Editorial:(Adult) Ohzoku early impressions
From Wikia Gaming
by user Afker
[edit] Background story
In a world where the victor gets to be king (王, "Oh"), and the defeated goes down in history as bandits (賊, "Zoku"), the kingdom of Visto started a large scale military expansion to dominate the continent.
The main character, Gin, was a famous strategist general defending his nation against the invasion from Visto. However, due to traitors backhome, his nation was eventually conquered. Now, the kingdom of Elt seeks his expertise to help them defend against the Visto army. To Gin, this is a great opportunity for revenge against Visto, and well as a chance to get a kingdom's ransom worth of... women!
[edit] Promotional trailer
The first half of the trailer is the opening movie for the game, while the second half showcased the gameplay system. The music is nice, singing not so great (though in-game voice acting is decent).
[edit] Gameplay
The overall flow of the game is organized into missions. In between missions, you may hire and organize your troops into various squadrons. Each squadron may consist of up to 4 units, and players can mix and match as they wish. The game features may different unit types, from the classic soldiers archers and mages to catapults, samurai, ninja, and dragon riders, each with different default skills, and more powerful skills to learn as they level up.
Each battle mission has its own tactical map, with various hotspots such as towns, villages, and forests to stage strategic combat. Strategic combat is fought on hexagonal maps between all the squadrons stationed at that hotspot. Additionally, the promotional trailer seems to reveal at least two different ways the overall tactical map may affect battle: in one case breaking a dam causing a huge surge of water flowing down the river, in another case the walls around a citadel has several hotspots housing cannons that fire outwards. Those elements may bring some additional tactical element that isn't normally found in strategy games.
[edit] Final notes
The story, for those who can read Japanese, has lots of funny moments in it. A great punchline often creeps upon me unawares, and force me to splash part of my drink on the monitor. While I would only give the art style a 4 out of 5, the art quality is rather stable, so it's mostly just a personal style issue. The gameplay promises to be fun and interesting, which has always been a strength of SofthouseChara.
Overall, I think it will do relatively well amongst the heavy competition (read: 40 game releases) of June 29th, the weekend right before Japan's summer break.
Higher quality gameplay trailer as well as a trial version of the game are available for download. For more information, visit SofthouseChara's homepage: http://shchara.co.jp/ (need to be 18 or older).
