Nintendo is adding some very peculiar picks for Nintendo Switch Online’s SNES library, just in time before March ends and just before the Switch 2 Direct.
Nobunaga’s Ambition, Nobunaga’s Ambition: Lord of Darkness, Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire, and Uncharted Waters: New Horizons are all from Koei, years before they merged with Tecmo. We can already tell you now that most of you won’t be interested in playing these games. But maybe the story behind them will be more interesting, at least.
Between Total War, Crusader Kings, and Company of Heroes, the West has long been familiar with military strategy games. However, Koei’s history in the genre is unique, both among its peers and also among its Japanese peers.
Both Nobunaga’s Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms are an unholy alliance of military tactics and business simulation. You aren’t the general who’s facing enemy troops out in the field. Instead, you are the military commander managing things from afar, and as either a Japanese or Chinese lord, you own a parcel of land, have your own farmers and people, and you are in a position to build your own empire.
To do this; you compete with other lords in neighboring lands, but before you can attack them, you’ll have to build an army. So you’ll spend the first hour or so managing your land, recruiting soldiers and generals, and collecting gold and rice, to prepare your army.
Koei’s games can get even granular than this, however. You can hire spies to find rumors, or to spread idle gossip about your rivals. You can build alliances with defeated generals, and even other lords.
Unfortunately, here’s where we get to the real bad news; this plays out in a lot of menus and still screens, which can take hours to get through. Unlike ActRaiser, there is no action side-scrolling section to break up the monotony. The gameplay is the monotony, but then again, this might just be your jam.
Because Nobunaga’s Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms games continue to be made to this day. In fact, the newest games in both series are also on the Switch. Those games are better paced and have tons of QOL improvements, whereas these games are literally ports of PC games (from Japanese operating systems that aren’t Windows.)
Uncharted Waters: New Horizons is a different beast, and this might be more your jam. Conceptually, it’s similar to Sid Meier’s Pirates, but once again with the eccentricities unique to Japanese games. But it has naval combat, trading, treasure hunting, even cartography.
You can choose to be a pirate, but with six protagonists with completely different stories and careers, you can be something else too. This game may also feel dated in presentation, but if the rigors of actual military strategy simulation seemed a bit much, this might be worth a try.
For their age, these games do have great music and graphics (with cover art by Godzilla poster artist Noriyoshi Ohrai!), and fans of the genre may want to satiate their curiosity on how these titles played. Of course, whether you personally like these games or not, it’s great that Nintendo is making them available for newer games to experience, and see if they will like them.
These games will be coming to Nintendo Switch Online this March 28. You can watch the announcement trailer below.
