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.