Total war -- Japanese style

In Shogun, you take the role of Kurosawa himself, moving over the battlefields with a distanced perspective that distinctly evokes his serene, cinematic gaze. (You can even toggle the in-game voices to be Japanese-only, with English subtitles, and choose a letter-box, widescreen display -- computer game as Criterion Collection DVD.) The upcoming theatrical re-release of "Ran" makes the comparison between the two mediums even more inviting.

One could argue that Shogun actually compares well with two of Kurosawa's best historical films. It captures the sense of lucid strategizing from "The Seven Samurai," where we're able to follow the logic of Kambei's every field tactic -- only here, you're in charge of that strategy. At the same time, the game also has the dreamlike quality of "Ran's" chaotic battle scenes -- only this time, you're not a passive witness to them, but a fully active participant.

None of this is to say the game only works as an interactive version of a Kurosawa movie. As a strategy game, it also features some fairly impressive innovations.

Shogun employs the resource-management aspects of games like Warcraft and Starcraft, in which building castles and training facilities are crucial to victory. (Which, unfortunately, tends to reduce the genre's tactics to effective industrial policy.) Cunningly, Shogun separates the resource-management element, making it a discrete, turn-based component, while confining the real-time action to the battlefield.

Construction needs extend way beyond building armories and barracks, too: erecting a geisha house, for example, enables you to train kimono-wearing master assassins; constructing a temple allows you to recruit fanatical Buddhist warriors. It's startling to have a culture's basic facets defined strictly according to their strategic utility in wartime. (Then again, perhaps that's also the truest way to perceive them.)

The artificial intelligence for your soldiers and their enemies is similarly ambitious, with each individual on the field an autonomous agent. Commit a successful maneuver, and your opponents will retreat to a hill and regroup. You can see them there on the horizon reorganizing and hear them shouting commands, their armor clanking and horses snorting. The effect is eerie.

And befitting its setting, the honor ranking of commanding generals (determined by previous victories/losses) is of preeminent value: Even with the strategic advantage, the soldiers under a disreputable general bereft of face will scatter at the first sign of resistance -- while the vastly outnumbered samurai of a legendary daimyo will bravely stand and fight to the last man.

To be sure, Shogun is not without faults. The resource-management strategic map, while elegant and intuitive, can also be annoyingly arbitrary. With only a handful of unclaimed provinces keeping me from victory, for instance, I was casually informed that my daimyo had died of old age, and left heirless; with that, the game abruptly ended. Without an interface to increase my stable of concubines, let alone my attempted copulation rate, that hardly seemed fair.

The groundbreaking combat interface is not flawless, either: while the visuals are admirably detailed, it brooks little player mobility outside its reference frame. You're unable to jump to places very far outside your current viewing frame. So when reinforcements arrive, for example, you need to squint and poke about for them somewhere behind hills and forests way off in the distance.

Above all, one wishes the design also accommodated Kurosawa's renowned sense of shifting perspective from "Ran," where the viewer first watches the battle from a godlike, abstracted distance -- only to suddenly plunge straight into its center, amid the screaming and the horrific gore.

But even without that sense of contrast, which would truly put Shogun into the realm of the profound, the game offers enough to demonstrate how far the medium of PC gaming has come. The best games are now powerful enough to compete on ground previously occupied only by film.

Perhaps it will require a Kurosawa of game designers to fully expand on the potential suggested here. For now, though, it's enough that it convincingly transforms you into an ambitious daimyo, seeking the title of Shogun. And to feel the thrill of uniting a heartbreakingly beautiful island against the treachery of neighbors and would-be exploiters from abroad.

At the moment, though, I've only a few provinces remaining on the southern tip of the island, and a rival daimyo is marshaling massive forces at my borders. So I'm tempted by the Portuguese trader who marches into my palace, offering to sell me muskets from the barbarian West -- but only if I'll first convert to Christianity.

Firearms would drive my foe's armies from my provinces in clouds of gunsmoke, true. But it would also mean an alliance with this arrogant foreigner, with his patronizing half-bows and his odd religion. To decline is suicide, but to accept is even worse.

So I refuse, and the uncouth gaijin stomps out. Asked for his counsel, my nearby advisor bows. "A true warrior prefers to die with honor, rather than live with shame," he observes with sage approval.

His compliment turns out to be a Delphic backhand, though. Within a few turns, I'm face up on a funeral pyre, honorably roasting like a charcoal briquette. In this realm, at least, dying with honor only means a longer reload time.

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