Before each stage, you must pick out a piece of land you want to try and conquer and there are just over ten to choose from. Unlike in the Playstation games where you could pick your equipment, accessories and officers separately, the equipment feature has been omitted and a much simpler “Commander Card” system is used instead. They aren’t like a deck of cards that you use at will as in a card game. Each of these cards represents more commanders but instead of having them following you around the battlefields, they are stationed at key bases to delay your adversary.


Pick the best cards to protect your bases and gain “spells”.
Cards can also level up after being used in several battles, determine the range of “spells” you can cast and boost your stats depending on which cards you select. Spells can’t be cast or selected freely so basically, if you want to have more chances of using a certain spell you’ll have to select more cards that give you that spell. You see, spells don’t run off mana or MP like in most RPGs. Instead, one of them is randomly selected from your cards after you collect a certain amount of coins that enemies drop. It’s all part of the “Obstruction Slot” system which is kind of like playing jackpot because you don’t always end up with a spell. There are chances of getting nothing too after all that coin collecting so most of the time you’ll be saving a spell for later use. Obstructions include a dark cloud that limits your field of view, confusion so that a character is going in the wrong directions, a whirlwind that sends your opponent to another random zone and my favourite earthquake which damages enemies within range.


Hmmm, “Dark Cloud”… Pretty useless obstruction.
Once the whole stage selecting and card management has been completed, it’s time for the action part of the game. The bottom screen shows a map of you and your enemy’s bases and the goal is to take out all the opposition’s bases before finally attacking their fortress. The AI will be doing this too and the first to do this conquers the land.

To progress between the zones on the map you have to defeat a certain number of enemies before arrows will appear, allowing you to move on. Up to 20 enemies can be attacking you at any time but they’re all generally easy to kill. Alternating between the two attack buttons releases different kinds of combo attacks from your character which is enough to kill them. Apart from that and the Obstruction Slot system mentioned above, there a few other obstacles to help break up the constant mindless button bashing such as having to break bells that make the enemy invincible and loose rock bridges that crumble away. Sending your foes literally flying away once you unleash your special attack is pretty fun but the rest of the action is extremely bland. Troops act like zombies and they’re at a lower level than the Resident Evil ones. When you’re finally up against the slightly more challenging commanders, it’s a game of “knock-down-and-wait-to-get-up-again” loop. The wait just completely breaks the whole tempo of the battle.


With the right combo of buttons, you can take out plenty in no time.
And that’s really all there is to the game. Once either you or your AI opponent has conquered a piece of land, you move to the next “stage” and repeat the whole card managing and action part cycle until the whole Northern China has been divided up. Whoever, rules the most land in the end wins. As you can guess, the entertainment doesn’t last long when you’re doing the same thing over and over again with no storyline to enjoy or at least some varying conditions to fulfil.