Honeymoon's Over
Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI is an armchair general's wet dream, but casual strategy fans are going to slip into comas.
Published: February 24, 2007
If there's a way to condense down the absolute encyclopedic amount of information on how to play Romance XI into something that doesn't take a good five hours or so to digest, I don't know what the hell it'd be. And that right there says volumes about how much KOEI has packed into the strategy games that put them on the map (yes, long before you were button mashing your way across China in [ps2game=601]Dynasty Warriors[/ps2game], KOEI was cranking out turn-based affairs, as those roman numerals in the title make obvious). I'll say it again because it needs repeating: to learn the basics of Romance XI, you're going to have to sit down and spend at least three or more hours trudging through the tutorials.
I can't think of a better litmus test for gauging what kind of stomach you'll have for the rest of the experience than that. It's as if KOEI looked at all the current kids cartoons and MTV shows with their ADD Short Attention Span Theatre mess of jump cuts and constant screams for attention and decided to make the anti-ADD game. The game moves so slowly sloths could sprint around the planet in the time it takes to complete a scenario, but in a way, that's almost the appeal. This is not a PC strategy game dumbed down for a console. In fact, it's doubtful any traditional real-time strategy fan could even stomach what it takes to trudge through a handful of battles -- and if I didn't have to review the game, I would count myself in that number.
Alas, I did have to review the game, and after no less than half a dozen attempts to get to know the game and (I kid you not), passing out mid-tutorial, I finally steeled myself, put on a pot of coffee, grabbed a fresh pack of smokes and set to work trying to gobble up all that the game first presents in the tutorials. Lest you think this is some kind of unnecessary hand-holding, think again; Romance is beyond typical micromanagement.
You will explicitly detail exactly how your armies are built, from recruiting troops to boosting morale to buying weapons (which you have to research first) to controlling dissent in your cities. You will control exactly how those cities grow, from which politicians will make decisions (though this is almost always guided by the defaults) to how money is spent to what military buildings are erected. You will constantly shuffle troops and strategize both offense and defensive positions (often at the same time). All of this can take hours to complete -- and usually before you ever start to press the major attack on your enemy.
And there are enemies, of course. The Warring States Era of Chinese history has already proven to be rife with material for multiple KOEI projects, but none have been so meticulously outlined as they were here, or at the very least didn't give you this much control over things. Near as I can tell (and this is one of the rare times when I simply had to stop playing well before I'd beaten the game or this review would never go up), there's an almost infinite amount of play time built into Romance, just by virtue of the fact that one could, say, pour almost 60 hours into the game and only be about five scenarios into the two dozen or so that populate the game -- and that's without exploring any of the options that can be used to tweak some of the conditions. One could also wake up one day to find their debug had erased their game save, at which point it would be reviews time.
Ordinarily, it's our policy here to try to beat every game we review out of respect to the developers and all their hard work, but two things drove me to just end things where they were. The first was the feeling that I'd gotten the gist of things (and if I haven't, KOEI folks, feel free to rip on me) and the second was that I just couldn't handle playing the game all the way through -- not with the amount of games hitting these days. It's not that I didn't want to -- actually, scratch that, I was overwhelmed and burdened by the game, so in a way I just chalked my save disappearing into the ether up to fate.
I can't think of a better litmus test for gauging what kind of stomach you'll have for the rest of the experience than that. It's as if KOEI looked at all the current kids cartoons and MTV shows with their ADD Short Attention Span Theatre mess of jump cuts and constant screams for attention and decided to make the anti-ADD game. The game moves so slowly sloths could sprint around the planet in the time it takes to complete a scenario, but in a way, that's almost the appeal. This is not a PC strategy game dumbed down for a console. In fact, it's doubtful any traditional real-time strategy fan could even stomach what it takes to trudge through a handful of battles -- and if I didn't have to review the game, I would count myself in that number.
Alas, I did have to review the game, and after no less than half a dozen attempts to get to know the game and (I kid you not), passing out mid-tutorial, I finally steeled myself, put on a pot of coffee, grabbed a fresh pack of smokes and set to work trying to gobble up all that the game first presents in the tutorials. Lest you think this is some kind of unnecessary hand-holding, think again; Romance is beyond typical micromanagement.
You will explicitly detail exactly how your armies are built, from recruiting troops to boosting morale to buying weapons (which you have to research first) to controlling dissent in your cities. You will control exactly how those cities grow, from which politicians will make decisions (though this is almost always guided by the defaults) to how money is spent to what military buildings are erected. You will constantly shuffle troops and strategize both offense and defensive positions (often at the same time). All of this can take hours to complete -- and usually before you ever start to press the major attack on your enemy.
And there are enemies, of course. The Warring States Era of Chinese history has already proven to be rife with material for multiple KOEI projects, but none have been so meticulously outlined as they were here, or at the very least didn't give you this much control over things. Near as I can tell (and this is one of the rare times when I simply had to stop playing well before I'd beaten the game or this review would never go up), there's an almost infinite amount of play time built into Romance, just by virtue of the fact that one could, say, pour almost 60 hours into the game and only be about five scenarios into the two dozen or so that populate the game -- and that's without exploring any of the options that can be used to tweak some of the conditions. One could also wake up one day to find their debug had erased their game save, at which point it would be reviews time.
Ordinarily, it's our policy here to try to beat every game we review out of respect to the developers and all their hard work, but two things drove me to just end things where they were. The first was the feeling that I'd gotten the gist of things (and if I haven't, KOEI folks, feel free to rip on me) and the second was that I just couldn't handle playing the game all the way through -- not with the amount of games hitting these days. It's not that I didn't want to -- actually, scratch that, I was overwhelmed and burdened by the game, so in a way I just chalked my save disappearing into the ether up to fate.
