You can level your generals and boost their special talents by fighting both major battles and an assortment of minor skirmishes that become available. A number of officer skill upgrades and troop improvements help keep things from getting too stale, however, and in between battles you can purchase new units, skills, and a bewildering array of weapons, armor, and other equipment to outfit your generals and boost your abilities. And while it's certainly fun to watch a group of infantry form a spinning death wheel that decimates enemy groups, it does start to wear thin after you've seen it for the hundredth time. There's a bit of mixing and matching when it comes to the various units and generals you have available, but your strategy will usually boil down to cutting your way to your objective by using your powerful group skills and then using those same troop skills to clear the stage so you won't spend much brainpower on tactics. And the units themselves have 'troop skills,' which are special charge attacks that let them slice through enemy squadrons for massive damage. Your generals also each have unique and learned abilities, called 'officer skills,' that you can use in battle to heal your units, increase their attack power, and so on. While you can rack up some bonuses in that mode (rampage mode), often you'll be able to rout the enemy with just the brute force of your separate units. You can control any of the individual groups on the field and direct them in mass melee against your foes, and you also have the option to switch to that unit's general to control him or her directly in brawling that's very similar to that found in the sister series, Dynasty Warriors. Before each fight, you'll assign your units and support squads to the provided locations on the battlefield, and then it's a matter of leveraging your warriors to good effect to obtain your goals. You'll grow attached to the diverse cast and their struggles without being pulled from the action for significant periods of time.Īnd there's plenty of action doled out in the many battles that range across Japan's scattered and contentious shogunates. Everything unfolds in short, manageable cutscenes between major and minor conflicts as you progress, and as a result, the game never gets bogged down in ponderous, self-important storytelling. The tale is based loosely on historical fact, but there's plenty of romance, mysticism, and some ham-fisted comedy to spice up what might otherwise be textbook battles. Japan has been thrown into wild disarray, and Nobunaga Oda seeks to bring peace to the land by jamming a polearm into the face of every general he sees.īased on the Warring States period of Japanese history, Kessen III follows the story of a brash young nobleman named Oda Nobunaga as he sets about unifying a turbulent Japan by dominating the nation through military might.

Kessen III delivers a good balance of tactical decision making and up-close action that will be most appealing to existing fans of Koei's other beat-'em-up works, but it's simple recipe for mass warfare can create an armchair general out of anyone.

Koei's Kessen games are strategy-action hybrids that serve to bridge the gap between the company's statistics-dense strategy titles and the pure hack-and-slash swordfests that characterize its Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors series.

Kessen 3 item locations