Kessen 3 (PAL)

[iangilroy]

I've put a few hours into this so I thought I'd offer some brief initial thoughts. It's an interesting mix of strategy and action and I think it slots in nicely alongside the DW games. The basic gameplay mechanic is

1. Planning - buy/sell equipment, fiddle about with officers etc then decide which battle to take on next. Some battles move the story on, others are levelling-up opportunities.

2. Battle planning - set up your forces, kind of like the DW pre-battle screens but here you're actually giving orders about who/what to attack etc to your various officers.

3. Battle. You take control one of your officers and his troops, moving around the level and attacking stuff. The controls are very similar to DW. Meanwhile, your other officers are following your orders. You can swap between your officers at will, taking control of whoever you like.

The overall gameplay is classic Japanese console strategy-game stuff - simple rules and structure, lots of item/character collecting and levelling-up, surprising overall depth - with the added twist that you're actually controlling the action and tapping out DW-style combos to attack the enemy. I think the combination works well. This will keep me going until DW5 gets a PAL release

[SaijoBob]

I'm tempted to get this game. Did you play Kessen 2 at all? Can you offer a comparison on the combat? It used to be pretty crude from what I remember of Kessen 2 a few years back...

Also, can you just keep levelling up on one section if you want to make a really hard army?

Cheers!

[iangilroy]

I never played Kessen 2. From what I understand, something that wasn't in K2 is the new 'Rampage' officer skill. This lets your officer attack an enemy batallion DW-style, riding around and taking out enemies.

I think the combat is reasonable - you have 2 different attack buttons, a troop skill plus a range of officer skills at your disposal. The depth comes from the addition of support units providing covering fire, unit positioning, reacting to ambushes and so on. If it was much more complex I think it would just get bogged down and stop being fun.

You can certainly focus on levelling up one officer more than the others by taking direct control and ensuring that they do the things that earn extra experience points. However you can't send only that one officer into a battle to get all of the experience that the normal 4 (or more) would get, if you see what I mean.

[SaijoBob]

That sounds good. When it came to fighting in the second game, I think there was only one basic attack you could do. Giving more options here sounds good. I loved doing the chain attacks before, like flank charging units already fighting. The support skills were great too!

Time for me to start looking for the cheapest place to get this, though I should finish Kingdom Under Fire first... thanks for the info!

[Meng De]

I hope it's not too much like Kessen 2, I really didn't like the system involved, and the story was awfull too!. Dynasty Tactics made it redundant anyway. I'll certanly be picking this up after I've cleared up the current crop of games. Nice first impressions, if you havent done so already you should buy/rent Samurai Warriors - the save data unlocks two new characters.

[iangilroy]

My Samurai Warriors save unlocked Keiji Maede (sp?). Apparently you need a SW:XL save to unlock another character. I never got SW:XL but this game kind of puts me in the mood for it...

[Meng De]

SW:XL wasn't that great in my opinion. It did fix some of the problems and introduce another Lu Bu-style killing machine in Tadakatsu Honda. Koei made a big mistake by introducing two new comedy characters (Hideyoshi and yoshimoto) they just seemed very pointless. Ina Honda is the character that the save gets you, she's not bad in XL so if you can pick up a copy cheaply enough it's probably worth it. Otherwise it's not too long until the Pal Dynasty Warriors 5 - which is fantastic.

Btw has Kessen 3 got voice acting in it, and if so how does it compare to SW? I thought that Koei did a very good job with the VA's in SW, Nobunaga, Noh and Ranmaru being my Favourites.

[iangilroy]

The voice acting seems about normal Koei standard - OK, if a little stilted and Californian. A nice bonus is that you now finally get the option of Japanese or English voices in a PAL game.

[Meng De]

Excellent! As much as like the SW Va's, the Japanese ones are always superior. I'll look forward to playing this soon - Thanks!