Really wish I liked this game more. Its promise is wonderful: a grand strategy game set in mythical Ireland, with gorgeous graphics and wonderful music. Unfortunately, when you start playing the game as it is and not as the manual describes it, it turns out to be a fairly shallow experience, which is a frequent thing with these older Koei grand strategy games. I can only imagine this was pretty solid for 1995, but for the contemporary gamer I think the promise of CT is better fulfilled by King of Dragon Pass (which is remarkably similar in some regards, but that is apparently coincidence).

Unlike old Nobunaga's Ambition games, you get one action per champion, not per province, which to me feels like an attempt to make player power growth less geometric (by decoupling tempo from economic strength). Sadly, getting champions through peaceful means is very hard (you need your leader’s level to be higher than the recruit, and most wandering champions are significantly higher level than you at the start) and development and diplomacy are both extremely slow. Despite the manual’s insistence that the diplomatic approach is best, the game’s mechanics are set up in a way where the absolute best early-mid game strategy seems to be a weird scorched-earth horde approach: attacking a neighbour with all your might, taking all of your banked resources to your ‘new’ province, and continuing to roll through Eire. This is a very fast way to build up both your champion roster and a gigantic stockpile of resources, which is very good, since it means instead of doing stuff like farm or chop wood, your newly-captured champions can spend their turns playing hurling, which I think is the highest peaceful EXP activity in the game.

Rolling around the island as an ever-growing, hurling-obsessed deathball is a pretty funny mental image, but starts getting repetitive pretty fast. Aside from the combat being nothing special (I like the rune-based magic system, but that’s about it), this playstyle just kind of ruins the illusion of every single other mechanic in the game. Until you gather the majority of the island's champions under your banner, doing anything like building up your provinces or engaging in trade/diplomacy with neighbours just feels like a waste of time. It also ruins any feeling of uniting the tribes to defeat your common foe, the Fomorians, since what you're doing is arguably more destructive than their thing. Apparently when you do end up uniting Eire, you get to fight against Balor's champion Conann and then counter-attack Balor himself, but I found the game too repetitive to get there. Which is a shame, because I really do love looking at it and clicking around in the menus.

The strongest part of the game is the amount and variety of puzzles and elaborate secrets. The gunplay is good too but the low enemy variety and mostly underwhelming boss design means I'm always never looking forward to combat in the first place.

Some aspects of character building are pretty fun (weapon/skill loadouts), most others are typical "3.157% extra lightning damage on a wednesday" fodder. I really wish I understood why people talk about build variety or how this game is fun for hundreds of hours because making a meaningfully distinct build just feels like trying to scoop dry sand up into a tower.

The writing was a big letdown too. The world-hopping premise is cool as first but as I started realising it's headed towards the most cliché reveal possible for this kind of setting I lost interest rapidly. Layering really grating "sooo yeah that just happened"-tier quips from nearly every character on top of that really didn't work for me either.