Retroview - Genghis Khan (NES)

Source: Youtube Channel NESguide

Some of my best childhood memories (besides playing videogames) was watching my father player them.  He really liked strategy games.  One of those games was Genghis Khan, the story of the man who founded the Mongol Empire.  These strategy games are very different from the Strategy games we play now and it more closer to "management simulations" and "tactics" games.  A player manages their area of its resources, train their military, and takes over other areas to expand their rule over the land.  There's the planning phase and the battle phase.  It was games like this one as well as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Nobunaga's Ambition, and Bandit Kings of Ancient China all developed by KOEI that got me interested in Asian history.  Back then though, it was just a bunch of numbers and names fighting each other for me.  I never really figured out how to play (tried and then lost my entire army in one battle) and it's probably the reason why they're not publicly popular.  They're difficult games with a lot of foresight and planning required in order to even begin playing.  To my surprise, Koei still creates these games.  One thing that gets me nostalgic from these games is the music.  They might be short, repetitive, and possibly annoying, but I recognize them pretty easily and hold a lot of memories of my childhood.  In the past decade, Koei has worked on the same histories and storyline through a different genre.  The most popular one being the Tactical hack 'n slash genre of Dynasty Warriors.  That one follows Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  Now my father plays nothing but Dynasty Warriors 5.  I asked him about Genghis Khan and he said that he really missed playing those games back in the NES days and how exciting it was to plan a huge army to decimate an entire fief.  So 20+ years later, I'm still watching my father playing videogames based on the same history of the games he played back in the NES days.  Genghis Khan was one of the more obscure games since I never really learned that much about the Mongols or the history of them.  I think I eventually learned more about Chinese and Japanese history on my own.  It was also probably because in Genghis Khan, you played several different nations in the world: The English, Japanese, Middle Eastern, and Byzantine.  Seems like the last Genghis Khan game that came out was back in 1998 in Japan (Genghis Khan IV).  I definitely remember watching my father play Genghis Khan 2 because it's synonymous to my memories of watching Halley's Comet.  I've always wondered if I should go back to this game and try to play it myself sometime and see if I can fare better than I did when I was younger, but I never hesitated to back to listen to the music from it.