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
It will take a very special kind of person, one stronger than I, to actually finish the hundreds of hours of gameplay stuck in just the default stuff KOEI piled into the game, not so much because it takes forever to get into (though there is that), but because it requires a saint-like level of patience when wading through the menus. Even common actions are hidden under a couple levels of sub-menus, and nearly everything in the game feels clunky. You adjust, yes, but there are times when you just wish the game would get dumbed down a little so you didn't have to quite micromanage everything every turn. Slacking off can mean you lose precious troops or resources or fortifications, but if nothing else, I can almost understand what it's like to be a general at this point.
It's a little weird, too, because it's obvious KOEI picked this as the game that would be refined and tweaked to appeal to a wider audience; the cel-shaded graphics are absolutely gorgeous, the portraits nicely detailed, the gridded map clearly showing troops and buildings with an attention to detail that is, frankly, unheard of for the series. Animation is better (where present, which isn't terribly often in the grand scheme of things) and texture resolution, for what it is, was great.
Conscious effort was put into breathing a little life into what had become an almost painfully bland-looking game in the past (so much so that I never would have gotten as far as I did in this game if it hadn't been updated).
The audio, too, offers a plethora of tastes; Japanese/English voice work (minimal, but certainly more reserved than the Warriors stuff), rich, moody music thick with period-perfect instruments yet still subdued enough that few tracks actually grate or force themselves to the fore. The production values this time around are markedly better than the series has ever seen.
And yet, despite all of these improvements, the general interface, pace and monumental amount of time required for the game mean that it will continue to stay the niche title that it has always been. That doesn't mean that newcomers or those previously turned off (like, say, me) can't get into things, and there is nothing like pouring all that time and effort into a scenario to finally come out on top because you were the one that guided all those actions into place (likewise, losing can absolutely crush a man, though saves certainly help). It does mean, however, that Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI will continue to be relegated to the world of ultra-hardcore strategy aficionados.
Is that a bad thing? Not if you count yourself among the strategic elite, and there are folks out there that absolutely adore this series, but if you don't have the time/patience to really pour yourself into this game for months on end, it's hard to even recommend this as a rental. Actually, I take that back. This should absolutely be a rental first for anyone interested. If you can stomach the ceaseless menus and endless parade of per-turn decision making (not to mention chess-like pre-planning), then you're set. If not... well, there's always the Warriors Empires games, right?
