There are so many types of games in the world, in no small part due to the fact that there are so many different types of people in the world. The term “there’s something for everyone” really does apply, from the hardcore FPS gamer to the casual gamer matching colors in a mobile game. With that in mind, strategy games offer a lot of world building and growth, in which you must create your own world brick by brick to eventually defeat your enemies or their country. HongShou Studio is mixing this genre with several others in The Heroic Legend of Eagarlnia. The fusion of Japanese RPG’s character interaction with attractive artwork, the use of sprites to represent your troops, an over-arching plotline and world map gets used here to great effect all in a high fantasy backdrop.

In a medieval setting, your kingdom is on the brink of disaster, and it’s up to you and your group of warriors, clerics, and nobleman to not just defend but take over the land and secure your dominance. But it’s not just defense and attacking you need to worry about, no you need to truly govern your area with everything you have. The economy, rebuilding areas, lobbying enemy warriors to come to your side, political trickery to ruin defenses, and much more just to give you the option to attack. This is a game for the patient planner inside all of us, but it’s not boring since every turn you take you have to hope and pray your enemy doesn’t out produce you, build their defenses or in the worst case attack your city.

To help you on your way, you have your own posse of warriors to defend and attack, but they are all very different, and you can lobby others to join your cause which increases your ranks. With so many heroes that all have very different talents, it leads to some very interesting gameplay. For example, excluding one of your main members from battle because his charisma is high so you can use him to lower the defenses of the army with politics. You could also spend a turn with one of the warriors training the soldiers so that your base army that goes with you to war will be much harder to kill. There’s no perfect answer to war across the board, and sometimes creating a treaty with the enemy castle is the best way to survive.

With such great artwork for the conversations, such distinct and unique characters and situations, it’s easy to love this world. The sheer number of options can be a bit much at first, so I do suggest going through the tutorial to at least get your bearings first before going into battle. There are some odd choices on the music side, like having a babbling brook as background music for a significant amount of time, which becomes annoying. Small problems aside, this is great fun for those that love the strategy genre and want some anime influence.