Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI

"Huge, Immersive, Spectacular"

After years of eyeing up RotTK X I finally broke down and went to buy it. XI was already released and I figured what the hell. A few days later it was delivered, and so was my satisfaction. It should be noted that the last Romance game I played was number 2, for the SNES. This game is much different than the second one, heh.

Overall Ratings:

Gameplay - 9/10
This game consists of managing prefectures and raising armies to conquer historic China. You'll have to recruit both officers and soldiers, produce arms, generate income and food harvests, dabble with diplomacy and eventually take the fight to the battlefield. While this game includes massive amounts of micromanagement, you will also be fighting almost the entire duration.

Each turn represents ten days, and thus three turns equals one month. Income is gained at the beginning of each month and harvests are gained at the end of each season (summer, autumn, winter, spring). You have a certain amount of action points per turn, and various actions require varying amounts of action points. An example is that searching for officers takes 20 AP, while rewarding an officer takes 5 AP. Some tasks also require a certain amount of days to be completed. Building structures can take from 20 days to 100, and sending envoys to negotiate diplomatic relations takes an amount of time relative to the distance envoys must travel.

There are less than a dozen buildings to be constructed. You'll have markets (produce income), farms (yield harvests), barracks (allows recruiting of soldiers), smiths (can produce arms), stables (raise horses for cavalry), workshops (to build siege equipment), and shipyards (produce vessels for naval travel/combat). Additionally, you can make mints and granaries, which will increase the amount of income or food yielded from adjacent resource gaining structures. Once all the buildings in a prefecture are built (from 8 to 20 structures) they will not need to be built again unless they are razed.

You will have to keep your order high to keep the peasants in line, and reward your officers so that their loyalty does not waver. Also, you'll need to arm your soldiers and train them appropriately. Arms consist of swords (weakest but do not need to be produced), spears (good against cavalry), pikes (good against spears) and bows (average, no strengths or weaknesses). Each type of arms has up to three different tactics that can be executed which do various things. Bows can use the shower tactic, which will rain arrows down on a large area. Pikes can execute the whirlwind tactic which will damage all surrounding enemy units. The tactics are very useful, and must be utilized properly to win battles where you are at either a numerical or tactical (generally due to terrain) disadvantage. Each tactic consumes Will, which is raised by training your soldiers.

For each battalion of units you send out, you will send one to three officers with them. Officers have special abilities that come in a very wide variety. Also, officers have several stats denoting how efficiently they can do a variety of things (high war means you're good at training soldiers, high charisma means you're good at recruiting soldiers, etc. etc.). Additionally, officers have a proficiency rating for each type of arms. A higher proficiency means you can use more tactics with the appropriate arms. Some officers are proficient with several types of arms, other are proficient with none. With the ability to send three officers with each battalion, you can create some really powerful groups of units to attack your enemies.

Terrain plays a very important role when fighting. Certain unit types can't execute tactics on certain terrain, and will also lose movement to boot. An example is that spearmen can't use spear tactics when they're in the sand, bowmen can't shoot arrows into the woods (unless an officer with them has the Bowmanship skill), and cavalry can't execute tactics in forests either. You'll need to use terrain to your advantage both when attacking and defending.

There are many aspects of combat I could go on about for pages, but I will try to refrain. Just know that the combat is exceedingly fun, and never really ends once it has begun.

To ease the pain of micromanagement, you can delegate the responsibilities of your prefectures. You will set up districts and place your prefectures into the proper district. Each district will have options for how the delegated prefectures should act (should they save money up, transport it to different districts, focus on recruiting soldiers and building arms, etc. etc.). By utilizing the districts appropriately you can ease a lot of pain. You should know that the AI for delegation isn't the best, so you'll likely need to control each prefecture along your border manually. As long as you expand in an intelligent fashion that should only be two to four prefectures.

There are a few mini-game type operations in this game. First is duels. Dueling can occur when you challenge the enemy to a duel, or sometimes when certain officers meet on the battlefield (they will duel automatically). You basically choose one of four stances to fight in while the combatants exchange blows. As you fight you will fill up your musou gauge, and eventually be able to execute certain musou moves (feign retreat, increase your defense, and several others). The second mini-game is a debate. You will debate to either recruit scholarly officers or to decide a diplomatic outcome. It's something like a card game, where you draw a hand and get cards from three different suits. You need to play a card from whatever suit is active, and further must play a more powerful card than your opponent. There is a special suit of cards that will do special things (ignore your enemy's card, or bellow over their voice). Similar to musou in duels, you gain anger in debates. When your anger bar becomes full you will gain certain bonuses depending on which character is debating (based on their personality traits). Know that both duels and debates don't need to be manually played out, they can be auto-calculated if you don't enjoy them.

Finally, RotTK XI is from one to eight players. You can ally with other players or try to defeat them along with any computer controlled enemies. If you plan on playing this game multiplayer then you should be ready for a very long gaming experience, as this game can take up to 40 hours to beat a single scenario (which there are about ten of total). Multiplayer modes contain every single aspect of the singleplayer experience, and don't cut anything out.

There are a lot of features about the gameplay that I haven't covered, but due to the massive nature of this complex game it would take pages and pages to explain it all.

Story - Nil
I'm not rating the story for this game, as it's a historical simulation (much like most Koei games). You play in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms era, where Wu, Wei and Shu are battling to gain control of China during and after the fall of the Han dynasty.

Graphics/Sound - Nil
There's nothing really spectacular about the graphics or the sound, nor is there anything extremely annoying about either. The only flaw I can think of is when the voicing is set to Chinese, and the Shower tactic is executed. Only occassionally will this glitch up the audio, and an extremely annoying voice-over glitch occurs (it's hard to explain, but is terrible sounding and doesn't go away until the game is saved and loaded). Regardless, if you're interested in this type of game then it's likely you won't care about either graphics or sound.

Play Time/Replayability - 5/5
This game is huge. Simply huge. It can take about 40 hours to complete a single play through, and has around ten different scenarios to play. Featuring a fully functional multiplayer mode it can provide endless hours of fun, and can be played several times through, each time substantially different.

Final Recommendation - 9/10
If you like strategy games then this is a must. Just be ready to misplace weeks of your life because this game is gigantic. I consider Koei games to be a big bang for your buck, and this game is no exception.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 04/24/09

Game Release: Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI (US, 02/06/07)