Ambitious Mission Review

After the middling reception to last year’s title, Saga Planets once again tapped Sakaki Kasa (さかき傘) to write the main scenario, hoping he could rescue the new game’s reputation.

The game is called Ambitious Mission (アンビシャスミッション), and it’s set in Sapporo, Hokkaido (though the game deliberately renames the place). The protagonist grew up in an orphanage, and one day he stumbles onto the fact that the school’s untouchable beauty, Arise Kaguya, is secretly moonlighting as a righteous phantom thief. With her identity blown, Arise Kaguya also notices the protagonist is no slouch himself—fast runner, high jumper—so she strong-arms and sweet-talks him into joining her crew, training him up as a fellow thief to lighten her own workload.

Meanwhile, one of Sapporo’s oldest families, the Ishikawa, have also caught wind of the phantom thief running around pulling jobs across the city. The Ishikawa family tradition is to protect the city’s safety in a manner not unlike the ninja, so they send out the family’s sixteenth-generation successor, Ishikawa Yae, to apprehend the thief. In the end the protagonist still gets caught during one of his operations, nabbed by Ishikawa Yae—but she’s shocked to find that the so-called phantom thief is actually the guy living next door to her. Then comes another round of the carrot-and-stick routine, and Ishikawa Yae gets pulled into the phantom thief crew too. There’s also a gyaru makeup artist on the team, Hongou Nijimu, plus some servants from the Arise Kaguya household, and together they make up the crew.

Once the “phantom thief crew” is complete, the game starts explaining why the team was formed in the first place. Turns out there’s a legend passed down in Sapporo about something the Ainu left behind: an Ainu dial called “Ambitious” that archaeologists dug up, with 12 slots on it. Collect the matching 12 gemstones and set them in, and you can summon the legendary “god of medicine” — a cure for any illness.

Aruse Kaguya’s older sister, Athena, was originally supposed to be the family heir, but a car accident when she was little left her in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, so Kaguya ended up next in line as the family’s successor — though she’s been carrying the guilt ever since.

Back then, there was a phantom thief in Sapporo called Fantom who pulled off exactly that kind of heist — and vanished after the job was done. So Arise Kaguya decided to follow in Fantom’s footsteps: steal the gems, and cure her sister’s illness.

Once the basic setup of the whole story has been laid out, the game moves on to the route selection for each heroine — still done via the hopelessly clichéd card-flip method:

有瀬かぐや

Arise Kaguyas story picks up right after the common route, with the protagonist and her continuing to gather gemstones to save her sister. After a lot of effort, the gems are finally collected. Arise Kaguya then activates the thing that’s supposed to summon the so-called “god of medicine,” but surprise: no “god” shows up. Instead it triggers a “rewind in time,” and Arise Kaguya gets sent back to the minute before her sister’s car accident. She manages to grab that chance and change the fate that was supposed to happen, rewriting history.

Afterwards, Segawa Kaguya is still stuck as the family’s number two, while her older sister became the heir. The sister grew colder and more arrogant, and the relationship between the two drifted far apart. And with the original history altered, Segawa Kaguya finds that everyone she knew from the so-called Phantom Thief Club is now disconnected from her — the protagonist no longer has any chance of meeting her, and Hongou Nijimu never came to this city either. Sure, she saved her sister, but is this outcome really okay?

Just as Arise Kaguya was starting to regret everything, she realized her supposedly proud older sister had been faking it all along. In this parallel world, her sister had apparently become a “phantom thief,” and she could see right through Kaguya’s unease—she even understood why Kaguya had ended up here. Once her sister, as the phantom thief, collected all 12 so-called gems, she reactivated the parallel-world “Ambitious” and sent Arise Kaguya back to her original world once again.

Then Aris Kagura (有瀬かぐや) realizes that after all that running around, the world she started in is the better one — so she goes back to flirting and making eyes with the protagonist, parks this so-called “god of medicine” business on the shelf, and settles down to live the life she’s got.

Ishikawa Yae

Ishikawa Yayoi’s route is seriously padded out. Most of it is just her, a ninja of the sixteenth-generation Ishikawa family in Sapporo, deciding she’s too dumb to handle the job and wanting to lie down and quit. On top of that she was apparently adopted, so she’s not actually her mother’s blood heir, which makes her want to throw in the towel even more.

The story spins out a whole pile of threads, and in the end it lets Ishikawa Miya feel proud of who she is and face her life again…

That’s it. The rest is just Matatabi Ai playing the doting wife again and being cute.

本郷虹夢

It barely says anything of value — only later did I realize it just spells out some scraps of side clues tied to a few details in the main route.

Hongou Kuumu’s route keeps hammering on about how “the world runs on numbers.” Sounds mad deep, but it has literally zero to do with her actual route. Feels like they forced it in just to sound clever—at best it’s a throwaway bit about how Kuumu thinks about everyday expenses.

Anyway, this route is pure H fanservice — it really feels like the Sendai-babaa route in Kin’iro Loveriche.

Arise Atena

After clearing the three main heroines, the final Grand Ending route unlocks — Arise Atena’s.

这条路线其实也是游戏故事的补完，在线路中男主会被告知，所谓的「Ambitious」并非“医术之神”，而是一个可以操控时间的上古神器，来自阿伊努族的遗产。同时有瀬家也会面临着新的危机，一个名为根津与吉的人，觊觎一个名为 F-Coin 虚拟货币带来的巨大财产，但是这个虚拟货币的创造发明者已经引退，号称这个虚拟货币是可有一个管理权限的，管理的密码就是来自「阿伊努族的歌谣」的曲调，而这个歌谣鲜为人知，只有启动「Ambitious」的时候才能触发。

Right at the start of the Grand Ending, it says the protagonist falls from a great height while carrying out a mission, his life hanging by a thread — and Arise Kaguyahime’s aunt, Arise Horoko (or was she a great-aunt? I forget), rushes to the scene and fires up “Ambitious” on her own initiative, rewinding time and saving his life. Which also ends up handing the F-Coin admin privileges to Nezu and Yoshi, who’d been lying in wait the whole time — and with that, a shitload of money.

Having obtained F-Coin, Nezu and Kichi (根津与吉) start screwing around with it—shorting several companies with it, then pulling a pig-butchering scam, and eventually even wanting to buy up the entire city of Sapporo with their massive fortune. Later, the protagonist meets the inventor of F-Coin in a hospital room, who tells him in person that his original intent in creating the thing was simply to make a free currency no one could control, one that would build a better life. He never imagined people would exploit it, and he asks the protagonist to stop Nezu and Kichi and preserve world peace.

Just as the protagonist is agonizing over how to take back control of F-Coin, Arise Hōko shows up and lays out the whole truth behind everything. Turns out the protagonist is her own older brother — and the phantom thief Fantom from back then was him all along. No wonder Atena said his face looked familiar. Back in the day, Phantom Thief Fantom collected all those jewels to activate “Ambitious” and summon the god of medicine to save his mother, who was terminally ill. But it turned out “Ambitious” couldn’t cure illness at all — it only manipulated time. The protagonist got caught in that swirl of time, was returned to infancy once, and lost his memories. Arise Hōko had no choice but to send her brother to an orphanage and quietly watch over him as he grew up. After growing up again, he became the protagonist we have now.

有瀬幌子 explains that the protagonist was originally supposed to fall to his death, but to save him she had no choice but to activate “Ambitious” — which also let Nezu and Yoshi get the admin password and seize control of F-Coin again. There’s only one way to fix this now: go back into the past, change history, change F-Coin’s admin password, take back admin rights, and stop Nezu and Yoshi.

The person who carried out this task turned out to be the protagonist again, so he once again traveled back into the past, met his own mother, changed the F-Coin password inside her necklace, and then returned to the present, broke through layer after layer of blockades, and held a press conference to tell the world that Nezu and Yoshi had lost control over F-Coin. In the end, by keeping the financial market stable, he preserved world peace.

The ending is open-ended like most anime — basically just that some new treasure has shown up in the world and the phantom thief’s work continues and so on…

“Ambitious Mission” broke me in a way. The bugs were relentless — memory overflows constantly took the whole system down, and save files would just vanish, forcing me to start over. That ground my patience straight into the dirt.

But I’ll leave all that for later — let’s just talk about the story. And if I’m being blunt, the story left me with nothing to say… except complaints. Two of them. Let’s start with the first:

This story can be split into two parts. The first is playing phantom thief — collect gems, activate a mysterious mechanism, cross worlds to save people. The second is some big villain trying to control the entire world through “virtual currency,” with the protagonists fighting over control of that virtual currency to stop his scheme.

But frankly speaking, one is a magical fantasy story and the other is a realist financial war — the two have literally zero overlap. Whatever the hell the planners were smoking when they decided to jam two completely unrelated things together, I have no idea.

The game’s biggest gripe is its virtual currency, F-Coin. From the very start it keeps hinting that this thing is basically “Bitcoin,” and as everyone knows Bitcoin’s technical core is the “blockchain,” whose defining feature is decentralization and anarchism. And yet this game claims that something like “Bitcoin” has an “admin permission” that can be controlled at will. I’m not denying that some big companies can manipulate the Bitcoin market through various means, but it is absolutely not a case of getting one password and then freely changing the value. Writing something like this shows plainly that the scenario writer has zero grasp of what this thing actually is—they just wanted to ride the hype, or force the theme in to look cool. Sure, you could contort yourself and argue the game never says F-Coin is blockchain tech, maybe it’s just something like Discord’s Q Coin from mainland China, maybe it’s like getting the backend core admin rights to “Alipay” and freely editing balances. But the game repeatedly stresses that F-Coin’s inventor was a mathematician, says the original purpose was freedom, and even mocks Nezu and Yoshi for understanding nothing about math and tech—isn’t that plainly saying this thing is a cryptocurrency built on blockchain?

Which is why I have to roast this game’s scenario writer, Sakaki Kasa, all over again. Last time with Kiniro Loveriche he wrote a brain tumor that made zero medical sense, and now with “virtual currency” he’s exposed his habit of getting smug about fields he clearly doesn’t understand at all.

I’ve read Sakaki Kasa’s (さかき傘) blog. He feels like a lot of the sleazy middle-aged guys around me — every day he’s sounding off about current affairs, eager to lecture the world, and he’s always got some sermon ready for other people too.

That’s exactly why I say it — and this leads into the second story-level problem I want to talk about: there are way too many self-satisfied in-jokes.

The common route and slice-of-life content are absurdly, terrifyingly long—and almost none of it touches the core plot. It’s just the protagonists goofing off, which honestly isn’t a problem. But you’ll notice the dialogue keeps exposing how much the writer loves dropping “references.” The range is enormous: old-school games, mainstream meme/shitpost culture, social politics, Japanese customs, COVID, you name it. I’ll be blunt—early on, a lot of the gags land. Like the heroine deciding to make the protagonist disappear from the world by dumping him in China, except China still has the 14-day quarantine policy, so she hastily switches to Vietnam instead… But by the late game, you can tell this writer has no idea how to talk like a normal person outside of referencing memes.

I’m not saying memeing is bad. But if you can’t say a single sentence without one, all I can tell you is “that’s enough, bro.” It’s the same feeling as those Reddit shitposters everyone hates, the ones who talk like “no way, no way, no waaaay” every other line. A while back someone on 5ch’s anime board posted, “Why do Chinese visual novels love Neta so much in their dialogue?” Some replies said it’s basically the scenario writer flexing — showing off how much deep lore they know. Ambitious Mission is the same: way too many references, and after a while the dialogue just gets obnoxious, especially when the game’s route pacing is this damn stupid.

The game has four heroines, and the only one you could really call a main route belongs to the Arise sisters. Youji Ai’s ninja storyline is, obviously, not worth discussing. And Hongou Nijimu getting her own route at all is something I found completely baffling — there’s not much to say about that route either. What stands out instead is the writer’s repeated, on-the-nose use of the line “the world is driven by ’numbers’.” Why? Because the final boss’s weapon is cryptocurrency, and they clearly hoped players would connect that line to the final End. It’s like watching someone who’s realized mid-exam that their essay went off-topic and is now frantically copying the prompt over and over, terrified of being caught.

Calm down and think about it, and the game isn’t really that hopeless. All you’d have to do is delete that profoundly stupid “F-Coin” and keep the “Ambitious” as-is. The final boss wanting nothing more than to rule the world through the immense power of a sacred artifact like the “Ambitious” would raise zero eyebrows. I genuinely cannot figure out why they insisted on dragging cryptocurrency into it. The writer clearly doesn’t understand the first thing about it, yet still had to flex. No wonder the whole thing turned out this ugly.

So, Kasa-nii, from now on just stick to writing fairy tales, fantasy stories, and stuff like that. Quit flexing and chasing clout so you can lecture people. Otherwise you’re gonna end up a clown, same as Take-niu-bi.

Call it bias if you want, but I honestly think this one isn’t as good as Saga Planets’ previous title. Which is weird, because over on X (Twitter) all the big accounts were saying the last one was trash and this one’s the second coming. I read a pile of those self-congratulatory little essays and still couldn’t figure out what virtues or flaws they were even pointing at. One thing they did have in common, though — pretty much all of them seem to have blocked me. LOL.