 Thanks to John for the request via Patreon, the SNES had all kinds of gigantic clunky and unwieldy PC ports, many of them courtesy of developer Koei who specialized in simulation and turn-based strategy games, everything from Aerobiz to Romance of the Three Kingdoms to Nobunaga's Ambition to Gemfire to Liberty or Death. Many of these games just aren't that fun to play nowadays because they're just too ambitious for the Super Nintendo hardware. The user interface usually has way too much going on, everything is super confusing and unintuitive, and the games are just too huge for their own good, many of them just should have stayed on PC. Koei did provide some exceptions to that, I did a video on Inindo Way of the Ninja a few months ago, that's a strategy game that has some typical RPG elements and also has some interesting ideas, it's very slowly paced and doesn't look like much, but the game's not a total loss, it's still halfway decent. The same could be said for the Uncharted Water's SNES ports, especially the second game, New Horizons. Starting with the first game simply titled Uncharted Water's, this game was on MSX and the NES before making its way to Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo in 1992, and yeah as you might expect from an early Koei game, the graphics here at First Glance do not look like much, and I guess that's the first hurdle you gotta get over if you want to get into this one. This looks like an NES game in many ways, especially the overworld map, but thankfully there's quite a bit of substance here to dive into that tries to make up for it. Uncharted Water's is part adventure game, part strategy, and part role-playing game. It's an adventure game in that it's non-linear and you can do pretty much whatever you want whenever you want. It's a strategy game because the goal of the game is to outmaneuver your opponents, and it's an RPG because it's a character-driven adventure where you play as Leon Franco, a 16-year-old boy who's out to restore his family name, and he sets out to do this by recruiting a crew for his ship and travel the world trading goods, making investments, fighting pirates and ships of rival nations, searching for treasure, and of course rescuing a princess. Or you can say screw all that and just be a total A-hole and be a pirate yourself if you want. That all sounds cool, right? Of course, Koei games always sounded cool, but once you got down to playing the game, there's a bit of a steep learning curve and it's like, what in the hell do I do? In this case, you start up Uncharted Water's and you're met with a set of skills and scores. You press left or right on the d-pad to scroll through different sets of scores, although I'm not sure it makes that much of a difference because you can apply the bonus points at the bottom to whatever you want anyway and make every score 70 something. So what difference does it make? So yeah, this game is predicated on open world exploration. The time you settle in looks the same though. There's a marketplace where you buy and sell stuff and even invest in the port to raise a little support for your home country of Portugal. But if you do that, it'll piss off other countries like Spain and Turkey and you'll have a tougher time making other allies. You can see some of this info in the guild building where you pay to see who supports or opposes who at any given time. There's also an inn where you recruit your crew and gather info. There's the lodge where you rest up for the night, a shipyard where you buy, sell, fix, or remodel ships and there's a palace which is where the game's main narrative takes place. You eventually work up enough favor to meet the king or sultan or whoever and they send you on missions finally resulting in a mission where you rescue a princess. Or again, you don't have to bother with any missions and you can just screw around and do whatever you want and that's kinda cool. The only problem is how incredibly dry this game is. The story is fine for what it is and all the open world politicking, negotiating and maneuvering is cool and reasonably well balanced, but there's just not enough style here to compliment all the substance. The game is fine on paper but the graphics are lousy, the music is decent but a little bland, and there's just not enough personality here to keep you entertained. But that brings me to the sequel. Uncharted Waters New Horizons was also developed by Koei and made available for the PC98, Sega Genesis PC, and the SNES this time in 1994, so the game's overall presentation has made a quantum leap over the previous game, and that goes a long way toward making this a much more fun and engaging experience. This time around you have six different character arcs you can play through. There's Joao Franco, the son of Leon Franco from the previous game, he's searching for the lost land of Atlantis. Catalina is a pirate from Spain who is out to avenge the deaths of her fiancee and her brother. Otto is on a secret mission by order of King Henry VIII to defeat the Spanish navy. Ernst is a Dutch cartographer who wants to map the entire world. Pietro is an Italian treasure hunter who must repay the debt his deadbeat father left him, and Ali is a Turkish merchant who grew up in poverty but stumbled into owning a ship some house so he's out to make his fortune. So yeah the sheer number of characters here gives this game a huge amount of depth and subsequently a ton of replay value, and the storytelling and character development here are a massive improvement over the first game. Each character has kind of their own category though. Joao, Ernst, and Pietro are adventurers, Catalina and Otto are pirates, and Ali is a merchant. Adventurers definitely want to level up, so to speak, before setting out to sea, so get lots of gold and durable ships and a reliable crew, or you won't last long. Merchants should go for volume when it comes to ships so they can hallmark goods. And pirates? Well, just go out there, guns blazing and take over any merchant ships you can find. As for the gameplay, again the best way to classify this is a sailing sim with adventure, roleplaying game, and strategy elements scattered throughout. Like the first game you play at your own pace, and you only get a game over when either your flagship sinks, you run out of provisions and your crew drops dead, you lose in a battle, or you fail to complete your character's storyline by January 1554. So yes, like in an endow wave of the ninja, there is a time limit here, but it doesn't really come into play. The trading system here is much more complex because there are a lot more moving parts at play. Each port has different prices depending on where you are, so the game encourages you to explore to find the best prices for certain goods so you can pull a profit. And there's 120 different ports you can visit, which is kinda crazy. You can also do quick fetch quests and run errands to help build your reputation as a decent fellow, earn enough of that and you'll eventually attract the attention of more powerful folks. That'll have you running missions that involve political maneuvering, negotiating, or straight up battles. And the battle system here is a massive upgrade over the first game. You give orders to other fleets you control, like for example, you sail in close enough to the enemy, and that opens up two new options, a crew battle or a duel. The duels, for example, are between enemy Commodores, and they're based on whatever weapons and armor they have equipped, as well as their stats at the time. There's also weather you have to contend with while you're out at sea, battle strategies you can arrange to sink the enemy's flagship, there's just so much stuff here. But at times that kind of backfires, there's almost too much stuff, and it can definitely feel overwhelming. There's some stuff I don't even understand yet, like the ration meter for your crew doesn't seem to matter for instance, or what the round earth society is supposed to do. Some stuff is just trial and error to figure out the best way to do things, but a lot of it is pretty straightforward. You traverse ports, and sail to sea going from town to town, visit the cafe to gain info, do favors for people, you can gamble, win powerful people's influences, recruit tons of other sailors for your crew, and just get your name out there. There's so much flexibility here in how you want to approach things, and again, there's six character story arcs you can play through. It's really impressive, especially for a 16-bit game made in 1994. So yeah, New Horizons might be a bit intimidating, but it's at least a lot of fun to get to know this game. Sure, there's some stuff that's kind of useless, and it feels like it's there for no reason than for the sake of being there. But New Horizons is still fantastic. The different characters are great, the music is a big step forward, and the freedom to figure things out at your own pace makes this one fun. I would pass on the first Uncharted Waters, but Uncharted Waters, New Horizons is definitely one I would check out. If you've ever wanted to look at any one of those old Koa strategy games, make sure it's this one.