Romance of the 3 kingdoms is as hard as always

by Chronikle

In Group: Boring

Worth to: Avoid

Romance of the Three Kingdoms 11 is just an OLD concept that Koei is needlessly complicating. The game sucks. Avoid it.

Last time I played RO3K was like 20 years ago when it came out on the NES. I remember having hard time with it at first but I eventually got used to the game and it turned out pretty fun. 20 some years later I try the 11th version and its:

1) Same thing
2) Harder
3) Less fun

The game has a learning curve of about 1 day, as in 24 hours, which might be like 2-3 days in real terms (we have to sleep, eat and go to work some times). And in the end players get a game that makes us jump through hoops to do the most elementary thing: war. You have various points you need to accumulated, generals you need to find/recruit, farms and markets to build, smiths to set up and barracks build before you can get some troops. Once you start accumulating troops, you have to Drill them to improve Will, Inspect your city to improve Order so you don't get attacked by rogues and accumulate weapons to arm your troops.

Everything is all about accumulating various points and stuff that have little to do with actual war stuff. You can't build cities. They are all there and all you can do is conquer them. You have no control of your population, which is weird because I would imagine that would have a direction relation to how many soldiers you can recruit.

Once you got your troop, it's off to fight neighbors. Battles are done on a 3D rendered map (the whole game is) but all you see is crappy little groups with a flag sticking out. No animation. Graphics are pretty lame. Towns, farms, barracks, armies, it all looks like shit. You can duel instead of fighting, then the game turns into a turnbase rock-paper-scissors game. You can also fight in debates. But that's just a weird game of luck and strategy.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms 11 is just an OLD concept that Koei is needlessly complicating. The game sucks. Avoid it.