Lords or the Rising Sun puts you in the role of head of a 12th Century Japanese clan. Your father has just passed leadership to you, and it falls to you to work with limited resources to take over Japan.
The primary map is strategic in nature, allowing you to send your armies from one city to another, along prescribes routes. When armies meet, play shifts to a more detailed, but ultimately still strategy, game-play, allowing you to charge, attempt to flank, and ultimately route the opposing force.
After a successful victory, your opponent fleeing before you, you can siege the opportunity to take matters into your own hands in one of the most fun action oriented portions of the game. On horseback, you ride through an obstacle course of terrain, slicing left and right to hill guards, and eventually the defeated general. It's a very satisfying sequence.
Other portions of the game include engaging in a siege, perhaps the most difficult portion of the game, which has you and your men running though the enemy city, searching out its heart, and all the while being assaulted by archers and the like. It has been aptly described elsewhere as something akin to the ancient upright game, Gauntlet. Luckily, for any of these events,
it's easy enough to have the computer control the action - for my part, I only ever tried performing the Siege myself manually a couple times, failing horribly in the effort.
My favorite sequence, however, was when the shoe was on the other foot, and an enemy army was laying siege to one of my own cities. This action sequence puts you in the position of archer, firing at enemies as they try to climb your numerous outer walls to gain access to city. Nothing is better than shooting defenseless samurai and they charge at you - very satisfying.
The game also includes some random events. Armies led by other generals will sometimes join you, or randomly go rogue (the latter is often difficult to deal with), and there's also a quest for a wife who's hidden within one of the many cities. Assassination attempts are also part of the game, but sending them after your enemies can backfire - if you're accused of doing so, you'll be forced to commit seppuku (ritual suicide), and your game will be over.
As I recall, back on my Amiga 500 (I feel old), the game had pretty good replay value, since the random events could dramatically change the course of a game, and individual performance in the mini-games affected the outcome significantly too. I recall once defending Edo with a tiny contingent of troops based solely on my stellar skill as an archer in the Besiege game described above. I shot so many of those attackers, my mouse started freezing up.
It's amazing to think of how much game used to fit into less than 2 megabytes. This old one is definitely worth looking into.
