Warrior's Way
There are two major phases to any play session in Warrior's Way. First, you recruit new soldiers for your army from your StreetPass tags. People who don't own the game appear as generals and bring a small group of soldiers who join you right away. Other Warrior's Way players appear as monarchs and visit with their entire army in tow. They may volunteer a few soldiers to join you, but usually just offer an empty greeting if you don't choose to challenge them on the battlefield. If you issue a challenge and defeat them in a battle, then a fraction of their army will defect to join you. Winning these fights is the fastest way to grow your forces, but the wild differences in the size of other players' armies mean that not every fight will be worth it, or even possible, to win. This is the first point where the game was trying to nudge me towards taking a risk or two, which I comfortably ignored.
The second phase is the actual goal of the game, giving you a chance to conquer the world. Starting as a minor kingdom with a tiny army, you have to use the forces you acquire through your StreetPass tags to take over increasingly powerful countries. In addition to having progressively larger armies, many opposing monarchs will also have unique forces, like ninjas that always have the advantage but usually fight in smaller units. I often chose not to fight during this phase because I felt unprepared when I had significantly lower numbers, but I regret that approach because of how slow it ended up being. If you do choose to fight, you begin by allocating your forces.
Your army is split into cavalry, archers, and infantry, represented by rock, scissors, and paper. Before every battle, you are shown a preview of your opponent's army and get to divide your forces between the three units. The battles boil down to a best of three, where you can send each of your units out once to face down one of your opponent's units. You secure a win if you have more forces than your opposition, but if someone has the disadvantage (following rock-paper-scissors logic), then their unit is cut in half, which can allow even the smallest armies to get lucky and emerge victorious. However, I only experienced that kind of luck one or two times because I was always approaching these battles with such high numbers.
Most of the time when I was dividing forces there would be a little icon over at least one or two of my units indicating that they couldn't lose to any of the opposing forces. This gave me a nice sense of security, but seeking it out the way I did likely made the game take much longer than it should have. The prep time between conquering each country continued to balloon until I got so fed up that I went into the final fight with less than half as many troops as the final boss, yet I somehow won! When that happened, I realized that I played the rest of the game wrong, but I had no interest in doing it all again in the post-game, just to try and be faster.
Warrior's Way is a good enough game, but its biggest flaw might be that it lets you play however you want to. If I was forced to take a few more risks, then I probably would have enjoyed it more. I played it like a game of strategy, which led to far too much twiddling my thumbs and made the overall experience a little boring. There was enough variety in the opposing monarchs to keep me engaged enough, so that's worth some sort of kudos, but I think I've learned not to play it so safe in other risk-based games. If you're going through the StreetPass Mii Plaza, definitely try Warrior's Way, just play it better than I did.
