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good one

Great review, and completely fair. I fell in love with the game in 89 for reasons I still don't get. It's not my kind of game either, but I've been returning to it for 35 years now. It turns out I've been mispronouncing "Nobunaga" since then...

I love how Kou outright demanded that Koei should make a game with the Fate IP and turned it into one of the best musou titles out there. aa true geek even all these years later.

As far as I'm concerned, "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" is canonically the sequel to "Seduction of the Condominium Wife"

Hard to believe that Nobunaga's Ambition isn't a staple at AGDQ

Hands up if you used to pronounce “Nobunaga” to rhyme with “Cowabunga”

Romance and the three kingdoms and nobunaga's ambition 2 sucked up a lot of time in the late 80's and early 90's on the nes.

Koei was one of the last 3rd parties to keep publish games on the NES even as the SNES was taking over. They had a small but reliable fanbase so they knew how many copies they'd sell.

Genghis Kahn was a jam at a friend's house all summer in the 90s. We'd stay up all night playing it or starcraft running on combos

Can't wait for the Liberty or Death retrospective on SNES Works

7:09 - Sounds exactly like Vlad Dracula.

I thought it was "no-bung-uh's" ambition until I was an adult and read the name more closely. 6:09 - He looks like a Japanese Neil Breen.

This is one of those weird nes games that you see but you don’t know what the game is

Most Nintendo Power readers were probably not looking for a precursor to Paradox's Grand Strategy titles like the Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis series.

I couldn’t wrap my head around what I was supposed to do. It was like SimCity to me. Oh, you want me to get power everywhere? Sorry, no idea what you want. Hey look, RBI baseball!

Great video again love listening to these

I kinda wish we'd get a Columbus' Ambition, now that you mention it.

10:01 Woo Baseball Stars!

I rented this in Jr. High, and was really bummed out I spent $5 of my hard earned lawn mowing money. I did enjoy sending ninjas to assassinate other daimyos. The animation when they succeeded was hilarious!

This game was perfect for extremely long vacation trips (the gameboy version) Tons of batteries died for this game.

I remember feeling a sense of conflict. I _wanted_ to play this game, because, as noted, it appeared to have similarities to Ultima Exodus. The problem was that 10 year old me had zero context for the Warring States Period... a thing that wouldn't be even remotely remedied until years later with the PS2 launch of Kessen. The stats management would have driven me to madness in NEEDING to puzzle together how everything worked. Essentially, it would have been more of an obsession about learning how to play than actually playing it. Pride of "figuring out" rpg systems from Ultima or Final Fantasy or solving outcomes for the MacVenture ports or Maniac Mansion was a major appeal for me. I might have liked this game... eventually. But I never got to try it out when I would have been most receptive.

I'm tired of making soft core porn games about lonely house wives. I want to make something epic(training montage with 1980s music begins).

The game (and the franchise) that made my love for strategy gaming and grand strategy games as well.

i love the random pop culture stuff at the beginning of these vids haha

didn't realize that Paradox like games existed in the 80s

I love the old Koei strategy/sim games though I didn't play this one much. I think I played Romance of the Three Kingdoms first but my memory is hazy. I adore the Gameboy Nobunaga's Ambition though because it was the first game I got on the long, long road to building my Gameboy collection after all my Gameboy games besides one new game, aka my least favorite video game of all time, got thrown out by mistake during a move.

Even listening to you explain this, I still don't understand it

Bandit Kings of Ancient China gave enough control and streamlined things enough that I had fun with it any of the other NES era Koei games I tried were too overwhelming.

I beat this one a couple of times. Once in two player with a friend and then a solo replay. As long as you start off well it's not too hard. I Started as Takada Shingen, so I focused conquering north & south then focusing on the east. Saving western expansion for last. The key is keeping your battle front as small & manageable as possible. An the back line fiefs producing food and replacement soldiers. Def not a game for everyone but I enjoyed it

Definitely not my cup 'o tea, but I am glad it exists. Seems pretty ambitious for the era.

Fist of the North Star has had some pretty good games. The Arc System Works fighter is fun, Lost Paradise is amazing because it’s just using the Yakuza engine, and the Ken’s Rage game are fun Warriors brawlers. This is, well, everyone has to start somewhere.

I also recommend using the Buster on Airman instead of his weakness. There are times the lower tornadoes are just high enough for it to clear, and mashing it when he lands on one side of the screen or the other feels more effective than hoping the leaf shield doesn’t get bopped down by the gusts.

I actually go after Metal Man last, so I don’t get to use the OP option until the Wily Stages. It keeps the challenge for the Robot Master stages while giving me the rest of the great arsenal over the course of the early game.

I think I rented one of these, (it was either this or shingen the ruler) but man I was in *way* over my head!

Nobunaga's Ambien

My pet theory for how/why Koei was willing to keep publishing in the US: Dads. These are some of the first "dad games." And so if a family had a NES, and older family members wanted a fairly mature game to play, there are all these deep wargames for them to get into. And very little else. Koei kind of cornered the market.

When my friends popped this game into the NES, I’d usually head home. I didn’t understand it as a kid, and it was boring to watch someone play it.

This is timely. The 2024 (remake) of Shogun recently concluded its run, which is heavily inspired by the history and events surrounding Oda Nobunaga.

Is this the same game that had all the commands on the game cart? I rember getting this as a kid used with no book and dident realize all the commands where on the cart means my buddy liked the tactic battle part

"the ladder was formed from the ground up"

I've barely played this one, but I love this series and the related titles. As a kid I played the crap out of the sequel (Lord of Darkness) on SNES, as well as Romance of the Three Kingdoms 3 and Gemfire (which applies a simplified version of the format to a fantasy version of the Wars of the Roses)

Is this the first use of the term "grognards" in this series? It is really surprising to see something this dense and complex not only on the Famicom but translated for the North American audience. And apparently doing all right! I guess by this point the NES was well saturated enough that you could start pitching more games to niches like this. A good pitch to dads who bought the thing for their kids to play Mario. Avalon Hill was still doing brisk business in tabletop wargames back around this period.

One of those games as a kid that I had absolutely no idea how to play, but now as an adult, I've grown to quite like it.

Around the start of highschool, I was quite fascinated by samurai and Japanese history. I faithfully tuned in every weekend to watch a year-long NHK series about Nobunaga. Then I bought Nobunaga's Ambition on SNES; and I soon realized "This ain't for me."

I always forget Ogre Battle is a series and not just Person of Lordly Caliber

Damn, man! You’re on it lately! Loving the steady drop of NES games! Love this channel, man.

Nobunaga's Ambition is complex by the standards of console gaming (e.g. NES/Famicom) of the day. Certainly a bit more of a slog than say Romance of the Three Kingdoms in my opinion but relatively manageable once you figure out the basic "rhythm" of KOEI and how to abuse the decidedly less than optimal AI. This said, I still think sticking to the sequel is a better idea as by then the games had become far more user-friendly and easier on the eye.

Happy fief, happy life 🙂

It'll be neat when Jeremy eventually reaches 1990 & has to cover Hot-B USA's release of the similarly-styled Shingen the Ruler, which was apparently so complex that Hot-B put a key for all of the various menu abbreviations on the cartridge label itself, despite players not being able to actually use said key during gameplay, because the top-loader NES wouldn't come out for another three years.