Late last night, Nintendo announced the new additions to its Switch Online classic games catalog and, surprisingly, they are all Koei Tecmo games. While the titles, in question, are technically Koei games (the two companies merged in 2009), that doesn’t matter. All four of them are solid games that should be of interest to classic RTS fans. They’re also SNES classics that have been grossly overlooked for too long.
Joining the service on March 28th, 2025, will be the following four games:
- Nobunaga’s Ambition
- Nobunaga’s Ambition: Lord of Darkness
- Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire
- Uncharted Waters: New Horizons
Many people will likely not have heard of these games, but they’re all part of a strong lineage of strategy titles that Koei Tecmo used to make. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms games still exist (with the last main installment being 2020’s ROTTK 14), and Nobunaga’s Ambition did receive a sequel in 2022, but Uncharted Waters has mostly evaporated or been relegated to lousy mobile spinoffs. The games focus on different periods of history and force players to think tactically about where they’ll move to conquer a large map of outputs and territories. They are certainly simplistic but engaging nonetheless.
While these aren’t the most high-profile games to be added to the Nintendo Switch Online service, I do think company has made the right call adding them. Subscription services should be focused more on titles that either wouldn’t sell in major numbers or have gone overlooked. We would all do well to learn more about the history of our hobbies.
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
