Romance of the Three Kingdoms VIII

"Good game. Not as good as the 7th one though..."

The Romance Of The Three Kingdoms (RTK) series has been around for a long time and KOEI has always been delivering great strategy (other than Kessen 2 and Dynasty Tactics) games. Unfortunately this one isn't as good as the others. RTK 8 uses the RPG-ish style of RTK 7 where you choose one officer and basically serve your liege to unite China. When I first got this game I thought it was great but after finally actually understanding how to play it, it turns out its very limiting and the AI is horrible.

The graphics have never been the strong point in the RTK series. In RTK 8 there is still those awful outdated graphics but the officer portraits remain great... maybe its because about 3/4 of them are the same character portraits from RTK 7. KOEI tries to get a bit up to date with this game by using 3D animations. There aren't too many of them and they're rather short and very repetitive. They basically show them when doing a special attack (Arrowstorm, Trample, etc) or when dueling. Basically the opening video is the best showcase of graphics in the game.

The story is based on the 3 Kingdoms period of Chinese history. Rebellions and plague were breaking out and the Han Dynasty was on the brink of collapse. When the Yellow Turban Rebellion broke out the Han Dynasty was unable to stop them by themselves and requested help of many talented warriors. After the rebellion was quelled, Emperor Ling died and the country went into a deeper chaos. Ambitious warlords across the country took this time to develop armies and try to capture China to either restore the Han Dynasty or create a new one for themselves. You choose an one of those brave (or cowardly) officers from that period. To win you must unite China.
This game becomes less historical by giving excellent generals very poor stats. If you played any of the older RTK games you'll realize how ''godly'' some of the officers for Wei are, but here they lower their statistics as low as possible. They gave Xiahou Dun a political and intelligence stat around 60's when in the older ones the lowest it went was around the 70's. Funny thing is that Xiahou Dun was a great governor of Chen Liu for over 10 years yet his political skill is only in the 60's. Also Cao Cao's war ability is now in the 60's. This is completely stupid. In older games they had a separate leadership and war stats. Then they mixed the both of them in. Cao Cao didn't duel because he was a ruler but he was an excellent commander which led him to being one of the last 3 rulers around.
By lowering many of the character's stats it destroys the AI of the game. Cao Cao being very ambitious in history and the previous games decides to tell all the officers to work on farming and investing while his only city is surrounded by the enemy and Cao Cao has hardly any soldiers. This game makes great generals in the past and characters that people loved into morons and pacifists. Also out of nowhere they made Gongsun Zan into a god. In about 3 years he had full control of northern and eastern China. I admit I like the guy and he was a great general but not this great after all he was defeated by Yuan Shao.
KOEI did fix up the length of the lives of some of the officers. Most of those fixed are just killing off Wei officers a bit earlier than they were dying in RTK 7. Yet other characters such as Sun Ce still manage to outlive everyone when they were supposed to be dead many, many years ago.
Another fault is the what year some of the characters show up. For some characters (like Xiahou Dun) they put them in the game WAY too late. It makes the early scenarios less fun.
They also add in wives which don't really do anything but they do sometimes teach you skills. There are sages around the country that also teach you skills if you become their friend. There are tons of events and the good thing is that once an event is viewed it is saved into the library and you can always view it again. They also added in sworn brothers, sworn enemies, and rivals. All they do is a add a bit more text in the game.

Anyway enough complaining... something good about this game are the battles. The battles in RTK 7 were ridiculously easy. Here there are many tactics and strategies that make battles very, very hard.
The dueling system was improved very well. Unfortunately hardly anyone ever duels. I've been playing this game for weeks and the only time I ever dueled was when I was campaigning against bandits.

The sound effects are all repetitive and used over and over again. The music is pretty good. The music switches in different regions of the map leaving people up north like Gongsun Zan and Yuan Shao having horrible music while Liu Zhang and Ma Teng have some pretty decent tunes. Things like this have me craving to transfer away from Xu Chang to Hong Nong just to escape the heavily awful and repetitive music in that region. I still like some songs from RTK 7 more than these.

The game has great replay value but the AI is just so horrible. Let me give you an example of how bad the AI is. Gongsun Zan passed away around the year 203. He had control of all of China other than the west and parts of the south. The year is now 220 and the only remaining cities Gongsun Xu conquered were the few cities in the south. No attempts to finish off Ma Teng or Liu Zhang. This basically left me in the same city where the market, technology, etc was all maxed out leaving me nothing to do except give suggestions during those councils every 3 months.

This is a must buy for all you RTK fans but for newcomers... you guys should rent first. I like RTK 7 a lot more than this one...

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 09/16/03