Koei's Ambition: to sell a Wii game
Koei tried porting one of their most venerable franchises to the Wii, in the form of Sangokushi XI (Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI) with Power-Up Kit. By most publishers' standards, it bombed, selling about 6,000 copies. But how much could those ultra-hardcore strategy games really be expected to sell? Apparently, not that much. Maybe the development costs are low enough that Koei can recoup their expenses just by selling to a small audience.
In any case, ported strategy games are cheaper to develop than original RPGs, and sell about the same. Because of that, we can kind of understand why Koei's putting another of their classic strategy series on the Wii. Well, that and the fact that pointer control is a natural for this kind of menu-driven game. Nobunaga's Ambition with Power-Up Kit offers the same kind of thrills that Romance of the Three Kingdoms did: lots of map screens and numbers representing historical battles. Famitsu's got a bunch of screens of the game, which is due out in March, both alone and in a bundle with Romance.
As long as they keep putting out art like this that we can then post, Koei is free to do whatever they want on the Wii.
