At least the six campaigns here and length of each battle will give you plenty to be going on. You’re going to spend a good few hours just figuring out how things work and even then, I still wasn’t sure if what I was doing was correct. It’s just all so un-intuitive – take for example moving between your territories, which is hidden away in the menus under “vassal” since the “city” option is actually for developing your food and water resources. The options are overwhelming but it’s fun to experiment with it all to see what works. There’s plenty more options beyond this – you can form alliances (and break them!), spread gossip about your foes which may lead to revolt in their cities, while sending goods between areas runs the risk of them being stolen by bandits and if you have a sneaky general, you can even try to burn down territories by arson. Eventually, one leader will retreat and the territory will belong to the other. Either way, you’ll eventually head into war which takes the form of a really weird top-down turn based battle thing, where your units don’t get destroyed but your available troops simply diminish with each time they clash swords. Your officers are also used to expand to new territories, which can either be neutral or occupied by enemy leaders. You get new officers by either bribing them away from your rivals (including attracting them thanks to the strategic growth of your nation), or alternatively beating an opponent in battle and then capturing their generals, who you can then imprison or attempt to get to work with you. You’ll need to have a lot of officers in your ranks as they will oversee each of these measures, alongside spending gold which is taxed from your residents. You start in your home base, which has a set number of residents you need to keep happy by making food, damming the river to stop flooding and various other requests to ensure they live comfortably under their leader. This is basically turn-based Age of Empires that’s more about making decisions than creating troops and ordering them around. Still, once you actually just get stuck in, Wall of Fire starts to make a bit of sense. Again, none of this is explained – you can go for advice from your team, but this is just generic lines like “you should take down Cao Cao next” without any actual input on how to go about this or whether he is weak in terms of economy or military, both of which you are able to strike against. Once you’ve chosen your general, you’re plopped into a map and given an overwhelming amount of options to choose from. Even something as simple as choosing your leader is made confusing as you can pick more than one, with no reasoning given for why you should or shouldn’t do this. You’ll need to read through the manual should you want any idea about what you’re doing as the game explains nothing, which is such a glaring oversight considering how complex everything here. So you are literally dropped straight in here once you start, playing through one of six different campaigns. There’s so much here, but it is incredibly obtuse to cut through – which is extremely disappointing. This is a product of its time, but certainly a charming one.Īs deep as an ocean, Romance of Three Kingdoms IV is a grand strategy title where you aim to conquer your opponents by whatever means necessary. The one new addition for the 32-bit consoles is live-action scenes that play when certain actions like gossip or war are taken, which are nice little touches even if they’re incredibly cheesy in their execution – much like the opening scene which is hilarious in that early 3D way. There’s so many elements here, but they are all extremely basic, albeit they certainly get the job done. Even things like the battles are top-down and extremely simplistic, although I did enjoy the side-view castle defending screen which looks like an isometric platformer from the era. That is to say that menus appear as rectangular blocks to choose from, while the gameplay map is simply a series of flags with text overlay. Upon first glance it’s easy to tell that this was a game originally released for the SNES as it has that graphical feel from other simulation/strategy titles from the era. You can play through a historically accurate version of the various wars in one of the modes where you’ll get to know the various rulers of the time and their tactics, but otherwise this isn’t a great jumping in point for newcomers to the tales contained within Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Amusingly, there’s almost no plot to be found in this older title in the very series that inspired Dynasty Warriors! When I’ve played things like the Dynasty Warriors titles, they’ve been keen to push the historical elements of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms story to the forefront.
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