Ambition: A Minuet in Power
I almost fainted when I saw Ambition’s premise. A choose-your-own adventure? With political intrigue and love interests?! Taking place in the French Revolution!? It seemed perfect for me - and, oh, it was!
You play as Yvette Decaux, a woman who travels to Paris on the eve of the French Revolution to rendezvous with her fiance, a baron named Armand. But oh no! He’s missing! You have the option to try and find him, and/or abandon him for one or more of the five other love interests. Each of those love interests are part of a faction - the Crown, the Church, the Military, the Bourgeoisie, and the Revolution. To build your power, you must go to parties thrown by these factions to meet your romance options, collect gossip, and participate in a randomized and vast array of entertaining minor intrigues. The gossip you get can be sold for money (used to buy dresses, pay rent, bribe the authorities, and purchase coffee - the usual!) or bend the factions to your will. You can increase or decrease their power, or nudge the middle factions towards the Crown or Revolution.
– Real player with 146.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Diplomacy Political Games.
First and foremost: this game gets my recommendation. Its content is deep, compelling, and interesting. Despite having limited hours to do so, I wanted to keep playing. The historical perspective seems incredibly well researched and founded (though I admit I am not a good source to weigh in on historical legitimacy), the characters were diverse, and the story was compelling.
That being said, I found numerous issues. The most frustrating being that many of the randomly generated interactions kept appearing “out of order” in such a way that the story felt massively interrupted and disjointed. I’m honestly not sure if it’s some strange series of choices I made to cause this, but I kept accidentally running into one of the main characters in the game in side missions at parties in which she would act as if we had some very contemptuous history, when in reality, I had never even seen her before let alone (to my knowledge) upset her before. As I found from playing the entire game, I believe she was destined to be an adversary, but I was SO confused when I was playing. There were several other instances in which I found that interactions I had already had with characters didn’t jive with interactions I went on to have with them subsequently, and honestly, this is my biggest issue with the game.
– Real player with 48.2 hrs in game
Palais de Reine
Played a bit more, and decided to add some new and fresh feelings. I definitely recommend this game, like 99 out of 100. Though lots of texts, even the opening took me like more than an hour (I’m a slow reader, though).
Highlight of the game, I think, is the way of building characters. Each character have distinct personalities and personal stories, for like 30-40 characters? It also built a pretty complete world, with reasonable explanation for all things I can think of.
This is a mixture of romance and strategy, like half-half. Yet I guess a reason why this game is not very popular is that neither is out-standing. I mean, both are great, but if compare each element to famous games like Civilization (famous strategy game) or 蝶の毒 華の鎖 (famous romance game), neither part stands out. I don’t play strategy games, so I only can speak romance-wise. The number of characters is both the tame’s highlight and weakness. With so many characters, it is just impossible to make everyone’s story equally impressive. Personally, only one character’s route made me feel like in love. All other romance route makes me feel average-good but not impressive (or maybe I’m too harsh). Though most non-romance routes are beautiful.
– Real player with 85.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Diplomacy Romance Games.
Highly recommended.
-Romance parts are optional and not required to finish or to enjoy the game!!!
-It has two difficulty settings, normal and difficult.
-You can’t just click your way through the game. If you fail the strategy part then that means game over.
-Has partial voice acting. The 7 “poster boy” knights are all voiced, while the 20 kights are not voiced. Some of the Lords are
voiced, as well as the Princess’ two aides.
-Don’t focus too much on voiced characters. The rest of the cast all have their own stories and the majority of the characters can
– Real player with 48.5 hrs in game