perhaps three) are painfully slow. In fact, pacing is one of Eiyuu Senki’s biggest enemies it doesn’t know when to pull back and let the player figure things out, or just simply play the game, and then when it gives folks free rein over conquering neighboring lands and settling scores on the battlefield, it doles out hours of action without ever bringing relevant dialogue into the picture that could drive the plot forward. The writing is especially a mixed bag in the beginning - this is mostly because there’s just so much dialogue at the start of the adventure that, statistically speaking, there’s bound to more problems with it than the other portions of the game simply because players spend so much time being set up for the actual gameplay. While some of the humor hits the mark, thanks to a solid localization job by Fruitbat Factory, other times the jokes are stale and the writing even stiffer. As one might assume, each of these renown fighters is out for world conquest, as the namesake implies, and our amnesiac hero is along for the ride.Īs mentioned, the game doesn’t know how to be anything but comedic. So, well-known figures such as Oda Nobunaga, Billy the Kid and Napoleon Bonaparte have been turned into girls all vying for control and, at times, the player’s love. Our protagonist here wakes up one day in an alternate universe where famous warriors from the annals of time are all scantily-clad females. The tale isn’t exactly a serious one, though, which is unfortunate because the undercurrent of the narrative is historically significant. All talking and story segments are carried out via text boxes, Japanese audio and wonderfully-drawn character portraits.

It’s equal parts visual novel and tactical RPG at its core. It’s that latter part which rings true for Eiyuu Senki – The World Conquest, a visual novel/tactical RPG hybrid from developer TENCO and localization studio Fruitbat Factory.ĭespite Eiyuu Senki being a huge game, just from a pure text and length standpoint, it’s actually fairly straightforward in its design. Many times, this is done to elicit a sense of nostalgia and not much more others, however, know how to evoke that strong feeling we call nostalgia while also managing to iterate on the formula they’re using as a template in intelligent ways.

We’re at a point in gaming where developers are regularly looking to the past to draw inspiration for their future titles.

Eiyuu senki nobunaga h scenes