A visual novel based on the French Revolution. Well, call me intrigued and enthusiastic at the same time! When Ambition: A Minuet In Power dropped in our digital inbox, I was faster on it than you can say liberte egalite fraternite and handling the guillotine to kill some royal you found on the streets. Luckily, Ambition – A Minuet In Power is less on the bloody details and feels more like a game of Bridgerton. Time to dive in!
Story
Since it’s a visual novel, I will not go into too much detail regarding the storylines. These types of games work best when you experience them for yourself. So, a quick synopsis!
A young woman finds herself alone in the streets of Paris, far from home and abandoned by the love of her life. In that moment, she decides to live for herself and seek her passions as France marches towards a violent uprising that will change history forever. Navigate the twisting social politics of pre-revolutionary Paris in a game world that’s automatically generated and different every time you play. Court, snub, and seduce your way to the top of society. Extend your influence, uncover the intrigue of the coming revolution, and ensure you end up on the winning side of history.
Gameplay Mechanics
Ambition: A Minuet in Power is a game covering the French Revolution’s initial years. In the game, players are given control over Yvette’s activities from late March through early August 1789. Yvette can only perform one task per day, and there are only a few days left for her to do what is necessary before her fate is decided. Although this may seem like players need to carefully plan Yvette’s days, the game allows players to save manually and retry at various points. Players can save the game at any time, but it will always be saved as a new file, and there is no option to overwrite a previous save. There is no limit to the number of saves that can be created, but deleting them individually from the Load screen afterward can be tedious.
This stats-raising visual novel’s story is advanced through dialogue choices and actionable tasks. These tasks include attending parties, meeting love interests, exploring Paris, going to specific shops, and resting at home. On days without plot events, the player can choose one task for Yvette to do in a day. Although it is realistic for the 18th century for a day to be spent doing a single thing, it can be frustrating for players who unintentionally waste a day by visiting a shop that is out of their budget. It would be better if Yvette could exit and go to another shop for a different task. However, travel time would reasonably take up most of her free time.
RNG & Factions
Managing Yvette’s credibility, peril, fatigue levels, her favor points with various love interests, and the amount of money she has are the character stats that players need to focus on in the game Ambition: A Minuet in Power. The tutorial messages in the game explaining these character stats are concise and clear. Moreover, longer tutorial segments provide an option to skip, which is a thoughtful addition for players who want to explore the system independently or are already familiar with how things work. Another excellent example of how well thought out some of the game mechanics are is the random number generator (RNG) used in the game. Ambition: A Minuet in Power takes an excellent effort to label choices accurately to help players make decisions. Dialogue choices that require a credibility challenge or increase Yvette’s peril level are marked accordingly with corresponding icons. Hovering over those icons shows further information as a tooltip, such as whether the credibility challenge will be easy or tough or if the peril involved will be small or huge. Potential rewards of the selected conversation are listed at parties, be it a possible decrease or increase of credibility, peril, favor points, or money. These lists generally help players choose their battles wisely.
In addition to character stats, players can influence various political factions’ power and allegiance. This can be achieved through several channels, such as collecting gossip and interacting with side characters on the map. Although players can choose to ignore this segment, allowing the factions to run their course, the outcome of political conflicts may affect the ending obtained with the love interest(s). In Ambition: A Minuet in Power, the events updating according to present faction standings incentivize players to actively push for a faction’s standing, making it more enjoyable and worthwhile.
Love Routes
A total of six love interests are available in the game, namely Baron Armand de Marbo, Yvette’s fiancé; Corporal Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the soldier; Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just, the revolutionary; Father Ludovico Sidotti, the Catholic priest; Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, the painter; and Madame Honorade Gazel, the bourgeois widow. Except for Armand, all the other love interests have the same starting point, which is meeting at a party and gaining favor with them. Once enough favor is accumulated, Yvette can rendezvous with the specific love interest. Each love interest has its criteria for romance route progression. Some require attending their faction’s party or going to particular map locations after some point to access further romance plots, while others can be progressed by simply relying on rendezvous. This means that some romance routes are more straightforward to complete than others.
In the game, players have a lot of flexibility in handling romance. The main character, Yvette, can pursue multiple love interests simultaneously and choose to be intimate with them one after the other. However, it’s worth noting that the game’s epilogue only allows Yvette to end up with, at most, one of her love interests. While intimacy with a love interest is not required to secure an epilogue scene, players who choose not to be intimate will miss out on the event CG for the Intimacy scene. Most importantly, it’s worth noting that Yvette doesn’t need to romance anyone to avoid a bad ending.
Conclusion
So, to conclude! Ambition: A Minuet in Power has a good story and satisfying romance. The writing is polished but is not always greatly optimized for the Switch textboxes. The characters are lively and have depth, the art is detailed, and the music is captivating. The game’s stats-raising difficulty is comfortable for casual play, which takes little effort to master. But this should be nothing off-putting for the general visual novel fan. I believe that fans of visual novels who do not mind stats-raising elements would enjoy this historical title; I sure did.
