Romance of the Three Kingdoms IX

"The Best Game In the ROTK series? I think so"

The Romance of the Three Kingdom series has been a great strategy series ever since the NES. In most of the games, you start off as a ruler in charge of your own force in Late Han period China (late 2nd-Early 3rd century AD) and your goal is to conquer all of China (In ROTK 7,8, and 10, you may also start off as a non ruler character).

Gameplay: This game has rather smooth gameplay features. You have a variety of options to make your city/s better through domestic tasks such as patrol, trade, farm, repair, drill. You could draft troops to have a larger army. You can hire other officers, give gifts to other forces, and above all, go to war. One complaint I have though, is the lack of a possibility of forming an alliance with other forces, and forming coalitions against other forces outside of a random event. I liked being able to utilise these feature sin other game in this series, but to the average player, no one would notice the difference really. And another thing some average gamers may face is boredom once their force gets somewhat large, and they may not see the fun in it anymore. But, if they wsh to remedy this, they should try it on the expert difficulty and then I can assure them, they wont get so bored.

Game Modes: Basically, you have two game modes(Regular game and Challenge scenarios), plus a create a character option and a tutorial. The challenge scenarios range in difficulty from fairly easy to extremely hard, and if you don't want to play a regular game, are a good idea to try out. Create a Character is a fun mode too, where you can create officers to put into the game and give them tactics, decide how talented of an officer they will be, even their personality traits.

Audio: The in game music is very epic (Especially when you have a large force, I feel like Im watching an epic movie) and is very fitting for this type of game. I feel almost like the symphonic music really adds to this game, in the sense that it makes you feel like your in the game almost.

All in all, I believe this game is a great game, and I feel it should be right up there in terms of great strategy games that have ever existed on video gaming consoles.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 06/12/06