Nobunaga's Ambition celebrates 40th anniversary with new western release in July
Slightly more ambitious
Not many video game series reach the 40-year mark, but that's the anniversary Nobunaga's Ambition celebrates this year. The historical grand strategy series is celebrating with the announcement of a new western release, Nobunaga's Ambition: Awakening, which will launch this July. You'll find the first trailer below.
As per usual, Awakening is a grand strategy game set in the Warring States period of Japan, during which clans battled to unify the fractured country. It's a bit like Total War, in that you build defenses and manage economy and diplomacy on a zoomed out map of the nation, then jump into separate battlefields when it's time to pit your thousands of tiny men against a rival clan's equivalents.
Nobunaga's Ambition: Awakening launched in Japan under the name Nobunaga's Ambition: Shinsei in July last year. Aside from a full translation, the western release has apparently been polished and further expanded with what Koei Tecmo call the "Power-up Kit".
One of Awakening's key features is the return of castle sieges, in which players must either deploy defensive equipment to keep hold of their own fort, or select which route to take when smashing through an enemy's defenses. Those sieges, in a different form, were present in the last Nobunaga's Ambition we reviewed, 2015's Sphere Of Influence.
Awakening will launch in the west on July 20th. You can find a listing for the original 2022 release without English language support on Steam, if you want to see more of it in action, or you'll find more details on its official site.