When I was 11, my parents gave me Civilization II for Christmas. To understand the significance of this, one must first understand my parents. Specifically, how anti-videogames they are. Because of this, even though I had never heard of the Civilization games (the sales clerk at Babbages must have recommended it), the game took on a very special significance for me. More than a Christmas gift, I received a peace offering from my parents that year. It was a big step for them to take in understanding my passion instead of condemning it.
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Booting up Sengoku from Paradox Interactive is similar, in that in both cases I had no idea what to expect, and in both cases the first thing I’m asked to do is choose a character to play as. No information is given to help guide my decision. All I’m offered to go on is a map and a few nebulous stats, and numbers. I can’t help but feel like even this seemingly innocuous opening task was pregnant with some hidden significance. I had better choose wisely. I end up choosing the Uesugi clan; they’re large, and their difficulty slider isn’t too high. Their numbers seem to be the best. I enter the game to finalize my selection. There was no Uesugi clan in Civilization II, there was just Tokugawa Ieyasu. I doubt I would have played as a Japanese civilization. I had no idea who that was as an 11 year old.
I am already stressed out.
When I played Civilization II I had advisers I could turn to. I used them partly to help me figure out what to do, and partly because they were humorous little videos that I enjoyed watching. Whenever I would get lost (which was often), I would turn to these videos to help guide me towards my next task. They didn’t really help, but at least I enjoyed watching them.
Sengoku also includes a variety of advisers, and selecting them is one of the first things I must do. These advisers are not amusing videos with stereotypical personalities. They are names and character portraits on a spreadsheet, each as indistinguishable as the next. While I may not have fully grasped the concepts they were trying to impart to me, I at least enjoyed watching Civ II’s advisers. Their feudal Japanese counterparts, on the other hand, have none of their charm, kitschy though it was. They are nothing but names and amalgams of numbers. I couldn’t pick a favorite if I wanted to.
Instead I choose the one who’s numbers are highest. The numbers are, after all, all that matter. I am a ruler who knows his subjects only by their numbers; I delegate “Adviser 12 Martial” to increase the defenses of my castle, while having “Adviser 23 Diplomacy” build up the city. I keep “Adviser 16 Intrigue” close by. I don’t know what to do with him, and he doesn’t seem too keen to offer any suggestions.
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As an 11-year-old struggling with the Civilization series, what kept me going was watching my civilization grow. Each time a new structure was finished, my city would expand on the map. It was dynamic and exciting. More than that, it was physical evidence to mark my progress. It helped break the influx of information down into more manageable chunks. Every time a new warrior popped up on the screen, it was the game’s way of telling me you are getting stronger. I may not have been able to fully realize my objectives, but I could always resort to building more warriors. Whatever else was happening, I at least knew I was getting stronger
My goal in Sengoku is to grow my territory. While the overload of information I remember from Civilization is the same, gone is any of its dynamism that I so desperately clung to in my younger years. There is nothing – no increased map area, no warriors sprouting onscreen – nothing to indicate I am meeting my objectives with any success. Only numbers and colors, spreadsheets and map screens and names and too many numbers. Always numbers.
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As my cities improve, my numbers go up but there is no dynamic change. I am not connected to my citizens. I can’t even see them. My soldiers, too, are hidden from me. They are merely numbers and sliders and colors, on a map. Raising my levies does not offer me the satisfying feedback of more and more soldiers on my map; I am cruelly denied even this artificial security to hide behind. Feudal Japan is perhaps one of the biggest game worlds I have explored, and at the same time it seems so incredibly foreign and empty.
Back in my family’s den, muddling my way through Civilization II, I remember the one thing I was looking forward to the most was the battles. If the diplomacy and technology trading and peace offerings were convoluted and stymieing to my attempts at decrypting the game, the battles were at least something I could understand. Alas, my crude attempts at martial dominance were often stopped dead by opponents who benefited from higher-level military hardware, a more efficient distribution of forces, or more advantageous geography. Time after time I would send what seemed like legions of warriors and archers to what I was sure would be a victory, only to end up dragging my limping survivors back to the capitol before they were all utterly destroyed.
Playing Sengoku in my living room yields vivid flashbacks to that experience. It seems like I’m following all the rules; my numbers are higher, my colors more welcoming green than “danger” red, my castles better defended. Yet each declaration of war brings defeat. One action in a single stroke raises military power but drops my “honor” to catastrophic levels. All of a sudden my armies are no longer at peak strength; their numbers have inexplicably dropped and I find myself once more licking my wounds.
In order to raise numbers dropped through battle I have to raise numbers through diplomacy, but this lowers other sets of numbers. Honor, currency, disposition, martial, diplomacy, intrigue, faction alignment – I am inundated with so many numbers I am losing count. You need honor to wage war, but you need diplomacy to gain honor, which requires money and disposition, which you gain through faction alignment that you earn through waging war. Each set of numbers affects all the others, interconnected in an invisible butterfly effect of impenetrable opacity. The more I try and understand all the numbers, the more numbers get heaped on top of me.
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I wish I could say that through perseverance and sheer force of will I was able to overcome the adversity presented to me by Civilization II. I tried, for weeks on end, to decipher a game I didn’t understand that offered little help to a fledgling novice like me. Ultimately, though, I fell victim to my own frustration and lack of experience. In the end, I enabled the in-game cheat menu and developed stealth bombers to fly around and nuke my stone-age neighbors out of existence, over and over, until eventually I got bored even of that and the game faded into obscurity for me. It is perhaps the source of one of my greatest secret gaming shames. I really tried.
Playing Sengoku all these years later, I’m no longer desperately trying to make the most out of an uncharacteristic olive branch from my anti-videogame parents. Who knows – maybe if that were the case, I would play more fervently. As it stands, Sengoku sits on my desktop, remaining aloof, impenetrable – as foreign to me as Civilization II ever was. This time there are no cheats I can activate to call in stealth bombers to rain fiery death on my enemies.
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I feel a similar pang of shame moving on from this game as I did 14 years ago at Christmas. After all, it’s not a bad game. It hints at a wealth of depth and intrigue and possibilities, but it buries it all under unfriendly interfaces and overcrowded map screens – and numbers. Sengoku is a black box shrouded in numerical obfuscation. Perhaps it was designed with only the stoutest of arithmancers in mind; for those who are initiated into the world of numbers and stats and spreadsheet interfaces, there is plenty of that in the world of Sengoku’s Feudal Japan to enjoy. For my part, I spent hours practically shouting in its face – “MAKE YOURSELF ACCESSIBLE TO ME!”, and Sengoku just stared back and coolly replied, “no”. I challenged Sengoku, and I lost. But at least I tried. I really tried.
Originally posted on Pixels or Death