Release: 2022 (Switch), 2021 (Windows)
Ambition: A Minuet in Power is more of a social sim than something with a conventional plot to it, but there is a story nonetheless. You play as Yvette Decaux, a commoner woman who has come to Paris on the eve of the French Revolution at the behest of her fiancé, Armand, a baron. We don't know much about Yvette other than she was most likely in love with Armand (I think it's possible to avoid ever implying she was in love with him, but it's hard) so this was not a marriage of convenience. In fact, she expresses disappointment at how readily her elated parents packed her off to Paris to join him.
Once in Paris though, everything goes wrong. Armand doesn't pick her up from the tavern where they were supposed to meet and people shun her when asking about him. After she finds his home the maid is happy to let her stay but has no idea where her master is, and on top of that, when Yvette attends a party in Armand's stead, the host humiliates her in place of her fiancé and tosses her out.
Things are not off to a good start for our heroine, but even though she came to Paris for Armand, she has ambition and has no intention of returning to her village in disgrace, so Yvette decides to tough it out and make her way into Parisian high society.
Because this is a social sim with multiple factions at play and Yvette can influence them to varying degrees, there are different variations in how things can play out by the end. The bulk of the gameplay is social manipulation, though there's a heavy (but ultimately optional) element of romance. Yvette's story is largely what the player wants it to be.
Does she want to find out what happened to her fiancé? She can. She can also decide whether or not she wants to forgive him once she does.
Would she like to fall in with the revolutionaries or support the crown? She can choose. (And you can go against history, allowing the crown to win.)
She can supposedly sway the minor factions of the military, the bourgeoisie, or the church into supporting either side of the revolution (though in practice I only ever succeeded with the military), and the daily calendar of parties and meetings with friends is punctuated with historical events as Paris draws closer and closer to violence.
In the second chapter things slow considerably and this is when the player will (likely) begin to live comfortably, but it's a little too slow depending on circumstances. There aren't as many parties, giving the player more free time to do things around the city and investigate the storylines that interest them the most, which is good if you prefer story to schedule/stat management, but I felt like the whirlwind of the first chapter was a good indication of what Yvette's life was supposed to be like and I found I rather missed it.
Aside from that, the game is for better or worse heavily rng-based. At first I found this a novelty, figuring there was so much stuff available that I would be spoiled for choice, thus encouraging replayability. When the right parameters are in place it is just that, but if you don't meet certain people, they die, or you don't have enough favor with them, you are deprived of seeing events where you could interact with them, which can lead to boring parties with the same two non-unique filler events over and over again because there is literally nothing else the game can offer you that you haven't already seen.
For example, in my first playthrough Thomas-Alexandre Dumas got killed at the end of Chapter 1 and I met Élisabeth Le Brun late in Chapter 2 (sort of, I'll get to this later), which caused a chunk of the game's small cast to be unavailable most of the game. Losing them not only cost me those characters' solo events, but any events where they would appear together with Honorade or Father Sidotti because paired events involve the two characters conversing. As a result, my late Chapter 2 city map ended up with barely anything to do.
If Yvette supported the major faction that didn't win, or one of the minor factions, she gets framed by the closest thing to the game's main antagonist and she has to defend herself at a rigged trial. It's not hard to win if the player has enough credibility and found the box under the floorboards at her house, but what would a game in revolutionary France be without the threat of a guillotine? The trial is skipped though if she has a romance with Élisabeth or Antoine, since as a prominent noble or revolutionary respectively, they are able to bring Yvette to safety before any arrest can happen.
I really like the details chosen for the potential love interests, giving the player a mix of original and historical, and of both genders. Having one be historically biracial Thomas-Alexandre Dumas is a stroke of genius as that instantly shuts down any notion that having a Black man serving in the royal army would be unrealistic (and I just love him as a character), and though not as groundbreaking, I do love Father Sidotti being portrayed as a dark-skinned Italian. Showing up as the Father's "date" at a party is also something I love being included in the game. It gets the response you'd expect.
Though the player is allowed a lot of freedom in the game, there are two things I'd like to touch on; Yvette's story with Armand, and the game's inability to keep track of things.
Armand is the reason Yvette comes to Paris, so unraveling why he did not show up and mysteriously disappeared is the closest thing to a main story Ambition has. I admit, I figured based on the premise that theirs was going to be a marriage of convenience and he was a deadbeat who ditched her, but I like that the circumstances are a lot different.
Because this has made Armand enemies among both the nobility and the revolution, he goes into hiding to avoid getting killed, and he hid these political activities of his while courting Yvette. Once she's in Paris though, he can't hide them anymore and Yvette can either join in or become increasingly appalled as she learns the full extent of what's going on.
Towards the end of the game, after the Bastille has been stormed, Armand comes to realize that the FHS's plan can no longer work, because there isn't the time to bring both sides to an agreement when people are getting killed in the streets. So he comes to Yvette with one final bid to force both sides to the table. He asks Yvette to forge a letter to scapegoat one of her associates into an enemy that both sides can unite against, and he's frank that the scapegoat will probably be killed, but he sees it as the only way to save France.
What I really like is that Armand will always ask her to scapegoat the love interest she likes the most who isn't Antoine or Élisabeth (since as part of the revolution and the nobility they are part of the major factions) or himself. For my first playthrough this ended up being Father Sidotti, who I found a complete darling, so even though I had otherwise finished Armand's storyline he could go hang himself before I would harm the dear father.
Though this game is not as complicated as something like Dragon Age, it's still much more complicated than your standard visual novel, which probably doesn't need to remember more than a few dozen choices at most and most times you can't experience events out of order. But Ambition is more freeform, which is why I mentioned earlier that I "sort of" met Élisabeth late in Chapter 2 my first playthrough.
I actually met her during Chapter 1 as part of my revenge plot. I needed a painter to help me hoist the petard of Maximin and I assumed she was just a minor NPC like a bunch of others you can meet around town who also have unique appearances. So when I didn't see her again it wasn't a big deal. But then she showed up late in Chapter 2. I was shocked that she was the missing crown-affiliated character I hadn't met yet, since I had, in fact, already met her. (She just wasn't in my journal that tracks all potential love interests since I hadn't met her at a party.)
When I talked to her, the two characters conversed as if they had never seen each other in their lives, which wasn't true. This was especially bad when I tried jogging Élisabeth's memory by reminding her that I was the one Maximin didn't like and she clearly did not recall ever meeting me before, let alone making a revenge painting of him.
And this isn't the only instance where the game shows an inability to realize what has and has not happened. I once got an epilogue for a character I never met, and if you do certain things dead characters can approve or disapprove of your actions (which is kinda funny). The game's closest character to a main villain isn't adequately introduced if you don't follow Armand's storyline which results in a bit of a "Who are you and why do you hate me?" moment when she suddenly starts talking like you've already met.
If the game was rebuilt in a frantic pass of a few months ahead of launch (there were launch delays), I can see why some scenarios may not have alternate versions of themselves (for instance, Élisabeth might have only one party intro scene, because at the time it was written, it wasn't possible for Yvette to meet her somewhere else first), and then there wouldn't have been enough time to test all the different scenarios a player could run into in the final chapter, but it breaks some of the immersion, especially for a game where not remembering someone from a party could well be a call for some social castigation.
This also might explain why the game usually ends with Yvette saying that she still has her "ambition" as a callback to the title, even though we see none of this ambition prior to her arriving in Paris and it really only comes up for the first time as a reason not to go home after Armand fails to pick her up. The game likely changed enough over the course of development so that Yvette's story was no longer quite what was originally planned. (Most of what you see in the game's older story trailer doesn't exist.)
The game's not broken beyond repair. I still had a good time, because even with these problems, it worked more than 90% of the time. If there was a last minute rebuild of the game in its final months of production, it was likely the right call. But it would have been nicer if the game had been cleaner. This especially extends to the save system, which doesn't let you choose to which save file to overwrite, which can result in it overwriting a save you want to keep. You'll always be safe making a fresh save, but it's an annoying flaw that was quite unexpected in a console release.
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