Much of the fanbase agrees that Shogun 2 is a gem in the Total War series. The same community also largely lambasted Empire, and to a lesser degree its successor, Napoleon. Empire was the first Total War game I played, and I loved it, so as a relative outsider I was very curious about how I'd feel about Shogun 2.
The Pros[]
Graphics[]
A ton has already been written about its graphical accomplishments--after all, it's nearing a decade old--so I'm going to skip over those. I'll just say that they're good. The art style is distinctive and pretty, and the graphics even look relatively crisp by today's standards. Much as Napoleon was able to capture the era with its art style, Shogun 2 is evocative of traditional Japanese paintings.
A BIG knock against the graphics of Shogun 2 is the fact that you need to pay money to add blood to the game via DLC. Shogun 2 was the first game to do this and it's an absolute travesty. But if you don't care about blood, don't get the DLC and you'll be fine.
Sound[]
The voice acting is great, and the speeches the generals give before battles are fantastic. The soundtrack is largely inspired by traditional Japanese fare, and it was just varied enough to not get wearing after I sank some hours into the game.
Land Battles[]
It's refreshing to play a game centered on bows and melee. Terrain is more important, and the spear walls of yari ashigarus accentuated this. Cavalry is speedier and deadlier than ever before. The addition of special abilities of many units makes microing more intensive and rewarding, and I enjoy that generals play a more present role in battles. I was particularly impressed with how they managed to integrate guns, bows, and swords to work so well with each other.
Morale is more fickle than in previous games: in some cases, units will fight down to practically the last man, while lower tier units can break with literally 90% of their men remaining. I find this a good thing because even nominally unwinnable situations can now be a toss-up with some chain routing.
You can now wait for weather to be more favorable in battles: rainy battles reduces stamina recovery and prevents fire from being used, foggy weather reduces accuracy and visibility, and so on. Not only is weather an important tactical consideration, it is also a visual treat. Thunderstorms are rare but when they occur it has always been a delight to me.
Legendary Difficulty[]
Having a limited camera view and no saves was a pretty great idea for the highest difficulty.
Agents[]
By far the greatest mechanical improvement of Shogun 2 over previous games is what it did with agents. Now you can recruit agents manually, when and where you want them. Agents have a concrete way with which they level up, are granted skill points to customize them. This is a vast improvement over the random recruitment and random leveling of previous Total War games. At the same time there's just enough randomization to keep it interesting thanks to the ancillaries that you can gain, as these are randomly generated and range between useless to incredible.
Family trees were interesting, where you have to consider succession if the head of your family is quite old. The honor system was a nice idea but ultimately half-baked: it's pretty easy to gain high honor after a bit of game time and playing with high vs low honor isn't too dramatically different.
The Cons[]
Diplomacy[]
Shogun 2's AI makes no sense. Vassals that would instantaneously die if they declared war on you, not to mention having heavy diplomatic and honor penalties for violating your peace, do so freely, usually between 5-10 turns. Supposed allies backstab you at the drop of a hat. Factions on the other side of the map will declare war on you and sail doomstacks to your side of the map, their situation at home be damned.
In previous Total War games, you can always win if you play intelligently and skillfully. In Shogun 2, you could win flawless victories over and over and still lose due to the entirety of Japan declaring war on you. On the flip side, there are some clans which face a ludicrously easy mid-end game with no one declaring war on you and you being able to squeeze out 10,000 koku for a trade deal, no problem.
If I could fix it, I would make it so that historical friendships meant more. I'd also make the only factions that declare war on you the ones that are actually within reach of you.
[]
It's kind of amazing to me that detractors of Empire could so revile its naval combat system--which is admittedly flawed, no doubt--and yet sing praises about the combat in Shogun 2 while practically completely ignoring naval combat.
Why do they avoid it? Well--it's horrendous. There's no two ways about it. Where to begin? It's extraordinarily luck based: two ships can fire at each other and have wildly different results based on who hits who's archers first. The archers could launch dozens of volleys and kill no one, or loose a single volley and wipe out a quarter of their targets, depending on the mood of the game. Boarding A.I remains as inconsistent as it was from previous Total War games, with no improvement as far as I can see: ships sometimes circle each other over and over again without actually boarding when commanded to. Cannon fire ranges from being completely ineffectual to instantaneously sinking enemy ships. Cannon-armed ships are much worse than in previous games as they completely disregard friendly fire, resulting in potentially horrendous friendly fire incidents. As almost all ships can fire at every angle, any nuances of approaching enemy ships is taken out of the equation. And the ships are just ugly, resembling cardboard boxes more than anything, though I suppose I can't fault CA for being historically accurate.
I found myself skipping naval battles and autoresolving whenever possible. The exception was when I picked up Nanban trade ships, which are practically invulnerable to all other ships. However, even they were a frustration to use: their musketeers often simply don't fire at enemy ships.
Empire's ship battles were a little slow and micro-intensive, sure. But one would be absolutely out of their mind to say that Shogun 2 had better naval battle mechanics.
I will say that one positive of naval aspects is the inclusion of the Black Ship, a single doom-ship that's ludicrously powerful and sails around the map, just daring anyone foolish enough to try and capture it.