For players who haven’t the slightest clue about the history of Japan, Kessen’s story is slightly overwhelming at first. Set in the era of the Azuchi-Momoyama (from 1573 to 1603) period and the Edo period (1603-1867), Kessen chronicles the struggles between Ieyasu Tokugawa, the supreme commander of the Eastern Japanese Army, and Mitsunari Ishida, the supreme commander of the Western Japanese army. Each have their own goals and ambitions for wanting to have a stronghold over the entire span of Japan,. Kessen will let you take control of both the Eastern and Western sides, with one following the correct path of history with Ieyasu Tokugawa’s victory (where he then becomes Shogun), and the other putting you in the shoes of Mitsunari Ishida, attempting to stop Tokugawa’s advance in order to keep the Toyotomi alive.

Right from the start, Kessen hits players with an overload combination of incredible rendered and real-time sequences. They’re so good, in fact, that distinguishing between the two is difficult, and it’s a wonder sometimes why Koei even decided to do any FMV; the real-time is great as it is. Once the actual game starts, however, this is where Koei starts to truly shine, since they’ve developed a gaming engine that can handle literally hundreds of characters all fighting in real-time on foot and horseback. You would think that the character models would have to be exponentially stripped down in detail in order to compensate for all characters running around, but that isn’t the case; all the models are leaps above the PlayStation in terms of polygon count, animation, etc. And Kessen only becomes even more notable as missions advance, especially when two ten thousand men armies go head to head.

Koei might have some of the greatest strategy games on the planet, but because of the complexities involved in being able to experience their games for what they are, they’ve hard an uphill battle in being able to carve a spot in the US market. For Kessen, Koei has essentially stripped down one of their other titles and popped in a more user-friendly interface. Before a mission starts, you pick four enemy armies that you would either like to defect to your side, or stay out of the battle completely. Following that, the initial battle strategy showing where individual armies will move (or in some cases, not move; it’s possible to set them up near a forested area for an ambush) from the start is chosen. The final step of preparation comes in with choose with sets of armies will be battling. It’s possible to edit what character sets will be in included (archers, riflemen, etc.), and what pattern the group will attack in.

All of Kessen’s combat takes place in real-time, and even though battles can still take more than an hour and a half a piece, it makes things much more interesting. Armies will start at opposite areas of the map, and slowly advance to each other before confrontation takes place. The pace of this advancing is very slow, and this is one of the points where some people might have trouble with Kessen: patience. It can be irritating to see an army be clobbered by an unexpected twist of events, and when sending in reinforcements, it takes them fifteen minutes to arrive. As realistic as it might be, that realism doesn’t make the game more entertaining. Once a battle starts, however, that’s when things get intense.

Since you cannot directly influence individual units in an army, battles could easily have become more boring than a Martha Stewart marathon if it weren’t for the addition of special maneuvers. These special maneuvers can only be performed when a unit has a Zeal (a rating that goes up and down depending on how well the battle is swinging in their favor) of 80 or above, and some of the attacks include the devastating Cannonade (long range attack launching a barrage of cannons that can obliterate hundreds of men at once), Flying Fusillade (cavalry men charge forward), Barrage (long range attack that lines up the riflemen of the unit) and Volley (similar to Barrage, archers of the unit line up for massive attack). By correctly using the special maneuvers, it makes it possible for an army with an inferior amount of men (for example, 3,000 versus 5,000) to come out on top. Depending on the pattern that the army is aligned in and what character sets have been included, certain special maneuvers can or cannot be used. There are also certain special maneuvers that aren’t available unless the army is performing a certain task, such as an army turned into a portable fort being able to rally for another army, increasing the other army’s Zeal and moral.

In addition, Koei also made the first couple of missions easy enough that players could make enough dumb mistakes in order to learn all the required features of Kessen. There’s also a tutorial mode that pops up whenever there is a new feature that hasn’t been explored yet, and the game goes on to explain its purpose and how it will influence the battles ahead. It still takes a mission or two of hands-on experience in order to figure out the right situations for the options, but after an hour or two, things will become near second nature.

Koei has prospered in the land of the rising sun, and now the introduction of Kessen, a real-time strategy title that encompasses fantastic graphical prowess with equally fantastic gameplay and depth; Koei could be poised to break out of its niche mold in the US. Kessen 2, here we come!