Although Koei, the maker of the game, have numerous titles, this one is my favorite. From the first time I played this I was hooked. The game takes place in ancient China with three kingdoms looking to control the country. The game lets you play almost any one of the rulers. My favorite was to control a ruler located in the northern left or right of the map. This let me build up my armies and then declare war on my neighbor.
One aspect of the game that I liked was "bribe general" I would look for the smartest and strongest generals and bring them over to my side. This could be done by money, gifts or feeding into their ego. The first generals that I would go for would be Lui Bo or Zhang Fei - two of the most powerful generals in the game. When two generals go to war, look at what happens after.
Most of the time you can get some good generals because they may have be captured and their loyalty is very low. But you have to watch out for that as well. Just as a general can be bribed from another player, so they
can be bribed from you. If you do get Lui Bo be careful, his loyalty falls very fast. More often than not you have to give him money in order to bring his loyalty back up. You can play as Cao Cao and probably win in a short amount of time. But the reason I didn't play this character was that there were too many fronts that had to be protected and too many generals to be controlled. That is why I feel that it's best to start with a ruler that only has one province with few generals. Get the generals to be loyal and move your general to conquer other lands.
Compared to the other games in this series, this is the most simplistic in both game play and graphics. Even with this "con" I still played it for hours at night. Sometimes until 3 o'clock in the morning. One game aspect that I wish this game had that the others started to give the game player was creating your own ruler and generals. If this game had that ability it would be, in my eyes, one of the best. Although it still tops titles put out by Koei. The only other Romance of the 3 Kingdom titles that I had was Romance of the 3 Kingdoms 2. I did enjoy playing that title (for Super NES), I still went back to this one. I am so glad to have found it again.
