As for the explosions and deadliness of gunpowder, it made that game enjoyable for me because of how desperate battles became, and how costly mistakes were.
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I especially remember loving a campaign I did where I forced myself to play without any gunpowder, as one of the shogunate factions, on legendary. It was extremely challenging to try and close in the distance with arrows and swords, ambushing around forests, etc.
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The music was fantastic too.
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The music is one of the reasons I can't touch fots. I hate it. There is something about the meandering, aimless melodies Jeff van Dyck sometimes writes that makes my skin crawl. If someone is doing a let's play and either of these tracks comes up, I have to immediately mute the video or my day is ruined. I'm not exaggerating either, this is legitimately how I feel. I had to quickly copy the links to these to avoid me hearing anything through the headphones which are sitting on my desk.
The artwork is some of the worst I've seen in a professionally published game. It's truly horrible. In contrast, the artist they had for ROTS and the base game was excellent, it's some of the best imitation ukiyo-e I've ever seen:
Now compare that to this utter gutter gash.
The AI is awful, it's literally just copypasted from the base game so the AI treats riflemen like archers and tries to bait shots from you or send one unit of riflemen to fight 3 of yours. Sieges are laughable, and it is practically impossible to lose a siege defense because the AI tries to attack your units with riflemen but can't get a good shot, and so it climbs up the walls and dies. It's a meme game at best, shockingly boring at worst.
Also this is the first game in the series where agent spam ruins the entire campaign. In the mid-late game the agents are more powerful than armies a lot of the time and the only way to stop them is to play the tedious agent game yourself. The AI cheats for agents even on the easiest difficulty to the point where 3 full stacks is less threatening to your plans than a single geisha.
It's a historical period I find really interesting but the game turns it into a silly "dumb traditional shogun vs modern westernised imperial faction" Last Samurai ripoff when it was more like the opposite at the start of the war. More people die in a single battle in FOTS than died in the entire Boshin War.
WE ARE READY TO DEFEND SIR