Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII

"Won't help your love life, but a great game, anyway"

I got Romance of Three Kingdoms VII on the fly from the electronics section at the department store. After I put the thing in, I was kind of upset because I thought I had wasted $50 on a crappy game. Luckily, I tried the game without company and I found myself completely immersed in a campaign to unite China.

Gameplay: I can’t believe how fun this is! You can create up to 100 officers (70 male, 30 female), assign them parents and create your own country with them, wander the land as a ronin or join the liege of your choice. You can choose many types of stats to stat your character with and train them to learn new skills and raise their stats in the game! If you don’t feel like making your own guy, just use one of the 500+ Historical officers! You can be a ronin and work for yourself or you can become a common officer and work for your liege and prefect. If you do good enough, your liege may appoint you prefect of your own city, or even his WARLORD! Is that still not enough power for you? Take on the ultimate task and become a liege yourself! Stage a coup or revolt with your city, or simply get the position by succession. You work to conquer your foes lands and gain imperial favor, or overthrow the Emporer all together!

There are many chores to keep you busy, such as befriending you fellow officers and liege, fending off invading hordes and going to battle to capture your own lands!

There are even mini-games such as dueling tournaments and poetry contests. The poetry contest sucks, though. That and the fact that the battle system isn’t quite on par with Shogun: Total War brings the score down to a 9/10

GAMEPLAY: 9/10

STORY: you won’t exactly see much of a story in this game, though I hear there are dozens of scenarios that you can only get by putting many officers together in different cities, etc. You can choose one of ten (give or take a few) scenarios to start your game at and choose which ruler you will serve!

This game is based on the Fiction/History book about the same time period in China, so there is already one HUGE story built into it, which warrants a….

STORY: 10/10

Sound: the sound is crisp and easy to hear, though the music isn’t very good and there’s not much effects. What they have is very good, such as the sounds at the duels and during ploys.

SOUND: 8/10

GRAPHICS: The graphics are very good (though not so detailed during the battles) and every officer has his own portrait, as well as one for every created character! This is a strong point of the game.

GRAPHICS 10/10

REPLAY VALUE: This is HUGE! Gain all the items and sites, complete the game with every liege in every scenario, try to defeat Lu Bu in a duel, it never ends!

REPLAY VALUE: 10/10

BUY OR RENT: Buy! You will be wasting $5 if you don’t.

OVERALL: 9/10

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/13/02, Updated 08/13/02