Romance of the Three Kingdoms

The Good
The exotic setting of Romance is undoubtedly one of the reasons why this series has lasted so long. There just isn’t much competition in the field of “East Asian historical empire simulations.” Heck, there isn’t much competition from other strategy titles on consoles, either. I imagine that some folks will find the whole subject fascinating, even if they don’t know much about Chinese history.

The manual is typical Koei fare, which is to say that it’s quite thick and detailed by console-game standards. The historical background section is absolutely essential, considering that most Westerners will not know a single character in this game.

I actually liked the music. It’s not as good as the music in Genghis Khan or Nobunaga's Ambition, but it is appropriate and sounds pretty good considering the hardware limitations. Any 8-bit game soundtrack that doesn’t make you hit the mute button immediately must be considered a triumph.

In terms of gameplay, there were a few intriguing concepts introduced in Romance. The design takes advantage of the large cast of characters by making personnel management more important than in most other strategy games of this era. Not everyone will like it, but it does give Romance an RPG-like twist.

The Bad
I made the huge “mistake” of discovering Romance after I had already played two of Koei’s other 8-bit titles (Genghis Khan and Nobunaga’s Ambition, which are both very good). Romance is surprisingly primitive and shallow compared to those games, which made playing Romance a chore even back in the year 1991, not to mention 2008. Were it not for this game’s inherent appeal to Far Eastern gamers, I seriously doubt this series would have continued past the first title. This first one left such a bad taste in my mouth, I still haven’t played any of the numerous sequels to this day.

The menus are very clunky and unattractive, even by the standards of the era. I don’t mind text-based games, but the menus need to be laid out a little better than this! Numerous unnecessary and redundant messages will also pop up when you take any kind of action, which slows things down considerably.

In fact, the whole game moves at a painfully slow pace. Turns take a really, really long time. There are over 50 provinces, and the statistics in this game (gold, rice, troops, etc.) are numbered in tens of thousands, not hundreds as in Genghis Khan and Nobunaga. The NES CPU seems to have a very difficult time processing all of this data as a result.

Battles are very typical of the overall design. There is no strategic combat option. Like it or not, you are forced to play out the battles, which turn out to be rather boring. You have few tactical options, since units are not differentiated by type (i.e., cavalry vs. infantry) and the simultaneous attack method adds very little. Oh, and there is one incredibly annoying “feature.” When you invade another territory, you have to bring rice along with you and place it on the field of combat. You have to protect this rice, or else the battle is automatically lost. So even when you are on the offense in this game, it forces you to play from a defensive posture. Ugh.

And since this is supposed to be a game, I have to ask: Did it ever occur to Koei to include any “fun stuff” in the design? Where are the dirty tricks? Where are the exotic trade goods to buy and sell? What about character development? They aren’t here, and they really need to be, because this game is dull as dirt without them.

The Bottom Line
Arcane and obtuse, you won’t find much romance (or anything else very interesting) in the first installment of the Romance series. For 8-bit console strategy, virtually any of Koei’s other games would be a better choice.