UNCHARTED WATERS

Uncharted Waters is the most un-KOEI game ever made by KOEI, perhaps because it is the only series not designed by Kou Shibusawa, the prolific founder of KOEI. Based on the high-seas adventure period genre (think “Treasure Island” or “Moby Dick”), Uncharted Waters’s gameplay is about sea exploration, trading and combat. The game’s “treasure hunting” theme is unique among KOEI games, although it has been a staple of many RPGs from other companies, such as Square’s “Final Fantasy” series.

A more important difference between UNCHARTED WATERS and other games in the KOEI catalog is that its graphics are considered to be of less quality than what you’d expect from a KOEI title. This could be attributed to its creator, who was not a graphics specialist but rather a historian and translator of Japanese literature.

UNCHARTED WATERS is the most un-KOEI game ever made by KOEI, perhaps because it is the only series not designed by Kou Shibusawa, the prolific founder of KOEI. Based on the high-seas adventure period piece Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Uncharted Waters was a series that allowed you to explore a vast, open world filled with pirates and merchant ships.

But while that sounds like just about every other game in the genre, what set it apart was how much work went into its nautical detail. From the way your ships would bob up and down in accordance with real-world physics to how you could actually build your own boat from scratch and hire dozens of crew members to man the sails, Uncharted Waters was remarkably authentic for a video game series.