![Uncharted Waters (NES) Playthrough [1 of 2] - NintendoComplete](/images/yt/jb/uncharted-waters-nes-playthrough-1-of-2-nintendocomplete-y4tgd.jpg)
Uncharted Waters (NES) Playthrough [1 of 2] - NintendoComplete
151A playthrough of Koei's 1991 trading sim/RPG for the NES, Uncharted Waters.
This is the first part of a two-part video. Part two can be found here: https://youtu.be/nL6YAEdYbA0
Uncharted Waters was but one of many games that Koei brought to the NES in English, but it distinguished itself from the company's typical fare in a couple of important ways.
It's not set in ancient China, nor are there are any warring samurai or rampaging Mongols in sight. Instead of tasking you with dominating your fellow countrymen in a brutal civil war per Koei's usual style, Uncharted Waters plops you in the shoes of the son of a fallen Portuguese noble in the 1500s. Tired of the life that he was born into, Leon decides that he's going to make his mark on the rapidly expanding world, and come hell or high water, he's going to restore the luster to his tarnished family name.
You start out in the year 1502 with a single rinky-dink ship (probably got it on credit at Stan's Used Ship Emporium!) in Lisbon. You can chat at the bar, visit the shops and the palace, or if you're ready to throw all caution to the wind, you can hop on your boat and hope you don't get wiped out in a freak monsoon.
The gameplay is very open-ended - you can go anywhere in the world you like at anytime, providing you have the skill and the resources to survive the journey. The ultimate goal, however, is to marry Princess Christiana, and to do that, you need to make a name for yourself.
You accrue fame by discovering previously unknown ports around the world, manipulating various markets to your advantage, expanding your fleet, and destroying your rivals in ship-to-ship combat. There is no set way to get to the end, and you have a lot of choices in how you get there. You can make a fortune by selling coral you bought in the West Indies around the Middle East, or you can wage a naval campaign against the Ottoman Empire if their ships seem like they're worth pillaging.
However you decide to go about it, there's one thing that you must always keep in mind: no matter how great your ship is or high your navigators' stats might be, you're sailing around a largely uncharted world with only the simplest of tools to guide you, and a wayward wind or freak storm can easily wipe out everything you've worked for in the blink of an eye. (Use the save function!)
I loved how much the game emphasized the balance between risk and reward. Play well and you'll often be rewarded for your efforts, but if you recklessly hedge your bets and strike out, the consequences are swift and severe. Forgot to buy food? That'll become a problem when you're crew dies halfway across the Pacific. Approached by pirates when you're running on a skeleton crew? Good luck surviving that one.
As far as Koei games go, it's one of the easier to learn games in their simulation line-up. There aren't many variables that you'll have to keep track of at once, and you'll spend more time navigating the seas than you will pouring over screens filled with menus and statistics.
In this playthrough I sail around to most (maybe all?) of the ports in the world, gradually working my way farther and farther from Lisbon as I expand my fleet and crew. This video focuses mainly on building myself up and charting out the world map. The majority of the ship-to-ship combat is done in the later stages of the game, so you'll see most of that in the second part of the playthrough.
Uncharted Waters is definitely a slow burn. Just take one look at the speed your ship moves at and you'll see there is no instant gratification to be found here. The streamlining of the usual Koei interface makes it much more intuitive than games like Nobunaga's Ambitiom or Romance of the Three Kingdom's, but there's a meaty challenge here for anyone that's cool with the 8-bit presentation and the sluggish cursor controls.
Like most simulation games, this one is an acquired taste, and since both this game and its sequel were released on the SNES, I imagine that many would ignore the NES one. Still, if you consider yourself a would-be aspiring explorer and are devoted to the 8-bit era of gaming, Uncharted Waters is a thoroughly addicting game.
Random piece of trivia: this was one of the largest NES games to be officially published in the US, weighing in at a chunky 5 megabits (640K) of ROM. It is only beaten by Kirby's Adventure, a 6 megabit (768K) cartridge.
So yeah, it's super niche, but it has also developed quite the following over the years, and for good reason. If the setting appeals to you and you like to think more than you like to mash buttons, I'd recommend giving it a look.
Better brush up on your geography first, though!
(And is that town theme a Frankie Valli song? :0 )
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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