Regardless of where you start the battles, though, the controls are more or less the same. Officers can be fairly easily assembled into units, and then commanded individually, as a whole or with stacked orders that let you queue up things like pincher attacks. Because the units move in real time, mounted troops will have an advantage, but may be routed by, say, spearmen. By using the shoulder buttons and the d-pad, breaking off even large armies is really quite easy, and it makes for constant advances and retreats, as well as coordinated strikes on units or facilities in an absolutely intoxicating way. That you can pause the game and still issue orders means newcomers won't be overwhelmed right from the start.

That KOEI seems more than capable of making a strategy game that is neither the tacked-on fluff of the extra modes in the Warriors games expansions, nor as hopelessly detailed as the Romance series (at least in as much as we've played) means one thing: the Nobunaga's Ambition series is going to suck back in all those people that remember the name quite handily. Bear in mind that we've only just cracked the double-digit time investments and we hardly have anything progress-wise to show it.

The unification of Japan may well take some players hundreds of hours, but we get the impression that it'll be a slow-building snowball of progress. Build, build, build, attack/capture, then rebuild, and so on. With each push, more can be done and the rebuilding effort may go a little easier. Of course, everyone knows what happens to that Risk player who gets a little too greedy and starts conquering with reckless abandon...

We'll have more on Rise to Power here when the game hits stores in just a few weeks, but hopefully our early impressions have piqued your interest. If the game holds up as well our initial time with it, we could be looking at one of the last great strategy games to hit the PlayStation 2.