What’s with the ROTS hate?
I’m sure many have asked this before but I’ll go ahead and ask it again.
For years, ever since the campaign was released essentially, ROTS has sort of been treated as the neglected middle child of the Shogun 2 trilogy. I’ve seen nothing but disdain and disregard the likes of Rome 2’s directed at this campaign for the past—gosh—14 years or so? 7 of which is what constitutes my own time playing Shogun 2 on and off.
Perhaps it is for this reason that I’ve never once touched this campaign, but after around 3 years of not touching this game and finding myself having so much fun with it again, I just went “ah, what the hell. How bad can it be?” And to my surprise it was just…more Shogun 2?
Sure, the unit roster is not exactly diverse, the levies are annoying to use because of how quickly they shatter, and the meta is just samurai spam until you win…but, to give the game credit, as a history buff I believe that the time period is phenomenal and underrated, the unit aesthetic design is actually quite a bit more complex and interesting than the vanilla campaign (but less than FOTS), and the game mechanics are the same! That strategic and tactical gameplay that I love so much about this game is still perfectly just there.
So, what gives?