Nobunaga's Ambition: Taishi Critic Reviews

This is the kind of game I can sit down to and play for an entire evening without realising how much time was slipping. It's always "just one more turn," or "just one more battle", and even after all these years of playing Koei's strategy and action games set through the Sengoku period, and reading books about it, I'm always impressed that Koei Tecmo manages to teach me something new each time it releases something in the franchise.

Just like Sphere of Influence and Ascension the strategy focuses on development, diplomacy and warfare as core elements, with economic as well as political connections at its center. Overall it feels less refined than the predecessors, though.

Nobunaga’s Ambition: Taishi is certainly the kind of game that you can get lost in, constantly muttering ‘one more turn’ while losing sleeping and playing into the wee hours of the morning.

A deep, engaging and enjoyable strategy sim that requires too many hours of “placid” gameplay… and a hardcore profile as a gamer to really enjoy the whole experience the game has to offer.

Nobunaga’s Ambition: Taishi possesses many good qualities. Its extreme complexity makes it a top notch historic sim for every veteran but, on the other hand, results being inaccessible to all newcomers. Those who will invest their bodies and souls in Koei Tecmo’s new title will get a highly satisfying experience: if you’re not among these brave players, it would better to try something less demanding.

The new features, particularly the Resolve system, are cool, but the title still manages to feel incomplete. For those elite, it’s best to wait until the next version.

Nobunaga's Ambition: Taishi is a turn-based grand strategy role-playing simulation video game which comes out in the 35th anniversary of this series. Maybe this could be one of the reasons why it (pitifully) maintained most of its main features, including many faults that could have been removed or improved.

Sadly, all its clever systems end up centering on warfare, and it is in warfare where Taishi too often fails to deliver. For every pitched battle ending in an exhilarating upset victory, there were a dozen that left me feeling like they were wasting my time. Despite all the clever tools in Kou Shibusawa’s thirty-year vision for historical simulation, I frequently had no way to create a new history for a unified Japan without marching into the inevitable.

As much as Nobunaga's Ambitions: Taishi is a good "grand strategy", the production still sins of different ingenuity and a technical realization that we could define now connatural in the series signed Koei Tecmo.

Maybe the years are a weigh heavily for this last Nobunaga's Ambition or maybe the consoles are not its home anymore but Nobunaga's Ambition: Taishi feels old, clumsy and hard to play on a DualShock 4. It good features are covered by its defects.

Nobunaga's Ambition: Taishi is an interesting, but painfully slow and uninvolving strategy game that I want to praise more, but in comparison to its contemporaries, I can't help but feel it still needs work. Shame, as the strategy flavor of Nobunaga's Ambition has always appealed to me, but in practice it feels sluggish and makes me yearn for strategy games I'll enjoy that much more.

Ultimately, the final product is just dull, too simple to appeal to the hardcore, and too dense to appeal to the casual. It's hard to see who could enjoy this outside of hardcore J-History buffs and, even then, a textbook would be more entertaining.