Okay this one is actually a bit more brutal than the Nobunaga’s Ambition title. For starters there is still combat but it’s even slower and the bartering is even more detailed. Well, I’m jumping into this a little out of order so let me slow down here. Lets just say this isn’t like the Uncharted games that you’re used to. No sir, this is a very different experience and unfortunately I can’t exactly say that in a good way. I suppose there is a whole lot of water though.

So the game starts off by letting you choose from a bunch of characters. It probably makes a difference on how the game starts off so I picked the guy who seemed the most well rounded. You start off by talking to a bunch of people to get your starting equipment. Some food, water, men, items, and of course a boat. Now what you gotta do is travel the world and buy/sell items of commerce in order to get things rolling.

This is of course where the game starts to really lose a whole lot of steam. It’s just not a fun kind of gameplay. For starters you have to monitor the going prices on each island. Say Island A sells corn for $5, but island B sells it for $3. You want to go to Island B and buy a lot of it, then go sell to Island A where they really need it. Multiply this by over 20 different items and of course factor in that you need to have enough money to invest in buying more food for your men as well as to buy more material to buy. Amp up the confusion even higher when you have to deal with pirates that are running around.

These fights are hard to win and take a lot of men. If too many die, then you’re going to have to find more at another island which will of course take even more fuel out of your tanks. That’s not good. Did I mention that you can also run into random storms that eat up materials? Bet you didn’t think of that one….and if you die at sea it’s a full game over. There is no save point to go back to. You have to start from scratch. In a way it’s sort of like Digimon World Next Order where the intro is the toughest part as you will lose a few generations on getting the basics going but by the mid game you are really well prepared for what’s next.

Difference is that I don’t have a really enjoyable story and fun graphics to incentivize me to do all of that. No, instead I’m supposed to just enjoy the process and that’s not good enough for me. There is a story here of course as you’re taking someone back to his kingdom, helping a stowaway, etc. There’s also a war going on but none of it is particularly captivating. It doesn’t move you the way that a more interesting story could have. I know there were some technical limitations back in the day but it didn’t stop a lot of other big SNES titles that I’ve played back in the day. No sir, those just kept on trucking through.

The most I can say for the game is that it looks pretty nice. It reminds me of the old Final Fantasy titles. It’s peaceful to be moving around without any wild encounters running around. It feels like a long time since I could just explore the hub world like that so it was really a good change of pace. It even made me think that the game could have been good if it was limited to just the island. Maybe you’re the mayor and you have to take care of folks with a lot of trading. I think that could have actually worked out well but this one was just too ambitious for what it was trying to do. It ultimately was doomed to not be able to succeed this time.

Now just to leave the series some hope, the other way it could work out is if they made this into a big MMORPG. Imagine this scale but all of the people running around are actually real people. It’s why that genre always had a lot of potential. I don’t see myself really getting involved in any of those because honestly that would be extremely time consuming but I do get the appeal. If you are ever going to make a trading game that is actually fun, I don’t see any other way around it. You need to add that social element to the game, it would make you heavily invested. Particularly if there are social guilds and everything since then you don’t want to let your party down.

Overall, Uncharted Waters is not a good video game, I would even go as far as to call it a pretty bad one. I actually think it could be a good educational tool for kids but in that case the gameplay is a bit too difficult. They would need to find some kind of a solid middle ground but ultimately this just isn’t it. This is not the game that will really change things for folks and that may be unfortunate but it’s just the way that it goes. I can see why this game never got all that huge. I like to say that I am a fan of strategy titles but perhaps I’ve been overrating myself in that department. These definitely show that I’m still out of my depths past a certain point. I need some kind of excitement to get me going. Unlike fighting games or platformers, the gameplay alone cannot carry the game.

Overall 2/10