New Horizons

The Good
For most characters it's the exploration. It's easy to say that of the six characters you can choose in this game, four will have exploration as a main focus to doing well... and I perticularly enjoy traveling around the coastlines in search of new ports and discoveries. The world's coastlines are more or less accurately displayed (in the same way that Seven Cities of Gold is accurate) and the world's political situation is accurately reflected... what with Europe being the central point of civilization and areas such as the New World, Asia, Austrailia and Africa being largely undevelopped.

Having said that, you can also make a pretty good living as a trader. In fact money is very much the key to this game. Aside from using it to buy new ships and improve weaponry... you'll also need all your doubloons to hire crew, pay the wages of navigators you may hire, flirt with ladies, engage in gambling or, perhaps most importantly... investing in and improving a port on behalf of your nationality.

Of course none of that my be required. Individual character's goals and motivations vary and some may need to take control of various ports and others may not.

The graphics (which were 8-bit on a 16-bit SNES), sound, controls, area of exploration and plot have all been improved over the original . If you're a newcomer to the series, there's really no reason at all to play the first game other than simple nostalgia

The Bad
The music. if I had to pick one single thing, it's the music hands down.

Also the combat engines can be rather frustrating until one figures them out. Ship-to-Ship combat is displayed on a grid system. Ship Movement is rather realistic, in that you need to give most vessels a wide bearth to make a turn, however this can frequently lead to simple bad judgement on exactly how much room you need. Luckily, you can just put the battle on AUTO and sit back and watch.

The other battle engine is the duel, which is really just a fancy way of saying Rock, Paper, Sissors. You choose a combat tactic (Attack, Parry, Thrust, Strike) and your opponent chooses a combat tatic and whichever one beats the other one wins! Ironically enough this is similiar to other duels I've seen in games such as Shuikoden

Also I tend to make the mistake of saving at some isolated supply port (north russia's artic ocean for example) and then not being able to make it back to Europe or elsewhere that I can replenish my crew and make repairs to my ship. This is probably more of a bad reflection on my playing style than a negative aspect of the game. In short, one can explore too much and into some very dangerously isolated areas.

It's also not terribly historically accurate. The major nation powers of the game are "rounded off" and include the political influence of their neighbours. Also individual ports sometimes include one or two "historical footnotes" that seem ackwardly plucked out of a grade-school atlas.

The Bottom Line
Maritime travelling, trading and exploration.That's what it is and does a very good job of giving you lots of options and quests to keep things busy along those goals. The individual plots are a nice touch and help seperate the game into specialized chunks.