Expeditions: Samurai

brother yes

Still the Early Access. I will update my review when the full release comes out. At the landing, go to the castle area, there is no conversation. Instant battle. At the Inn, after you save Lady Sayako, Instant Battle, NO ENEMIES. NEVER ENDING

Overall, my impression has been very positive The Combat is the good old classic from the previous games with more polish, but with more RPG elements, which is highly appriciated The Storytelling is efficient, the characters are easily recognizable and understandable on first glance. The settup is intriguing, a Stranger in a Foreign Land. The Edo Period is a classic for a reason, much violence, conflict and intrigue, so no surprise there. I say it is worth exploring. And for the inaccuracies, well the Developers have never hidden the fact that they change things to make things fit There are some minor bugs, mostly with the interface and menu, hope that gets fixed. Overall, positive impression

So far I would say I like it quite a bit. The voice acting is good, the RPG mechanics show some improvement over the past, taking some of the best parts of Viking and Rome both. I had some worries about the art style from the promotional materials but I'd say its okay. The improvements in the live action parts kind of balance with the downgrade in the 2D, in my view. As for the performance, nothing stands out as especially bad. The stealth parts seem to be kind of like what you see in other CRPGs which is new for the series. I'm not great at it so far. I'd like to see more about how the world building is to progress with the story.

Une époque intéressante à jouer, la rencontre du japon médiéval avec l'occident, qui amène des situations tactiques nouvelles avec à la fois des armes traditionnelles et des armes à feu. J'aime beaucoup aussi le style graphique de l'interface de gestion et les dialogues avec des voix vivantes et des accents qui respectent les origines différentes des personnages (et du coup l'anglais me semble assez facile à comprendre). C'est un early access, mais les bases me semblent déjà solides au lancement (combats, carte géographique, journal des quêtes, gestion des personnages...) et ça va continuer à s'enrichir au fur et à mesure notamment pour l'histoire et les quêtes secondaires. Une belle aventure originale que je ne regrette pas d'avoir déjà pris à ce stade, vivement la suite, et que je reprendrai ensuite probablement en totalité en coop.

Early access - pretty buggy at first but not too bad after the first patch. I've played Viking and Rome extensively so much is the same - If you were hoping to play as a samurai you will be a little disappointed as this is strictly European point of view. Knowing the language feels a little too easy in some ways - I liked how the Vikings game handled early encounters better. Still learning how the devs are building the skill tree for gameplay with a party - I'll probably stop before too long and start over again to align my hero with the dialog needs in the early game.

Enjoying my time with it so far despite having a few pain points: 1) The equipment screen shows everyone in your party not just who you have with you which makes it somewhat tedious scrolling through to equip & spec people the way you want. It'd be amazing if the menu grouped together your party for this. 2) The game is tagged as a party based RPG but there are several areas where you can't have your companions not only that but your companions skills can't be used in conversation so there's no point speccing them into things like persuasion etc & by the same token you're kinda forced to spec your char into these types of skills because of this 3) The option to hide helmet isn't immediately obvious I went throughout the entire early access thinking it wasn't available but it is. You just gotta click the helmet slot & hold T instead of it either being inside the game settings or an obvious toggle on the helmet slot 4) There's no auto balance as far as I can tell in trade windows you have to manually adjust how much money you're paying over & over again until you find the perfect point 5) Desperately needs a way to respec your points 6) stealth is very clunky it's all done in real time but you have to shift left click to move stealthily to get behind an enemy then you need to press an ability number & then left click the enemy to stealth attack & all this is done in real time so with all these inputs by the time you get to do the attack they may have already turned around & seen you. 7) Needs the ability to bind shift & ctrl modifiers to different keys. would love to put them on my mouse side buttons 8) There are multiple quest objectives that require you to non-lethally deal with an enemy but this system isn't explained at all. How do you knockout an enemy without killing them? I managed to achieve it by throwing a rock at the enemies but wasn't able to achieve the objective in a different area because there weren't any rocks & every ability I had just outright killed them 9) I feel like I'm being punished by not playing in co-op mode. In co-op mode it seems like you can divide the conversation skills between you & your friend & branch out into other skills too but you obviously can't do this playing by yourself. Again this links back to not being able to just have your companions skills cover your char's weakspots & not being able to use them everywhere. I literally had a chest I couldn't get to because my char didn't have enough breaking yet piet who did have enough was standing right next to it & I couldn't ask him for help 10) The game needs to automatically recognise who in my party has the best skill for the task at hand. It gets annoying switching to Antje use her skullduggery to open a lock to then switch back to my char to loot it & continue exploring. The game should be able to just detect she has enough & use her skill stat to open the lock. I'm sure these points will be addressed & changed/fixed as they progress through early access but as I said I'm still enjoying what is there.