Visually it’s not very impressive either because you’re mostly looking at blurred, pixelated 2D characters with very little animation. Not a great sight but to be fair, it would be too hard for the DS to render the action if they were any higher quality. You also won’t be looking at them for long anyway. On the other hand, the 3D environments look a little more exciting with a selection of fairly good looking oriental structures, ballistas and some Kanji of course. There’s a small sample of voice and sound effects letting you feel every punch dealt or weapons clashing, all mixed together with rock BGM playing in the background.


Environments look fairly interesting at least.
With each “stage” taking around 15~20 minutes of play once you get those combos going, you can expect around just over 4 hours of play before a ruler of Northern China is determined. However, there’s little reason to go back to the game after that unless you’re fond of collecting the 100 or so Commander Cards. In fact, you’ll probably even get bored after playing through half of the “stages”. There simply isn’t enough variety in “Shin Sangoku Musou Fighters Battle DS” to keep the interest going. And why the developers didn’t use the touch screen where the game could have benefited is beyond me.


There’s really not much to figure out, just the controls. Cards are pretty much self-explanatory thanks to the coloured key text and icons.

• Sending lots of foes literally flying.
  
• Cute character art on cards.
  
• Fairly good looking 3D oriental environments.

• Few characters to choose from.
  
• Extremely repetitive, no varying goals.
  
• Blurred, pixelated characters.
  
• Card selecting takes longer than it should at first.
  
• Bosses fights have a broken tempo.
  
• Do the developers know there’s a touch screen?