Gunma’s Ambition is one of the most surprising games to ever be translated from Japanese. It’s a parody of the Nobunaga’s Ambition series, but instead of tasking you with conquering Sengoku-era Japan, it asks you to turn all of modern Japan into Gunma. Gunma is a largely rural prefecture somewhat near Tokyo that, if it’s known at all, is know in the West for being the origin of daruma figures. Thus, in this game, your source of power is cards drawn from a daruma.
Gameplay in Gunma’s Ambition is minimal almost to the point of being an idle game. Half of the screen is devoted to a bouncing outline of Gunma inside a pachinko board, with goods that Gunma is known for raining down from above. You’ll earn a lot of currency if Gunma collides with the goods, and a lot less if the goods fall into 1x or 3x buckets below the board. You can then use that currency to purchase upgrades to the value of goods, the size of Gunma, or the size and value of the middle 3x bucket. Alternatively, you can use it to draw a random town in Gunma out of the daruma and convert its population worth of people in a different prefecture to Gunma, ultimately converting the entire province when you draw enough to cover the full population. This can take a bit, since although Gunma’s total population is nearly 2 million, even the capital Maebashi only has a little over 300 thousand. Many of your starting cards are tiny towns with populations in the low thousands, so drawing Maebashi is really the only thing that makes any difference at first.
Luckily, once you do convert a prefecture, it becomes a card that may be one of the 35 included in your daruma the next time it resets. Even Tottori, the smallest prefecture by population, is significantly larger than Maebashi, so each one makes a huge difference to how fast you can progress. Converting prefectures also adds new goods from that prefecture to your board, which can be more valuable than the ones you had before, and allows you to purchase higher tier upgrades. And that’s pretty much it. You keep doing that loop until you’ve converted the entire country to Gunma.
Nothing else is very notable. The music and sound effects are intentionally a cacophony of silly voices saying the names of the cards you draw or the goods that Gunma collects from pachinko. The art is minimal. This is for everyone who wants to play a very silly game about Gunma for an hour. If you’re looking for anything more than that, you’re best off saving a few dollars and buying something else.
Rating: 70%
Time to beat: 1 hour
Price: $4
For another hyper-local game, see Momotaro Dentetsu 2017 Review – Ride the Rails, Buy the Rails
Feel free to leave a question or comment below!
For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041
Leave a Reply