Eiyu*Senki Gold – A New Conquest – Review

Eiyu*Senki Gold – A New Conquest is an adult strategy game, where you conquer the world, meet female versions of famous historical and mythological figures and quite often sleep with them. Ever wanted to see Tutankhamun as a cute anime girl? How about burying your own Excalibur in King Arthur? This might be for you.

It’s worth noting that this is different from the original Eiyu*Senki, despite many similarities. There’s a new story, more adult scenes, and improvements in combat and balancing. That said, it does use the same world, characters, and many systems.

Plot

The story of Eiyu*Senki Gold opens with you washing up on a beach, alone and without any memories. Luckily you are soon found by Masamune Date, a beautiful woman and the ruler of Sendai. She is shown to be quite capricious and suddenly decides to claim you as her little brother.

Much like Masamune’s historical counterpart, she dislikes the isolationist policy of Japan, referred to by the antiquated name of Zipang in this game. Almost immediately you are thrown into battle, as Masamune launches an invasion of the other territories. As quickly as she decides to adopt you as her brother, she decides to make you the king of Zipang.

After conquering Zipang, you learn that there was a reason behind the isolationist policy. You hear that there has been a lot of unexplained wars and uprisings across the world lately and the isolation was to protect it. In a surprising move, Masamune decides the solution is world conquest. That you should lead the Zipang forces abroad to restore public order, investigate the truth and recruit heroes to gather enough power to stop the problem. That and she just likes the idea of world conquest – it’s not the most serious of stories.

Over time, you discover that a mysterious organization known as the Knights Templar is behind the uprisings. They’re sending dark orbs all over the world. Anyone who touches these can be controlled and starts causing chaos. Throughout the story, these often end up in the hands of leaders of countries or powerful generals, who send their countries into war with your own.

On your path to conquest, you come across the Ark of the Covenant. You realize that this is both capable of absorbing the dark orbs to save the infected people and somehow connected to your memories. Along with a threat from the Knights Templar that you hear that the orbs can be used to stop, this has you on a quest to collect all of the dark orbs.

The story itself is never taken too seriously, with some countries just being handed over and some switching allegiances far too quickly. While I’ll refrain from details, I also found parts unbelievable or I caught onto obvious things that the characters should have but didn’t. Still, the overarching story isn’t really the main attraction here. The more serious plot points are so rarely brought up that I almost forgot about them. I wasn’t overly impressed by the conclusion either, though I did enjoy the very final scene.

Slice of Life

Most of the story content is slice-of-life scenes. As you go through the game, you can recruit more than seventy characters for your army and they all have multiple missions. There are also further missions that aren’t connected to a character. Each of these will include a small scene, often talking about the world or giving you some time with a character.

Some of these scenes reference events from real life or the character’s mythology, like Da Vinci’s flying machine or the California gold rush, while some are less connected. You might be spending your time doing paperwork with one of the Knights of the Round table or going on a date with someone.

On the topic of dates, Masamune pushes you to have multiple wives. To the point that she’s sending out marriage licenses to everyone and anyone that can she get to sign one. Following a lot of the character missions has you end up married many times over or otherwise having sex with the characters.

I felt like the plot of Eiyu*Senki Gold was weak. That said, the interactions between the characters and the comedy of the slice of life scenes were really well done. It also referred to several interesting, if not often accurate historical facts about the world. These had me interested to look up the actual history. On the comedy, I was outright laughing at some points, like Bedivere having multiple scenes where she goes off into her own daydream of what you and her could get up to. This comes included with her voicing her parts and your own out loud.

I will say not to come here looking for romance. While a lot of the scenes are fun, it is quantity over quality in a way. There’s no real build-up of romance in the short time that focuses on each character. It tends to be a ‘love at first sight’ or more casual incidents that occur. Experiencing the character scenes did give gameplay benefits though, by unlocking skills, item slots, and so on.

Gameplay

Eiyu*Senki Gold has a world map with many cities. As you progress through the story, you’ll be able to select missions on these, at first to conquer them and then to complete other missions. At first, you can choose two per turn, but this increases later on.

The available missions are quite linear at first, but after a certain point it opens up and you can progress in several different directions. So you can choose to try and conquer Russia quite early on, or it might end up being one of the last countries that you take over. There are some advantages to going to places in certain orders, but the game doesn’t let you know this directly.

As you conquer cities, they bring in income each turn. You can use this to buy or fuse items to equip your characters, to replenish troops you’ve lost, or to increase the max amount of troops. I say troops, but this is essentially each character’s HP.

I should point out here that there are hundreds of missions and that you don’t need to complete them all. You do need to conquer the world, but most of the missions are optional. Some missions give you extra characters or items which are possible to miss, so that’s something to keep in mind. If you want to play the game again, either on the same or another difficulty, this could be a good chance to try different missions and characters. New Game+ lets you transfer certain parts of your progress, such as some unlocked heroes or affection gained to your next playthrough of Eiyu*Senki Gold.

One thing I really liked about Eiyu*Senki Gold was just how flexible the gameplay was. You can go in quite a few directions, you can try fighting several countries at once or you can focus on the optional missions. It’s not perfect as I’ll discuss later, but it’s certainly appreciated.

Battles

Many missions, whether optional or required to complete the story involve battles. You choose up to six characters from your army to place on a 6×3 grid. With so many characters in your army, you can make thousands of potential combinations later on in the game.

Each character has one of nine primary types of skill, such as sword, gun, or magic. I found that most of my favorite characters tended to all be one of the few melee types though. There weren’t as many ranged characters either. That said, several characters did have unexpected skills. One sword type could use a cannon skill with her sword. There are lots of skills with different aspects to them like knocking characters out of place too. Certain skills are more effective against certain types, so it’s definitely worth keeping in mind when choosing who to make stronger and use often.

Whether to use the more effective skills was important too. More powerful skills require brave orbs to use. If you use skills that are not effective, you gain brave orbs. If you use skills that are effective, the enemy gains brave orbs. The same applies the other way too.

While there are quite a lot of factors involved in choosing characters, other than that I didn’t feel like the strategy aspect was too deep. I watched out for the occasional appearance of tiles with stat buffs/debuffs. Spells that did the same, I dealt with as they came at me. Aside from that, it was mostly a case of using effective attacks where possible and staying healed. While I could’ve gone deeper into the strategy, there were only a couple of instances where I felt the need to and it often didn’t help a huge amount. Perhaps it would have been more needed on Very Hard and Nightmare, but those are stated to be aimed at New Game+. Still, I enjoyed the battles.

Gameplay Issues

Unfortunately, I do have some serious criticisms of the gameplay side of Eiyu*Senki Gold. The major one being that it barely gives you any information.

To give you an early example, to start a mission you need to put characters on it. Each mission has requirements like having 4 sail attributes. The characters have some attributes assigned to them and putting 4 characters with the sail attribute on the mission will let you start it. It never mentions this. I found myself quite confused. On trying to start a mission in Hawaii, I couldn’t. Everything until then I’d just put my top characters onto and it worked fine. I only ended up being able to complete this long after I unlocked it.

Not having any information extends to most parts of the game. Skills being effective is only learned about by chance. It never mentions why it happens or what is effective against what. It doesn’t mention that you can do multiple things in a turn and that each one takes an action point. Nothing is said about how to gain brave orbs. These are only a few examples, but it does throw you in the deep end. I ended up flailing about, trying to figure things out for quite a while at the start. I’m still not entirely clear on some aspects, despite having completed the game.

Another area that I had no information about was where to go next. While I praise the game for being flexible and letting you go in multiple directions, difficulty was often inconsistent. Some countries were much more difficult than others, to the point that taking them on early was a quick way to a full team wipe out within the first couple of turns. Sometimes this happened with random optional missions too. Trying the mission and then dying was how I learned, which caused quite a lot of lost time.

Somewhat related to the lack of information is that you can get surprised at times. It didn’t happen until quite a while in, but I eventually started to get attacked myself and having to defend my captured cities. While this seems obvious from the type of game, this came as a complete surprise as it hadn’t happened until I had a good portion of the world conquered.

It first happened at an unfortunate time when I was on my third action and had already used all of my units – and when you’ve used a unit in a battle, you typically can’t use them again until the next turn. I ended up losing the city they attacked. Retaking it was quite easy. Only one unit defended, whereas originally I had to take out several. From there on, I made sure to strengthen some of the characters I didn’t use as often, so I had a few teams with decent power.

More seriously, at one point there was a story event where this happened. I’d saved at the end of the turn where I’d used a number of my stronger attackers, but had some waiting that could fend off a normal attack or two. The normal attacks came as expected. Then I had an unskippable story event between turns where I couldn’t retreat or progress without winning. Being a story event, I was being attacked by much stronger enemies than normal and couldn’t win at all, no matter the strategy or characters I chose from my remaining roster. I tried about ten times but eventually ended up having to revert to an earlier save. I was incredibly lucky that I had an earlier save, as it’s not done automatically and I would’ve had to restart the game despite being over a hundred turns in otherwise.

In short, it really needs a tutorial to ease you into things. Or at least explanations of terms when hovering over things or a guide. And getting caught by that one event could’ve ruined the entire playthrough.

As an additional minor issue, I sometimes found that the game occasionally hung for a few seconds too. This was despite playing on a powerful gaming computer.

Production Values and Quality

While the English translation of Eiyu*Senki Gold is a 2021 release, this is an older game, based on an even older game. Despite this, I found the character art and CGs to be high quality overall. The world map and sprites used in battle less so, but there were still certainly sufficient.

On the adult content, the majority of characters had at least one adult CG in their missions. These were uncensored and fairly detailed. It did feel a pity at times that there weren’t more CGs of favorite characters, but there’s definitely a wide selection of these between the many characters involved.

An important note here. Many of the characters could generously be referred to as petite. For quite a few of them, it would be accurate to use the term flat. This may be an issue for some players. It can’t be totally avoided either, as clothes often get ripped off when defeated in battle. The example below is one of the tamer examples. Usually there’s actual nudity.

The game is partially voiced and considering the large number of characters, this is a lot of different voices. I found it a pleasant surprise that they all felt unique, even where there were overlaps in personality types and tropes between the characters.

Editing quality was high overall. I caught about ten typos, but that’s quite minor for the amount of text.

On the options, they’re fairly basic but there are some useful ones. There are the standard controls around window size and sound. As well as those, you can choose to turn up speed for battles and actions. Late in the game, I learned by accident that holding Ctrl would speed me through battles if needed, but this would be quite useful for replaying.

Verdict

Eiyu*Senki Gold doesn’t have an amazing plot, but it has a huge variety of great characters. The time that you spend with them is the attraction here I feel, which is only helped by the wonderful artwork representing them. I do wish I could’ve spent more time with favorites, but the idea that quantity has a quality of its own certainly prevails here.

The SRPG portions of the game are fun if not standout, but there are some serious issues that I’ve gone over above. These really bring the game down, making it a worse experience than it could have been. Some might be overcome by referring to the Wiki, but this isn’t really an appropriate solution.

If this were just the visual novel aspects of this game, then I’d have no reservations in recommending it. While I still think a lot of people will enjoy it, considering the various issues I had the with SRPG portion, I have to lower it to the following rating.

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If you enjoy visual novels, perhaps you’d like to take a look at Majikoi! Love Me Seriously

Many thanks goes to JASTUSA for a PC review code.