Games worth discovering

Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening is a great entry point to a daunting strategy series

2K View2023-07-21

As a long-time fan of Paradox’s grand strategy games, I’m at the point now that jumping into a new one feels both exciting and familiar. The theme might be new to me, but I have a decent sense of the underlying ideas Paradox’s developers use when putting their games together. Firing up Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening for the first time, I was completely at sea. Everything about it felt confusing and strange, from the way mouse clicks work to managing my roster of grumbling officers.

Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening is now available in English, after its Japan-only release last year. It’s a series that is now forty years old, with the first game, Nobunaga no Yabō, launching in March 1983. That’s an incredibly long time for a game series to develop its own identity, as well as its own ideas about the basic concepts of strategy, like unit command, character dynamics, and the set of decisions players should be making.

Fortunately for me, Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening is heavily focused on delegation. I’ve been able to learn a lot about the game by simply watching my officers perform their duties and make decisions about what to do next. Playing the suggested introductory scenario as Nobunaga’s own Oda clan, I always had a couple advisers waiting in the wings to make suggestions about what to do next. While I was figuring out how to construct a market in my castle town, they’d be off scouting enemy fortifications and troop strength, identifying which bordering clans looked ripe for conquest.

It does take some getting used to, but Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening includes a fairly robust tutorial too, and it’s provided through these helpful advisers. I could always refer to the left side of my screen to pull up a new mini-mission that would walk me through another set of game mechanics, like appointing officers as lords of a new dominion I had conquered or ordering the construction of a commons in one of my counties.

Make no mistake, there’s a lot to take in, and that’s because running a Sengoku-era clan was a big job. While it’s wrapped in martial imagery, Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening is chiefly about government administration, and that includes keeping a fractious group of nobles happy—or at least happy enough that they don’t jump ship, join another clan, and wind up trying to have you assassinated.

I’ve also enjoyed the game’s visual novel-style storytelling, and gosh, there is a lot of that. Each major character has a story to tell, and these unfold a chapter at a time as time progresses. There are tales of betrayal and brotherhood, devious schemes foiled by pure luck, and intensely sad stories of noble lords who are doomed by their own sense of honor.

Similar to games I’ve played set in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms time period, Nobunaga’s Ambition has a sprawling cast of characters, and this stuff is happening all the time. It’s almost to the point that it's disruptive—I might be trying to plan a siege of a neighboring castle, and the game will suddenly jump into another vignette about characters interacting on the other side of the country. The major actors in this drama move around a lot, and it feels at times that the camera struggles to keep up.

Certain sieges and battles take place on tactical maps in real time, which I’m still figuring out. Interestingly, though, it’s here where some of the similarities with Koei Tecmo’s Dynasty Warriors series are the clearest—or perhaps Samurai Warriors is the better point of comparison, as that spin-off is set in the same time period as Nobunaga’s Ambition. Battles are about moving officers and their formations to capture key nodes on the map and activating bonuses when they’ll be most beneficial. During sieges, it’s important to quickly destroy (or protect) key defensive structures, while making sure to pull exhausted and depleted units back out of the fight to rest and replenish.

So despite the unfamiliar interface, a lot of the same principles that I’ve internalized in countless other strategy games apply here just as well, and learning to play Nobunaga’s Ambition is chiefly a matter of adapting to a new way of presenting the information. In the meantime, I’ve been enjoying the historical vignettes about these fascinating sixteenth-century characters who played pivotal roles in shaping Japan’s history. Plus, since so much of the moment-to-moment work is handled by subordinate AI lords, I think Awakening is a good first game for fans of western grand strategy games to check out—so if you're a Crusader Kings fan who's developed an interest in the Sengoku Jidai, this is probably a game you don’t want to miss.

I’ve only scratched the surface, so I’m looking forward to exploring the rest of what this latest chapter of Nobunaga’s Ambition has to offer.