 Sim-nestrack! Time to dive back into the time-consuming and complicated world of Koe strategy games. Here we have Gemfire for Super Nintendo, which was also released for the NES, Genesis, MSX, DOS, and later Windows. Yes, this is the same menu-heavy turn-based strategy style everyone's come to expect from Koe, where you pick your faction and conquer territory and manage up to thirty different provinces, but the main thing that makes Gemfire stand out is that it's not a historically based sim game. This is a fantasy game, an original story featuring four different campaigns that can support up to two players. So, long ago, Six Wizards protected the land of Ishmaria. One day they're attacked by a dragon, the wizards seal it into a ruby, and then turn themselves into gemstones to complete a crown called Gemfire. Fast forward to today, and the current king of Ishmaria is letting the crown get to his head, so to speak. Am I right? And he's such a lousy ruler that his daughter steals the crown and prize the Six Wizard gemstones loose, and they scatter themselves across the land. The king's daughter is imprisoned for her betrayal, and the king keeps the dragon to defend himself, while the wizards each support whatever lord they've become friendly with. There's four campaigns you can play out within this story, each featuring four characters you can play as, giving you a total of 16 different experiences available here. At first you're probably going to want to take control of Prince Aron of Blanche, or Prince Andor of Lyle, since they're the strongest and most well-rounded characters, but you do have other characters you can select if you really get into this game. Gems are distributed differently in each scenario. Some lords start with a few gemstones already making things a bit easier for you, and some characters don't have any, which would represent the most difficult path. The ownership of each province shifts around each scenario as well. The game also has you select an advisor, but I found that ultimately this choice doesn't really matter. The structure in Gemfire follows a calendar year. For example, your total food amount is based on how well your land is cultivated, and that's calculated every September. Taxes are calculated every January based on how happy your population is. That's what the red flag rating is there. You get one action per month, and there are four options, military, domestic, diplomacy, and view. With the military option you can straight out attack or recruit more soldiers or hire a monster. I like how that's phrased there. With domestic, that's where you trade and cultivate your land. Diplomacy is where you can partner up with other provinces or attempt to sabotage them. And then last, view is just rearranging your hierarchy of soldiers, like entrusting certain provinces to other characters beneath you so you wouldn't have to bother managing them anymore. But that can be risky because they might do something stupid. It's a game of management and delegation. You have to prioritize properly, and the first thing you gotta do is take care of your own people. Sure, it's fun to go all Rambo guns blazing and attack everything right away, but if you do that, uh, you're not gonna like this game. Because you'll get beat down immediately. You gotta build up to your attacks, and to do that, you have to spend your first several turns providing as much food as you can. And, you know, making sure nobody feels the urge to attack you. To prevent this, it really helps to give your excess food to the surrounding provinces, if you can. Sure, you could make friends with everyone and negotiate your way to victory, but let's face it, it's more fun to impose your will through combat. Once you've taken care of your own people and are ready to attack, you gotta treat the map like you're putting together a puzzle. You don't wanna start in the middle, because, I mean, you're surrounded by factions that can retaliate immediately. Start on the edges, if you can, simply because there's fewer people to deal with. The main problem here, as is the case with most Koa games, is that everything is paced very slowly, and the battles here are very limited. The only real strategy that works is making sure you attack from a different angle rather than head on. Everything else appears to be just window dressing, like it's there for the sake of being there, like the fence building mechanic. You've got a few different types of soldiers, which is nice, and the goal is to either take out your enemies entirely or capture their flag. You can just wait them out and hope they run out of food, which is interesting, but it almost never works. Another major factor holding this game back is that it's got the same old Koa graphics that are practically interchangeable with every other SNES Koa game, or in some cases with every other NES Koa game. Everything here is extremely lo-fi, with the exception of some of the cutscenes. The music is fine, but not all that noticeable, certainly nothing to hook you into playing the game or anything like that. So yeah, I just wanted to give the general gist of Gemfire, nothing too in-depth because, well, that would defeat the point of this channel. I just want to sum up complicated games like this to give the viewers a taste of what to expect, with the hopes that it could be useful to retro gamers out there, because while I don't think this game is for everyone, I do think it could be for the right person, if that makes sense, and that's evidenced by the fact that people have made Gemfire ROM hacks introducing new scenarios, which is kind of cool. But as it is for someone like me, Gemfire is okay. I would say if you're looking for a more accessible game like this, I'd start with something like Uncharted Water's New Horizons. Gemfire is, like I said, very slow-paced, the strategic elements are pretty limited, and the presentation is bare bones. But if you're patient and you dig turn-based strategy games like Risk, then yeah, you'd enjoy Gemfire.