OK, let's do it!
So the first couple of expansions featured new factions that were, to put it mildly,
completely fucking unplayable. They were various groups from outside the Imperial system so they weren't allowed to win by honor and ascend to the throne in the normal way. Which since that is the primary win condition of the game meant that they needed a viable alternate win condition. They did not get one.
There was some sort of narrative drive for these groups to exist, but none of them had anything they could do except hope to burn all the provinces of all the other players. This had almost no hope of success in a two player game and literally no hope of success in a multiplayer game. The Broken Clan of the Scorpion needed to come with some achievable alternate victory condition. The Rising Naga from the deeps needed to come up with some achievable alternate win condition. The ragtag armies of Toturi and Yogo Junzo needed some achievable alternate win condition. None of these factions had anything like that and none of them were remotely competitive.
The position of these guys in the story of the game was also somewhat unclear. I mean, normally if you win the game you become the next Emperor. What the shit does it mean if the Naga "win"? I mean, that wasn't going to happen, but what would it even
mean if it did? I dunno. No one else knew. The people actually writing the game didn't have a clear answer for that, which is probably why none of these "non-clan strongholds" had a viable path to victory in any context. So while the game rapidly went from 6 factions to 10, the number of factions with a viable path to victory stayed at
four for quite a while.
Anyway, the idea behind expansion was that it was all "story based," which basically meant that new cards weren't playtested at all and were justified based on slapdash fanfiction rather than on game play. And if you brought up the fact that the new factions couldn't see a path to victory with a telescope on their official listserv (it was the 90s) you were hounded for being some kind of powergamer. Yes, really. The actual designers used Roleplayer vs. Rollplayer arguments to defend their design choices. In a competitive card game. Also too: go fuck yourself.
The big storyline was also supposed to involve You! Yes, You! Which is to say that the slapdash fanfiction they wrote to template the new cards on would be "inspired" by events that happened in tournaments. Which is sort of almost the right thing to do. I mean, you really ought to go look at tournament results and try to figure out what is and isn't working. But their takeaways were
never that they had fucked something up, but always instead that they needed to write another five thousand words of bad fanfic and make every random character's backstory more complicated than the Summer's family tree in X-Men.
Let's take the hard example of Akodo Kage. He's a Lion Clan martial arts instructor. He bows to give small but permanent bonuses to your other characters. If the game goes on long enough, he provides a lot of value. In a short game, he is worthless. The actual viable Lion Clan deck is an aggro deck that in magical christmas land can actually win the game on turn 4. Having slow incremental value engines in such a deck is a waste of your fucking time. It's a dead draw every time you draw him. On the other hand, every other faction is playing a longer game than that and has some greater (which is to say: non-zero) desire to have that character in play. Thus he has a larger chance of appearing in literally every single competitive deck list
except Lion. And eventually, the designers noticed that he was appearing in deck lists of every clan except his own.
Now a reasonable designer would look at this result and slap their forehead and say "Oh right, we didn't make a viable Lion clan long-game plan and thus all the long-game cards in the Lion clan like the Champion and the Sensei are completely wasted cardboard in a Lion deck!" and then done something about it. Like, I dunno, maybe made an alternate Lion stronghold that had a fucking economy instead of being all-in on aggro. That is not what the L5R designers did.
Yeah. That's a thing that happened. They decided to make Akodo Kage the secret leader of a criminal syndicate full of spies and shapeshifters who had infiltrated all the other clans rather than simply acknowlege that they hadn't made viable paths to victory for all the deck types in all the clans. Because why admit that
you fucked up when you can instead have a series of nonsensical big reveals?
Another thing they insisted on doing was continually advancing the storyline. They put out newsletters that advanced the storyline on a regular basis and of course that eventually got to the point where the cards that were originally printed were referring to things that weren't particularly contemporaneous. I mean, you could have cards that referenced events before the Naga declared their return in the same game as an actual Naga player. More weirdly, you had various characters doing face/heel turns or heel/face turns where the opposite side version was facing off across the table or even just stooging around in the same deck.
But the absoltue capstone to this shit storm was that eventually the storyline caught up to the point where the Emperor actually fucking died. And then.... um... what the fuck does it actually mean to win the game at that point? I mean, the Emperor's dead, they eventually decided who his successor was, and it was Marty Stew the do everything self-insert hero despite the fact that he was obviously ineligible from the beginning. But the really important part was that the Emperor's successor was
not your character. So the goal of
becoming Emperor or the act of getting the Imperial Favor or any of that shit became completely unmoored from the storyline.
In essence, the card game, the
entire card game ended around Time of the Void, and yet Hidden Emperor happened instead. And the game never figured out a way to tie its game mechanics to the new storyline and everything went to shit.
So when we keep talking about this game, we will keep talking about Imperial Edition, because if we include shit from after that it will all be me shaking my fist at how they fucked everything up in the expansions. Because they did.
-Username17