Expeditions: Samurai Review

A promising tactical RPG that brings the Expeditions series to feudal Japan.

The Expeditions series has made a name for itself by bringing historical eras to life as rich, choice-driven role-playing experiences. Expeditions: Samurai takes the series to one of the most intriguing times of Japanese history, following Expeditions: Conquistador’s Spanish invasion of the Americas, Expeditions: Viking’s Viking Age, and the critically acclaimed Expeditions: Rome’s Roman Empire.

The franchise’s most recent addition is the fourth major release and looks to Sengoku-era Japan. Players assume the character of an outsider trying to survive a society torn apart by political intrigue and civil war. Set in the early 1600s, a pivotal time in Japanese history when the long period of civil conflict ends and the Tokugawa shogunate begins to take shape.

The developers drew inspiration from real characters and events, particularly the English explorer William Adams, who arrived in Japan and became a samurai serving the shogunate.

However, Expeditions: Samurai is not a hardcore historical simulation. Instead, it uses real history as the basis for a fictional adventure of player choice, party management, tactical combat, exploration, and relationships. This is also an interesting evolution for the franchise. Expeditions: Rome focused more on broad strategic systems alongside its tactical fights.

Samurai looks more like it's going to be a party-based CRPG. You get to choose, you get to have pals, you get to explore, you get to sneak, you get tactical fights. It entered early access with only its first act, so it's vital to view it as a work in progress rather than a finished product. But even incomplete, there is plenty here to suggest the series has another strong entry in the making.

The game begins with Captain Flynn, a protagonist the player can customize. The player can choose the protagonist's first name, looks, gender, and other cosmetic features. Interestingly, no matter what you choose, the protagonist's surname is Flynn, and the character loosely stands in for William Adams; instead of merely recreating Adams’ life, the game crafts an original experience around the historical premise of a foreigner arriving in Japan.

Flynn arrives in Japan aboard a Dutch frigate manned by privateers, expecting to participate in trade discussions. Things go south fast. The crew is attacked, a mutiny breaks out, and the party eventually fights just to survive after reaching the shores of medieval Japan. Once in Japan, things don't get any easier. The foreigners don't know the country's language or customs, and several clans and political factions are locked in a perilous contest for supremacy.

One of the best things about the story is how immediately the game reveals the importance of player choice. The group sets up a modest camp. They are starving and need food. Players can buy supplies, hunt illegally, grab equipment back from a local lord, or get rid of local outlaws and claim their resources. These aren't just dialog choices to make the player feel important.

The whole game is designed around decisions that can affect relationships, tasks, the crew, and maybe even the larger story. Your trip takes you to meet eight partners, each with a unique personality, backstory, questline, and role on the team. Your decisions can help or hurt your connections with others and can lead to friendship, rivalry, or romance. 

You can’t always please everyone, as companions may not always agree with your decisions. It gives the party more personality than replaceable battle units.

The fully voiced conversations also make the narrative feel more genuine. Conversations with voice acting add a lot to the atmosphere for a party-based RPG of this scale. The mix of real people, imaginary characters, political maneuvering, and the outsider's viewpoint gives Samurai a flavor of its own.

When you're not in combat, Expeditions: Samurai is fairly typical for a CRPG, with lots of exploring, talking, investigating, and puzzles to solve. Rather than just going from objective marker to objective marker in battle, players are encouraged to explore their surroundings and use their characters’ skills to find alternate solutions.

Your abilities can influence how you handle situations. Lockpicking, survival, stealth, and diplomacy can unlock doors to otherwise closed opportunities. You might negotiate your way around a problem, sneak around a restriction, pick a lock, take an object, or use your understanding of the environment to find another solution. This is great, as character growth becomes valuable outside of combat, just what you want from a CRPG.

Character advancement is based on a few traits: power, finesse, perception, and wits. Characters level up and acquire points to invest in these areas. Additional ability and perk points allow deeper specialization. The cool thing about that is that abilities and perks are pulled from a shared pool of resources, so players will have to decide whether to upgrade their class-specific talents or choose more general bonuses.

Benefits include weapon and armor proficiency, gear enhancements, range bonuses, and other specialized perks. This leaves room for experimenting. A character can be highly specialized in their role, yet the overall perk system lets them gain additional value.

The four main classes give a basis for character builds: Guardian, Marauder, Scoundrel, and Tactician.

These are sort of frontline warrior, ranged specialist, rogue, and support jobs. Weapons also shape how characters play; guns, bows, swords, naginata, and other historically inspired gear help create diverse playstyles. One really handy feature is that friends aren’t just copies of these archetypes. Each has a different approach and different skills and can play more specialized roles in the party.

This makes team building more fascinating, since you are juggling your character builds with your teammates' varied capabilities. Combat is one of the key pillars of Expeditions: Samurai. Battles are turn-based and shown from a top-down view, and each character has movement and action points. You can move characters in different orders, so you can attack with one character, use an ability with another, and reposition a third before concluding the turn.

If you’ve played Expeditions: Rome or tactical games like XCOM, you’ll feel right at home with the mechanics. Position matters, cover matters, and attacking from the right angle can make all the difference. Enemies have armor + health, and ranged attacks work differently against defenses than melee. Morale and coordination, for example, provide another depth to encounters, and characters can also draw on class-specific resources.

Another potential element is environmental interaction. The battlefield is more than a grid on which characters trade blows. Objects can be modified to gain advantages; for example, you can set a lantern hanging over an oily surface on fire, causing it to fall and ignite the surrounding area, and create a dangerous fire zone. You can also throw items to generate diverse effects, meaning that your environment can become part of your tactical toolbox.

Stealth is another technique to approach confrontations. Characters can leave the group before combat begins, go through restricted areas, sneak past adversaries, knock out targets, loot locations, or weaken opponents before the main conflict begins. Some tasks can also be done mostly through stealth rather than direct combat. This allows us more flexibility than a traditional tactical RPG.

But stealth isn’t infallible. Movement uses mouse-directed pathfinding rather than traditional keyboard controls, which could frustrate players accustomed to WASD. Occasionally, trees and barriers occlude the camera, creating unpleasant blind spots. The stealth mechanics themselves can feel a bit clunky in the early access edition.

The hardest part of warfare is balancing the weapons.

Firearms and ranged weapons appear to be far more powerful than melee weapons because guns can ignore armor in ways that swords cannot. On top of that, guns appear to have no meaningful reload limitation, making them incredibly effective. This is especially weird for a game set in samurai culture, as the gameplay often encourages players to rely on guns rather than blades.

That said, the developers entered early access specifically to get input and polish systems like this. The foundation is solid, and the mix of cover, positioning, environmental hazards, stealth, abilities, morale, and class resources gives enough tactical variety to keep the combat interesting. Progression comes mostly through questing, killing foes, exploring, and engaging with the world, rather than drudgery.

Characters acquire experience and level up, getting points to improve core stats and unlock new skills and perks. This approach affects gameplay in ways that go beyond increasing numbers. More methods to interact with the environment are a direct result of skill development. If you invest in finesse or perception, you might start to approach quests and exploration in different ways.

Still, if you have a more robust character, you might be able to get new equipment or combat abilities. The companion system also supports growth, as different party members bring different skills. Players are encouraged to build a balanced team instead of relying on a single character to solve every challenge.

This is especially beneficial because companions have their own quest lines and relationships, so party composition influences both combat and story experience. Visually, Expeditions: Samurai is a little different than Expeditions: Rome. The game uses 3D character models more often during discussions, rather than relying on graphical portraits. This gives the game a slightly more colorful and cartoonish look.

That visual difference may not suit everyone, especially players who prefer Rome's more down-to-earth presentation.

But the approach works better in motion, when you can watch the game being played, than it does in still screenshots. The surroundings do a good job of capturing the ambiance of feudal Japan, and the mix of forests, villages, fortifications, ships, and battles offers enough visual variety to keep exploration engaging.

Some rough technological edges remain, especially with camera placement and environmental impediments. But if you consider this is an early access release, these problems are easy to forgive. The fully voiced dialog is one of the game’s greatest presentation qualities. Having the characters actually say their lines makes conversations feel much more engaging, particularly when your companions disagree, react to decisions, or discuss the perilous political environment around them.

The sound design also works well, with combat effects, weapon sounds, environmental sounds, and atmospheric music setting the tone for the game’s historical context. It doesn't aim for the same blockbuster status as larger RPGs, but it feels right for the game's scale. Expeditions: Samurai is an ambitious take on the Expeditions formula.

Instead of simply replicating Expeditions: Rome, with samurai replacing Roman soldiers, it nudges the series toward a more focused, party-based CRPG framework. It's had a fairly broad range of mechanics, including a branching narrative, eight companions, a relationship system, romance possibilities, exploration skills, stealth, tactical combat, and two-player co-op.

But its early-access status is worth noting. What we have now is just the beginning of the bigger journey, and several systems still need polishing. The biggest issue is weapon balance: ranged weapons feel a little too powerful, and stealth and camera behavior sometimes feel off. Some PC users will no doubt be frustrated by the inability to maneuver the character freely with keyboard commands.

The fundamentals are promising, however. The historical backdrop seems fresh since the player is not just another samurai. You're an outsider trying to make a name in a land you hardly comprehend. Surrounded by clans, political machinations, terrifying foes, and companions with their own ambitions. The world feels reactive, as you can handle challenges with battle, diplomacy, stealth, exploration, or different character skills.

A few big updates are coming before the actual release, so the developers have plenty of time to iron out the kinks. 

If they can balance firearms and melee, increase stealth, polish the camera, and expand the latter acts to match the excellence of the opening, Expeditions: Samurai might become one of the more engaging tactical CRPGs of its sort. Fans of Expeditions: Rome, Divinity: Original Sin, Pathfinder, and tactical RPGs in general have something to like already.

It might not boast the colossal budget or production value of Baldur’s Gate 3, but it doesn’t have to. You get a mix of a historical tale, meaningful decisions, and tactical, party-based combat. Expeditions: Samurai isn't quite a finished masterpiece at this point, but it's a very promising foundation, strong enough to make an eventual full release worth seeing.