I’m pretty sure that one of the saddest/ hardest/ most infuriating jobs in videogames is to be an American/ European PR for Koei’s sprawling battlefield epics.

These genre-dodging games are continually panned by Western critics, despite being gigantically-popular-in-Japan (at one time the series was Japan’s biggest selling), with reviewers often glossing over the changes that have been implemented from iteration to iteration in favour of splashing easy copy on complaints about repetitive mechanics and a lack of wide-view innovation/ imagination.

Then, when a game like Bladestorm comes along trying lots of new and interesting things with considerable success, nobody bothers to explore the game properly because it’s aesthetically similar to what’s gone before. Indeed, just look at the list of corrections PSM had to post to rectify mistakes in their review (presumably after some poor soul at Koei prodded them), mistakes that clearly demonstrate the reviewer can’t have played the game for more than two minutes, if at all.

This month Edge magazine interviews Ken Matsumoto, producer of Dynasty Warriors, who offers a defence of the series, graciously talks about some of his frustrations with reviewers as well as outlining the challenges of introducing new things to a company’s best-selling franchise without alienating the considerable audience who love the games just the way they are. He says:

With Dynasty Warriors we might feel the negative criticism isn’t fair, but when there have been a few sequels it’s hard to turn those opinions around. You’ll sometimes read something that doesn’t mention any of the new things in the game, then says it hasn’t done anything new, and you wonder: was it even played for more than 20 minutes?

Perhaps people think, ‘Oh, that can fill up half a page’, and just give it to someone who doesn’t know the subtleties of this particular game – and when you get into an iterative series, subtlety is where the value lies.

I’ve not played the new Dynasty Warriors game yet but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed spin-off Gundam Musou on 360 and I thought Bladestorm was one of 2007′s unsung heroes (many players being put off by the demo’s condensed complexity). If you’re reviewing a Koei game in this curious and compelling videogame niche, do so with an open mind and, more importantly, some due diligence. In this genre it’s transparently obvious when reviewers haven’t.