I've never wanted to like a game so badly as I wish to enjoy Total War: Warhammer. But, being cripplingly bad at real-time strategy, getting supremely stressed out by the "doomsday counter" chaos invasion mechanic, plus getting constantly overrun by ultra aggressive and endlessly confederating AI, means that I can't play the game without mods. Then, the mods wind up with conflicting script changes, get broken by patches, and so on.

The result is that every time I sit down with the game, I wind up "playing" for an hour or two, where "playing" means constantly quick-loading, quitting the game to troubleshoot some mod or another, and just generally quitting in disgust at having wasted valuable free time on not having made any progress. Steam says I've played the game for 75 hours, and I've yet to get even close to completing a campaign-- it's been 75 hours of stop-start slogging and starting over (plus a decent amount of the game sitting idle, to be fair).

Basically, I wish the game were more like Dragon Force.

And sure enough, I'm up at the lake place for the week and have been playing Sega's classic, for the first time in six or seven years, and it's every bit as good as I remember. It's like the Total War games, but with everything streamlined-- you still get to take over a map of castles and lead massive armies, but without all of the unnecessary, time-inflation bloat. This means that the pace moves along very quickly; after just a few hours, I've already steamrolled part of the map.

And the best part is that it's not designed for the 99.9th percentile of gamers, who live in their parents' basement and memorize every tiny, little nuance; rather, it's balanced for people like me, who actually have lives outside of pouring hundreds of hours into practicing a single game.

Not to mention, Dragon Force's aesthetic-- the anime character portraits, the melodic and memorable music, the excellent sound effects-- are so much better than Total War: Warhammer's. The former is a better game than the latter in every single conceivable way.