Oda Nobunaga never conquered Japan. He certainly tried his best, back in the 1500's. But by the time of his death, his aim was not quite achieved -- he'd only managed to unite about a third of the island nation we know today. Luckily for Nobunaga, his legacy's lived on in digital form. And, if you're patient enough, dedicated enough, and don't get too intimidated by or lost in the sheer depth of it all, you could be the one to rewrite the warlord's impact on history in Nobunaga's Ambition. Maybe you can succeed where he fell short.
Nobunaga's Ambition is an incredibly deep and involved strategy title from the SNES era, originally published by Koei for that 16-bit platform back in 1994. It places you in the role of a daimyo in the Warring States era of Japan's history, and tasks you to unite the many separate fiefdoms of the age under a common flag. And, to accomplish that goal, you're given a ton of different options.
Your first instinct is probably to pursue military dominance -- and the game supports that with several different actions for you to take on each turn. You can choose to spend your time recruiting new warriors. You can choose to invest in training your forces. You can pour over screens full of statistics and numbers representing what classifications of men you have at your command, be they light infantry, horse-riding cavalry or rifle-equipped distance attackers. And that's all before even beginning to consider actually going into combat.
There, once you've decided your forces are prepared enough and you've selected which opposing faction to attack on the map, you'll find a grid-based terrain layout that is similar to other tactical titles like Advance Wars or Military Madness. Nobunaga's Ambition is unique in its grid's shape, though, as its spaces are all rectangular, and every other row is offset at a diagonal from those adjacent to it. That signature structure takes a bit of mental adjustment -- as do some of the movement and battle rules that next capture your focus.
You can't move your own units past each other in Nobunaga's Ambition. Other strategy games allow for free passage of friendly forces through territory occupied by allies, but not here -- so you have to be mindful that if you send an infantry unit into a mountain pass with a cavalry squad to back them up, they won't be able to turn around and retreat back behind the heroic horses when things turn south.
Individual units can also be terribly mismatched in this design. In a game like Advance Wars, single units' strength ratings max out at a 10 -- so there's never going to be more than a single-digit difference between the power of same-class units going head-to-head. Here, though, individual units can be rated at a strength of 50 or more -- setting up horribly one-sided massacres where just one group of troops under the enemy's command can waltz through and decimate your entire mobilized army.
Things like that can make the combat frustrating in Nobunaga's Ambition, especially early on. But, remember, military conquest is only one possible strategy for success. You can also pursue political victory, dispatching diplomats to establish alliances with neighboring warlords instead of challenging them at the point of a blade. Or, failing that, you can also go the sneaky route of sabotage and subterfuge -- hiring ninja assassins to sneak into enemy encampments under cover of darkness, and slit your foes' throats in their sleep.
Verdict
In the end, Nobunaga's Ambition is an ambitious design itself -- and your likelihood of enjoying it depends almost entirely on how patient you can be. This is a game that in no way rewards fast action or a kick-down-the-door offense -- you have to be slow and deliberate to make any progress at all, even on the easiest difficulty setting. If that sounds like something you can handle, and if you've enjoyed other Koei games like Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV here on the Virtual Console, then slap down those eight bucks and get ready for hours upon hours worth of managing food rations, setting tax rates and going on the march to victory. But if you don't consider yourself that hardcore of a strategy gamer, don't even consider spending your Wii Points here.
