Nobunaga's Ambition: Iron Triangle (PS2)
Uniting Japan on the PlayStation 2
2/6/2009 5:29 PM | 4 Comments | Page 1 of 3
What's Hot: Excellent manual; Deep and complex gameplay; Some interesting design choices
What's Not: Ugly, inscrutable graphics; Horrible interface
I got my first Game Boy in 1991, along with two games: some kind of
Metroid-like thing where you're a gargoyle, and
Nobunaga's Ambition. The gargoyle thing kept my interest for a while, but it was
Nobunaga's Ambition that really grabbed me. I was already into strategy games on my Apple II, but here was a detailed strategy game that I could carry around and play anywhere (so long as the light was bright enough to see the screen).
However, being a Game Boy game, it had a teensy manual. A Nobunaga's Ambition with a teensy manual is a terrible thing. I couldn't figure out things like how much food I would harvest each season, and how much of it my soldiers would eat. I was marching armies to death by starving them.
Calling Koei
Smells like Mikawa Spirit.
So I eventually called Koei's customer support. This was back in 1991, so I easily got an actual person on the phone. She was there for technical questions, and she had no idea what the economic model was in the Game Boy version of
Nobunaga's Ambition. In fact, she knew almost nothing about how the game worked, beyond putting the cartridge in the Game Boy and maybe blowing on the contacts if it wasn't working. She patiently tried to explain this to me as I read off my list of questions about harvests, castle upgrades, income rates and so on. The poor woman was at a loss. I demanded to speak to someone who could help me. I had to at least know how food and armies worked. How was I going to unite Japan without even the most rudimentary quatermastering abilities?
Eventually, she agreed to send me the manual to a version of
Nobunaga's Ambition for another platform. It helped a little.
Nobunaga's Ambition has never been an easy endeavor, no matter what the platform. Whether it's the documentation, the learning curve, the interface,or just the Asian names, most of Koei's games require a lot of patience and dedication. Eighteen years later, as I wrestle with
Nobunaga's Ambition: Iron Triangle, I realize that I've come a long way. Koei has not.
Officer's mess
SimCity, the Feudal Japan edition
Koei's longest-running and most famous series are Romance of the Three Kingdoms, set in China, and Nobunaga's Ambition, set in Japan. Recently, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games have gone a little RPG. Nobunaga's Ambition is doing no such thing. This is very much a hardcore strategy game. The "iron triangle" of the subtitle is a reference to the interplay among technology, government and the military, which is a good way to characterize the level of gameplay. You work your way along a tech tree, you build up your provinces, and then you have occasional battles.
The main playing pieces are officers, whose stats determine their most effective use: They have aptitude to determine what techs they can help you learn, politics to determine how quickly they can do projects like civil construction, intelligence to determine their effectiveness at subterfuge, and leadership for all things military. They have qualities like valor and will, for use in battles. They have inventories, loyalty and lifespans. Any task requires an assigned officer, and some require multiple officers. When it comes time to do battle, every unit can be led by up to three officers, which will determine whether the unit gets any special abilities.
