Nobunaga’s Ambition: Sphere of Influence | R3DPlaystation Review

By: Nate

Being as old as Mario is pretty crazy in the video game universe. After spanning across 30 years since its original release in Japan, the Nobunaga’s Ambition series returns with its latest entry, Nobunaga’s Ambition: Sphere of Influence.

Coming into this game and thinking it is going to be like any of the Dynasty or Samurai Warriors games is a mistake. Nobunaga’s Ambition: Sphere of Influence stands on its own as a real time strategy game. The game incorporates the following 3 elements: Creation, Diplomacy, and War. Players must balance these elements as they try to unite Japan.

There are many storylines that a player will experience throughout the game. The story depends on you, the player. Even though Nobunaga’s Ambition: Sphere of Influence is based on Sengoku era, from 15th-16th century Japan, it offers 11 different scenarios to play through. Because of how many different clans and tribes there were across Japan, uniting it will cause a player to spend hours upon hours playing the game. It is quite lengthy.

Nobunaga’s Ambition: Sphere of Influence offers a lot of history, especially for players who choose the historical route. Whenever I play this style of games, I always come out of them with some everlasting knowledge. It is an experience that you should at least try once. That being said, I didn’t feel the need to go back and play more after completing one of the scenarios.

Before even starting any scenario, a player should first try out the edit mode. In this mode, you can either customize any historical officer or create a brand new officer who is unique to you. There are a good variety of customization tools available such as your characters face, birth, personality, and lifespan.

Another feature in edit mode is who your birthparent is. I decided to go with Nobuyasa Oda since that was going to be one of the main characters I use during my scenario play through. Another mentionable quality about this mode is that you can edit all the stats of your created characters so that you have an advantage on the difficult battlefield.

While playing Nobunaga’s Ambition: Sphere of Influence, a player should be careful with every decision that he/she makes. If you decide to conspire against a clan or try to steal an opposing clan’s officer, they might come at you full force.

There is always something to do while you are playing too. Never is there any downtime. Creation is one of the prime elements of this game for a reason. In order for your population and troop forces to grow you need to make sure you enhance your harvestable crops. For your clan to grow and expand, you need gold. In order to get gold, you need to either sell crops or expand your crafts so that you earn more monthly money.

Within the menu of decision making, you can expand and conquer using these following mini-menus:

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Civil – Development of your town, enacting policies and trading.

Infrastructure – Using labor and gold to construct fortresses, castles, and expand onto your current areas.

Posting – Transferring officers among castles and fortresses.

Foreign – Use diplomacy tactics to gain trust and create alliances among opposing clans.

Covert – Appeasing tribes so that they may join you in battle or assimilate to your clan.

Retainers – Manage your officers and employ rōnins.

Investigate – Secretly search enemy and area bases to gain an advantage in battle.

Province – Manage your provinces and change bases.

Deploy – Plan where to start sending your troops to march.

Request – Request reinforcements and create truces with other clans.

Directions – Determine the direction for your province to march.

Attack – Set attack coordinates for your troops.

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The above are all of the different commands that a player can use to manage his/her clan. These gameplay elements add a lot of variety to the RTS style combat.

The main problem I have with the gameplay is that it can be very hard/annoying throughout my time playing. For example, the one clan kept bombarded me with troops (over 10,000 in total). The first time I defeated them it was fun, but spending another 10 hours or more on one clan that doesn’t seem to ever go away can make a person rip his/her hair out. So when I was finally able to destroy all the clan’s troops that they sent to my castles, I had no troops or supplies left. Then I had to do this about 4-5 times after resupplying before I decided to stop playing for a long time.

If you are playing a Nobunaga’s Ambition series’ game for the first time, then you will want to play on Easy or customize your own settings. This is also a cool feature because you can set everything up so that your clan has an advantage in combat, growth or anything else your heart desires. This makes playing the game much more manageable.

The battlefield gameplay makes Nobunaga’s Ambition: Sphere of Influence much more enjoyable, but it is not required. Once you are engaged in battle, a player can simply click on the option to join and they are transferred to an over-the-top, tactics style fighting system.

In this fighting mechanic, players can attack a unit head-on, from two different sides, or any other way he/she may choose. The fighting is completely based on your fighting style and up to the player. Even when fighting big units that have three times as many troops can be defeated by tactical gameplay and special abilities.

Each and every character has abilities that can be used throughout the battle to gain an upper hand. For instance, a player may use an ability that makes the front enemy unit attack the back enemy unit. There are a lot of abilities to explore and earn. A player will grow and learn new abilities the more that he/she fights, creates and negotiates.

The graphical aspect of the game is beautiful when outside of the battlefield but could use tinkering to make it really pop; however, when engaged in close-quarters battling, Nobunaga’s Ambition: Sphere of Influence looks dated and not as interesting. Also, I never had a problem with framerate or performance issues with the Playstation 4 version of the game.

Overall, Nobunaga’s Ambition: Sphere of Influence is fun upon your first time playing, but grows frequently less interesting the more you have to battle the same clan over and over. The gameplay has a lot of depth and some of the best tactical mechanics I have seen among other RTS style games in the genre. The graphics could use improvement and players will find out a little bit about Japan’s history which makes the game a great learning experience.

7/10 – For players that are interested in a good RTS game. For an extra challenge, play the game on its hardest difficulty or just on normal (Normal/Medium difficulty is hard enough).