Nobunaga’s Ambition (1989) NES Review

Nobunaga’s Ambition ・ 信長の野望・全国版 (1989)
Developed by: KOEI
Published by: KOEI
Released in: NA, JP

KOEI is a company that had quite a presence on the NES. Masters of strategy games and pioneers of the genre as a whole, they had 9 in total on the North American console alone. They were wildly popular in Japan (unsurprisingly), and they must have turned a tidy little profit in the West to bother to translate all of those niche, text heavy games for the US market.

When it came to the challenge of beating every single NES game, I was somewhat dreading tackling KOEI’s oeuvre. These were big, complicated games that would likely take up massive chunks of my time. When I first took a peek at the instruction manual for Nobunaga’s Ambition, my eyes glazed over in a way that took me back to high school classes I didn’t want to be attending; it read like a text book, and that only frightened me further. I figured that I would either hate every moment of these tactical games, or get totally addicted to them.

As it happens, I became terribly, terribly hooked on Nobunaga’s Ambition.

Based on the real life Japanese historical figure Oda Nobunaga who, to keep things stupidly simple, tried and failed to conquer the entirety of Japan in the 16th century, the game chronicles his fictitious ascent to the emperor’s throne. He’s since gone onto become a prominent figure in Japanese culture overall, appearing in historical dramas and in videogames alike. These days, he’s often genderbent to be a girl with big weapons of war at her disposal, which is how you know he was an important guy.

Though Nobunaga’s the one on the front cover and in the title, you can play as 49 other daimyo (Japanese feudal lords, all of which are also based on real life historical figures) and have one of them become the very best emperor, like no one ever was. How does one go about doing such a thing in feudal Japan? With money and war mongering, of course!

You build up your town by investing gold into the city, the rice fields, and spreading the wealth amongst your peasants so you can reap the rewards every Fall. Nobunaga’s Ambition is a game that requires a lot of micromanaging; in addition to ensuring that your citizens are happy so they don’t revolt against you, you must also make sure your armies are up to par in case of attacks by other daimyo, and plan your own means of attack alongside it. That topknot holds a heavy burden inside of it.

Your lord can also die of old age if the game goes on for too long, so you also have to manage your time effectively to have enough to unite Japan before you become too decrepit to do so.

There are two main means of obtaining other fiefs: one is the straightforward means – attack your neighbours, beat their asses, and take whatever land they have to their name by force. The other means is much more sneaky and strategic; bidding on fiefs that lack a general. Sometimes generals not related to you will kill each other or die at random, and if one of your fiefs is adjacent to the empty one, you get the chance to bid on it with gold and make it your own. While this rarely happens on its own (in multiple playthroughs, a neighbouring fief only opened up without my direct meddling once), you can directly influence the life and death of fellow daimyo by being a sneaky little shit.

Using discreet ninja services, you can hire an assassin to try and kill the daimyo of neighbouring fiefs, or to plant seeds of unrest in the peasant people of that village, and hope that being frustrated by the class system will be enough to make Joe Everyman-kun rise up against their local daimyo and do your dirty work for you. If successful, it’s yours with little effort! Just like in real life, there are few things more satisfying than successfully getting rid of your irritating neighbours. These underhanded tactics were my preferred method of taking out my rivals in Nobunaga’s Ambition, and I don’t know what that says about me as a person, but I loved every second of it.

Even if you’re trying to be slick and do things the sneaky way, a war will crop up in your neck of the woods eventually. Battles are a bit cumbersome, and unless you’re extremely well prepared or tactically minded, it often feels like a losing battle before you’ve even begun the game. The computer will wreck your shit if it feels like it can, and if your daimyo dies, it’s game over! I would say that the battling is probably the weakest point of the game for me, though it’s a necessity, seeing as it’s based around actual historical warlords. Which is fair enough, really.

Graphically, the game is quite sparse. Each of the 50 daimyo have their own character portrait, and a lot of the actions you take are accompanied by an interesting little animation. Other than that, though, there’s menus and a world map and that’s about all you ever see. While I got used to it quite quickly, I’d imagine that people who may be interested in this game will be turned off by the complete and total lack of anything to look at while you play it.

Thanks to ol’ Oda-chan, I’ve realised that I’m probably going to become a diehard KOEI fan by the time I complete the NES library challenge, and am planning to stagger out when I play the rest of their NES games as little treats when I need them the most (ie when I’m on a “shit game” streak”).

While Nobunaga’s Ambition is a game I couldn’t stop playing, it won’t be for everyone. You spend most of your time playing staring at a menu full of numbers, keeping track of numbers, and carefully planning out when and where to strike based on numbers. I, personally, ate it up with a spoon and asked for more. I LOVED it, and this has definitely become one of my favourite NES games so far…at least until I play Nobunaga’s Ambition II.

Initial Interest Rating: 8/10
Final Rating: