Nobunaga's Ambition: Awakening - Review

Clickbait title: THE BEST Nobunaga's Ambition game in years!

Nobunaga's Ambition: Shinsei is not exactly a bad game, but it is plagued with many flaws like questionable design choices, graphical inconsistencies and a forgettable soundtrack. So did Awakening fixed those flaws with the things added in the Power Up Kit expansion? Eh...

・Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:10 The AI issue and the overhaul of the civic system
04:53 Siege battle and how it changes the game
07:59 Direct talk and tales of Sengoku Drama
13:08 The writing is still good
15:39 The flaws that were left untouched
20:35 In Conclusion

All of the BGM used were from the game itself (will update the the song's titles later when I'm not lazy)

©コーエーテクモゲームス All rights reserved.

[GameplayBrasilis]

Love your reviews.
I am really enjoying the game... As long as I play as a big clan. The enemy AI is so agressive that even on Very Easy you will soon find yourself unable to progress if you are small.

[febriandi_lushan]

I am completely agree with your assesment, being a small clan is pain. Yet being a middle clan also hurt because there is always big clan in central japan that waiting you. The only way to win it just to butcher up them in combat where you still outnumber them, but it become boring after like 2-3 fights on the same place.

[toedpens]

20:07 😂

Yeah I've definitely enjoyed this a great deal, flaws are there but fun enough to ignore. Almost as good as sphere of influence

which does remind me, why not just use those events for osaka if they didn’t wanna write them? Hell the cutscenes too, no reason not to. It's weird since almost every design is the same, rotk 14 is especially egregious with that since it had no cutscenes for some reason

[viniciuslessa]

Thanks for the great review, Random Guy.

I must disagree with your main point though about the AI being unreliable, which I assume means the Suggestions system. I must have around 60h in the game at this point and I don't see how that's a problem. The AI makes suggestions regarding your neighboring clans as it seems fit and most of the times they make appropriate and useful ones. If, on the other hand, you want them to focus on a given clan, you just need to militarize against that clan by targeting one of it's castles. Voilá, now your officers will focus their suggestions on that clan.

The area I think could be improved is the armies' routes on March command, but then I don't see how that's related to your officers AI? t's more of a general algorithm the game uses for defining those routes. Which doesn't seem hard to fix through updates (hopefully).

So, while I agree the game has space for improvements, I don't really see the living officers feature and their AI as problematic, at least not regarding Suggestions. Are you sure it's not a case of you not really grokking the delegation-centered premise of the game, and perhaps expectating something it never tried to be in first place?

Anyway, I'm having a blast with the game, and while it's far from some revolution, it feels like a clear improvement over the last entries of this series, with each subsystem, from War to Diplomacy to Officer management etc being more well-developed than what came before. If KOEI keep polishing it up through updates, I could see it being the best Nobunaga Ambition in a long time (IMHO).

P.S: Japanese voices were added in last update.

[piripono]

20:24
horrible narrator but hearing sphere of influence's clan theme is nice

[archivegaming]

You flaming idiots! 😂 that brings back memories the dynasty warrios dubs were always feast or famine