This series has always been for fans of hardcore strategies. Even the original, which is understandably simple by today’s standards, required the player to manage multiple systems. There were natural disasters—droughts and floods—to contend with between wars with neighbors. Interestingly, the game gave almost equal weight to the loyalty you earned from your officers as it did from the peasants under your rule. Keeping the people happy and well fed was just as essential to ensuring a long reign as gaining new territory through conquest.
Battles in the first games took place in simple 8-bit maps, but it was the political intrigue that gripped players from the start. Characters would approach with seemingly benevolent intentions only to quickly turn against you. It was a revolutionary achievement on the hardware and made Romance of the Three Kingdoms the deepest strategy game on consoles at the time. Successive entries would build on the basic structure of the original, expanding the features and building on the visuals without straying far from the grand strategy premise. Romance of the Three Kingdoms II (NES, 1990; SNES, 1991) introduced a reputation system that could increase or decrease the loyalty of officers depending on your actions, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms III (SNES, 1992/3) would expand the number of cities up to 48, but these were small changes to the successful formula.
1994’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV would mark the final entry on a Nintendo console for over a decade as the series would skip both the Nintendo 64 and GameCube in favor of Sony hardware. It was only after the unexpected success of the Wii that Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI was brought back to Nintendo’s home consoles. By then, the series had undergone significant changes.
The making of a dynasty
15 years after the release of the original game, in the ‘gap’ between Nintendo’s entries, Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII marked perhaps the biggest deviation in the design of the series.
“In the case of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series, we worked on improving the kingdom management until Romance of the Three Kingdoms VI,” explains Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIV producer Echigoya Kazuhiro. “There was a big change in Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII and the direction was adapted to the officer game, and since then the direction of the games has been alternating between kingdom management and officer game.”
This shift in focus from big picture management to individual characters and their achievements led to the ability to create your own officers. By VIII, you could create custom characters alongside friends, creating—and possibly destroying—friendships and alliances in the virtual and real world. As Echigoya-san mentions, from then on the series will go back and forth between kingdom and officer rule, but going forward there will always be a greater focus on the characters from Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Part of that shift may have come down to liberation Dynasty Warriors 2 2000 This spin-off of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series introduced a much greater focus on combat, with players hacking and slashing their way through thousands of enemies in elaborate stages. Characters from this period, who had previously been relegated to talking heads on text boxes, were suddenly far more prominent and full of energy.
The accessible hack-and-slash franchise Dynasty Warriors would slowly eclipse Romance of the Three Kingdoms in popularity, spawning its own spin-offs and crossovers and eventually becoming Koei’s best-selling series by 2008. The existence of this action-oriented series would prove to be a blessing for fans of historical strategies. Koei had something to offer fans who wanted pure combat, allowing Romance of the Three Kingdoms to focus on strategy. The two series would occasionally share assets and even crossover in form Dynasty Tactics games on the PS2, but their targets have primarily remained separate over the years.
A win-win scenario
Regardless of the focus of the games, one of the core gameplay features of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series has always been the use of ‘Scenarios’, a feature that Ito Yuinori believes defines the series.
“The system of these scenarios can start from the first chapter of the story and is therefore a revolutionary invention in my opinion,” he says. “In that sense, I can’t imagine a Romance of the Three Kingdoms game with the current system but without any of these scenarios.”
Since the war for the three kingdoms lasted, with various highs and lows, 60 years, there are a lot of key points and engagements. These scenarios give players a starting point, allowing you to jump into the war at the most interesting moments and situations from a gameplay perspective.
Each game typically offers between six and ten scenarios to choose from, ranging from the outbreak of war to key moments from the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Liu Bei’s exile in Xinye in 201 does not appear more than once, nor does Jiang Wei’s rise to prominence in Shu. You drop into a ‘snapshot’ of history, with borders and characters represented as they were at the time. However, where it goes next is up to you.
Possible return to the West
Like many niche Japanese game series, Romance of the Three Kingdoms has had an inconsistent release schedule for the west over the years. Some like XI and XII, which appeared on the Wii and Wii U respectively, will never receive an official English translation, and some will only grace Nintendo hardware in the form of Japan-only portable versions years after their initial release. The latest main entry in the series (Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIV, released in North America and Europe in February 2021) marked the first time since IV in 1995 that a Nintendo console received an English-language release in the West.
With no new games announced at the time of writing, it seems unlikely — though not impossible — that the Switch will see another entry in this series that has been rewriting history for almost as long as Nintendo has been in the console business. Perhaps it’s better to hope that some of the early, increasingly hard-to-find titles find a home on Switch Online.
In the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms has always been a hidden gem in Koei Tecmo’s arsenal, luring fans of grand strategy with deep, challenging gameplay set in one of the most pivotal moments in human history. It’s a big old book with many more pages to turn; we hope to experience more of them on Nintendo platforms in the future.
