"If you are slain in battle, you should be resolved to have your corpse facing the enemy."
-Excellent graphics, sound, and overall presentation.
-Unit variety, generals, terrain, tactics, and combat are top notch.
-The game maintains a certain level of believability and realism that you don't find very often in strategy games of this caliber.
-Strong on-line play with a fairly decent matchmaking system. Large team based battles can be very fun as players can pick and choose their units to make a cohesive and efficient army.
-Naval and siege battles are a great addition to the game and require a completely different set of strategies compared to normal land battles.
-Ninja cut scenes are entertaining, though they grow old after a while.
-Plenty of unlockables and downloadable add-ons.
Bad:
-I almost always found army upkeep to be extremely annoying mid to late game as I was forced to field a larger and larger army just to keep a growing number of enemies at bay. This is frustrating when all I want to do is defend and build up my economy, even after I already own half of Japan. I suppose the developers made it this way in an attempt to constantly keep players on their toes, but it really just came off as frustrating and tedious (not nerve wracking or challenging) whenever I played.
-Once you play through a campaign or two you'll start to settle into a predictable routine and only the RTS battles will excite you.