IGN - Total War: Shogun 2 -- Fall of the Samurai Review

IGN - In the mid-19th Century, when the American Admiral Perry appeared with his black warships and forced Japan to re-open its trading ports to Western powers, Japan was still essentially a medieval society: closed off from the outside world, with a feudal government, an economy based primarily on subsistence rice farming, and warfare still conducted with swords and bows. In less than fifty years from the day Perry arrived, Japan became the first non-Western country in history to defeat a European country, Russia, in an open war – leveraging on modern weaponry, techniques, naval warships, and a completely revamped and revitalized economy. That transformation, and the success Japan built upon it, represents an achievement that must surely astound posterity forever.