Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a game in which you battle through the Han Dynasty in historical/fictional China. I say “historical/fictional”, because the game is based off of Luo Guangzong’s novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and because a lot of these Chinese heroes and generals have a lot of mystique swirling around them. Think about The Alamo, Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, and Santa Anna for something comparable where Davy Crockett could have killed a hundred of his enemies with his coonskin cap alone. What this means for the game is that there’s a very rich backstory, which some people completely adore.
I first started playing the game in its first iteration for the Nintendo, with Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I believe it was the first game I ever re-rented because it takes a very long time to conquer China. After the sequel, which came out for the Super Nintendo, it jumped to the PlayStation. I didn’t have a PlayStation, so I was left out in the cold. Also, I didn’t live in Japan or China or speak either of those languages, so I couldn’t get the PC versions either. Yes, this means that the United States userbase was relatively alienated.
I was idly thinking about the game and wondering if they’d ever release one for the 360. Poking around on Koei’s (the publisher’s) website showed that they released the English version of the most recent game on PC in 2008. I immediately went in to get it and download it (it’s also only $20).
One of the things that Koei did well was to innovate and put improvements on every single year. Managing the local economies early in the series were pretty easy with sinking cash into your harvest and flood control and making sure you had enough food to pay your soldiers (which sometimes was a feat). As time goes on, they’ve added more and more generals, more and more scenarios, more depth, better all-around quality, and even a better ease of use, even fixing and changing some exploits that were around earlier. For example, a couple of my favorite exploits in the early games were to hire as many good generals as I possibly could. That sounds pretty elementary, but if you hire a ton of generals, you can field a ton of troops, and since every turn is technically a turn of each of your generals doing a specific task, you also get that many more turns. To counteract that, good generals are still great to have, but their battlefield importance has slightly diminished. Leadership is almost as important as their ability in war, also extra techniques like being able to plunder resources from fallen generals, have critical ambushes, and what not are usually held by the commanders that aren’t amazing field commanders, so a well-balanced army, when deployed properly, can offset superior numbers and commanders. Also, on your land, you can build impediments to stop oncoming troops, arrow/catapult towers and other little improvements to make your defense that much stronger. Moving around is even much easier, and what I mean by that is if you have your land separated from unoccupied territory by an ally, you can march a general through your ally’s land to that territory. You no longer have to weight the pros and cons of taking your ally over just to get to that open land now.
If you liked Shingen the Ruler, Nobunaga’s Ambition, or Genghis Khan, Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a must own. These games are packed with gameplay and strategy and no two games play out the same way. You can even ensure that by customizing your experience. You can make it some generals come out randomly instead of at their historical entrances, make the familial or sworn sibling relations null, and even fiddle with the frequency of deaths on the battlefield for your generals.
This game isn’t graphically heavy, and it’s not for a lot of people. Out of the (admittedly few) ones in the series that I’ve played, this one is so far the best. The only negative is that Koei doesn’t give the English-speaking audience the same perks and things as the Japanese/Chinese audience, which is sad.
