Initially quite impressive, but loses your interest fast.
Okay, what works? I really like the ability to play as any level of officer. X has taken when starting in VII, and polished it very nicely. You can try your hand as the nobody on the field of battle, to the leige and it all works quite well. You rarely find yourself without anything to do, and you can make a real impact at any level. Just working on your character can be very addictive and I've spent many a late night with the perpetual thought 'just one more turn'.
That said, after playing so much the faults are becoming painfully obvious, and there are many:
1. AI, where the devil are you. I don't just mean for the opponent, for anybody. It's barely functional at best, and often what you can do in a few short months the AI takes years to pull off in game time. Battles are no better. I can consistently massacre my enemies in battle (which is just bad AI on the opponent's part), but my prefects seem like incompetent boobs too, unable to win dang near any defensive battle.
2. Bad battle balance. Hey, this direct command is cool and all, but god is it abusable. This one command totally trumps most others in combination with ranged attacks, and it can render the best defenses pointless by continuously ordering your 1 powerful unit to attack repeatedly in 1 round. Add to this the seriously overpowered towers which make the already potent ranged attacks even more powerful and you got serious issues.
3. Just not enough unique content. There are lots of historical events and pics, but for your average gameplay session you'll only see most of them if you directly go out to cause them (and even then they can be a pain). What's left to to endlessly repeat the same ones over and over again and that gets old REAL fast. You'll find yourself endlessly pressing the X button to get thru conversations fast, and pointless events quickly. What they really needed was more variety. Where are the marriages? Let's have some random special events while talking to people.
4. Minigames too luck based and poorly balanced. Basically you have 2 major mini games in here, debates and duels. Neither is really well done. Duels rely on a randomly given out set of moves with a sort of rock,paper,scissor thing going on, but you really never feel like you're in much control. It's more luck than much else, and feels like weak design. Powermoves are great, but not well balanced and the level of tactics you can bring to play is rather limited. Debates suffer the same issues (and man are taunts overpowered). Same random stockpile, same powermoves that are poorly balanced. Both mini's had potential but sadly need a lot more work before they are good.
5. Hey Koei, you've heard of this thing called 3D rendering, right? What can I say, Koei still looks like they're back in the SNES days... okay, maybe that's a bit harsh, but this certainly doesn't live upto today's standards in graphics, and the sound is no better. The sad thing is Koei I know can do way better than this. They have Dynasty Warriors and Kessen, both 3D games which still dated look better than this and sound better too. Dynasty tactics also looks better even though it uses very similar general presentation.
6. Strategic play is suffering. Okay, this is largely thanks to the AI being so poor, but it's more than simply that. When you're a leader you're too divided between working on your nation or yourself and this seems often artificial and unnecessary. Your commands you can give are very limited too at all levels: can't tell generals to work on their skills/stats, can't tell a city to amass troops for defense, can't give any kind of strategic policies to districts other than 'take this' or 'defend' which are far too broad to be useful. Plots have become more limited, and really are even less useful than usual. Those that are useful are too easily abused (when I can reduce an officer from 92 loyalty to less than 30 in 1 month, something is not right, or order from 100 to 0 in the same timeframe).
7. No obvious way to cancel waits. Maybe I missed it in the manual, but whenever you go into a action that take so many days, unless you get attacked you can't break out of it. This can cause you to miss all sorts of things and is rather annoying.
8. Relationships are almost too easy. It's nice being able to get a guy to be friendly quick, but being able to get them upto the highest level in less than a month seems too easy. Even when you're with someone who is very incompatible you can still get them up very high very quick.
9. Annoying structure to upgrades. Okay, each city has it's own buildings, that's interesting, yet if I want to make a elephant unit, I'm stuck making it in 1 of 2 cities. Worse, if I want to upgrade a unit to the next level, I also have to be in the appropriate city. Oh, btw, since most often you aren't in control of either of these places directly, you'll just have to hope the AI prefect does it for you since you can't tell him to do so. This is just kinda stupid. Either give us the ability to give detailed orders like this directly, or allow us to upgrade/create units ourselves perhaps with increased cost.
10. Campaigns, how do I hate thee. Interesting idea, utterly stupid implementation. On the bright side, the stupidity of the design makes these probably the 1 truly challenging thing in the game, which is exactly why you'll probably avoid them.
Hmmm, after all those negatives, you'd think I'd hammer the score more than I do, but I still find the thing very addictive, and I've put a ton of hours into it. I just see so much they could do to improve. Keep trying Koei and put some more effort into it!