Nobunaga's Ambition: Taishi

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.

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.

As a turn-based strategy game that should have offered more depth with the amount of time that you spend on it, Nobunaga's Ambition: Taishi is disappointingly shallow and fails to carry on the long legacy for a series that is known for its incredibly complex and deep strategical implementation of ancient Japan.

Nobunaga's Ambition: Taishi is a game that feels like a more approachable version of what's come before, both for returning players and new ones alike.

Considering this is the fifteenth in the franchise, Koei Tecmo took a big risk by trying to attract an all new audience and it failed spectacularly. Understanding where Nobunaga's Ambition: Taishi came from can help to explain it. It was released not just for PC originally, but for tablet also, hence the big changes and simplified features. In this bold move, Koei Tecmo managed to not only drive away its loyal fan-base but also fail to bring in any new fans to the series. 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.

I really hate tearing down games because nobody sets out to purposefully make a bad game and people put passion and effort into Nobunaga's Ambition: Taishi, but not only does this game fail on its own merits, the fact that this is the 15th entry in an acclaimed series makes it even more disappointing. The way it tries to hide its lack of depth is almost insulting, and not even a decent character system can save it.

Nobunaga's Ambition: Taishi is a slow-moving strategy game that needs long hours of play, a complex user interface and a smooth and annoying system of instructions rather than being useful to newcomers. On the other hand, the title provides many historical information about feudal Japan and real characters and battles from this era.

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.

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.