Samurai Warriors 4: Empires - Okehazama Scenario | Oda (Part 1)

After doing the livestreams, I thought I'd play more SW4:E. These playthroughs take a while though, it was like 8-10 hours to beat this one. The Okehazama scenario has a lot of warlords that are just generics filled with generics so there isn't that much variety. I have some CAWs show up every now and then but I wanted a more normal playthrough so I mostly stuck to using Musou officers I collected with as the Oda. SW4E has some neat things to it, like a ton of unique designs for generics to make them stand out more and a ton of female CAWs to represent various wives and daughters. That gives some much needed variety to the game's huge number of generics. There's a castle system where you build up your castle as you take territories and assign officers to rooms in it, giving bonuses per season. They offer strategies and you unlock new ones based on what they have listed as their tactics and certain ones favor certain things, like Keiji seems to suggest getting the Arrow Formation very often. Formations from SW2E are back, with a rock-paper-scissors style mechanic of one beating the other. There's 3 levels of Attack, Defense, and Speed formations but it's pretty easy to get advantage so long as you get tier 2/tier 3 ones and have plenty before invading. I frankly don't think the castle system offers very much to the experience, just simply selecting officer's suggestions feels like it worked better. But you can use it to raise bond between characters if you want them to have better relations. Bonded characters can switch to each other in combat so it comes in handy. Family members can't have any bonds with each other, but can switch by default. The general idea of Empires is the same as it usually is, but we are missing a few things, like being able to train your troops outside of battle. This makes it difficult to use new characters you didn't recruit through battle because if you have lower troops than your enemy you will just get curb stomped by their overbloated stats. So it really incentivizes just using the same 8 or so officers for every fight. If you recruit an enemy they'll usually come trained up to some degree though. But because of this you will see me stick to just the same party for the most part, especially towards the end. You also can't play as like an individual character, you play as a force, so you can't defect or try to be like a vagabond unit. We have actual cutscenes that play, usually during bonding events, but they'll get pretty same-y pretty quickly. Some characters have their own events, like Keiji can have events where he tricks Toshiie into taking a cold bath or Motonari will have a 3 arrows event if he's set as Strategist. Starting as certain forces in scenarios and entering into battle with certain others can trigger battle events, but there's not much to these. As Oda at Okehazama, we start that battle immediately and kill Yoshimoto if we succeed, having Ujizane replace him as leader of the Imagawa. The forces don't seem to follow any set AI like trying to fight like proper history battles so it quickly becomes a free-for-all. There are other battle events you can trigger like if Oda attacks Azai (doesn't matter where Oichi is or if you had 0 interaction with Azai), but the battles are just standard ones, it's just triggering a quick dialogue scene before the fight. There's really not all that much different from these scenarios, it's basically just affecting force placement. You still want to take over everything and will likely have to fight a lot of generic battles to do it. So I won't have too much to say in the descriptions for the rest of these and honestly am still debating if I'll do more. Oh right, in regular scenarios forces have "ambitions" and fulfilling them will play the credits and let you end the scenario right there if you didn't want to go through with finishing it all the way. Which is kind of like the small unification campaigns that SW2E had. It's a nice way to let you quickly finish a scenario within a single hour instead of having to play for 8 or so to conquer the whole land. And kind of feels like they KNEW it took way too long to finish a whole campaign.