Sengoku Musou 3: Empires - Battle of Okehazama | Part 1

Описание: Got the urge and curiosity to check this game’s Empires Mode out myself since Xaldin only recorded the unique Story Mode of this game. I have absolutely no idea how far I would get as I’ve never been too into these Warriors Empires games. Also have absolutely zero idea if the game will just crash halfway anytime because 3Z had a guaranteed crash when I attempted to record Original Career Mode there.

This is the Japanese-exclusive Empires spinoff for Samurai Warriors 3. The SW3 era sure has lots of Japan exclusives. As Xaldin mentioned in his video descriptions, this game introduced a town building mechanic that is honestly quite a pain for me due to the language barrier.

First things off, you only get to select the Battle of Okehazama in Empires Mode at the beginning. You don’t get anything else now, and there’s also no access to the mode for random officer placements like in the other Empires games for now. Just Okehazama.

You get to select any daimyo clan to play as, as usual to the Empires games. I chose Nobunaga because he feels appropriate for the Okehazama scenario. Then there are some tutorials about placing and destroying facilities in the town building section where you do as told (in Japanese) by Saya.

After a while, you get to fight a tutorial battle teaching you the basics of the bases, where I chose to play as the generic Nagahide Niwa for the funnies because like all other Empires games, you get to play as all generic officer units. Base seizing in this game just requires defeating enough peons in there like in SW4E, unlike in SW2E where you have to aim for the Base Captains. There are also cannon bases in this game that can gradually seize a base for the side it belongs to, as well as owl bases that let you ride the very-rarely-used owls for quick transportation around the map.

One unique thing about the battles of this game is that the character levels grow incredibly fast. Not sure if you start at level one everytime, but you will rapidly see the level up message and very quickly gain more than one musou bar. You also start with the full movesets just like in SW4E.

There’s also another tutorial battle where I invaded the Saito clan. One annoying thing I noticed is that “daimyo” characters can only be placed as player characters and not NPCs, so I can only either play as Nobunaga, or play as someone else but not have Nobunaga’s unit in the battle at all. Allies struggle a lot just like in SW3, and I did notice the morale giving enemies glowy health bars and buffs just like in Chronicles. I also got to change battle BGM mid-battle, which is neat.

And the loading time of the PS3 versions of these SW3 games never cease to amaze me. Takes like less than a second to transition. Feels like night and day coming from the Wii and 3DS versions.