#58: Romance of the Three Kingdoms II

KOEI!

I have a confession to make. I love the Final Fantasy games, and Square is now probably my favourite game company, but back in the day my favourite was Koei. I loved their historical simulation series. Uncharted Waters, Pacific Theatre of Operations, Aerobiz, Romance of the Three Kingdoms III... All awesome, awesome games. It helped that they were mostly games that could be played multiplayer so it was easier to rent them to play with my brother. RPG games aren't very good for sharing, but these neat simulation games were.

Yes, Nick Page is totally a Chinese name.

I hadn't played this particular game before, as it wasn't available for rent in any of the nearby stores. I played the sequel a lot, though. The game is a pretty interesting civ building game. You have a city and a couple generals. Each month each of your generals can take one action. It can be spending money to improve infrastructure. It can be making your army better. It can be trying to recruit more generals. There's espionage, and plotting, and all sorts of dastardly things you can do. Combat is played out on a tactical hex grid, and there's lots of stuff you can do there too. Personal combat between generals. Armies can attack in a variety of ways. You can try to bribe enemy generals. You can start fires. There's terrain that matters. If the fight doesn't end after a set number of turns the fight gets paused and you take another round of city turns, and then the fight resumes again. You need to eat food to keep this up, so you can try to win a fight by starving the enemy out.

RIP Kong Rong

Like all good simulation civ games you need to know what's going on before you can play it well. This game suffers a little in that I could spend a lot of time learning how to be good at RotTK2, or I could just go play more Civ V, and that's a game I know and enjoy. So I didn't put much time into this one. I threw my second general into a fight that it turns out I couldn't win. Oh well! I remember enough to know that I desperately needed to recruit more generals so that I could attack with more than 100 troops.

That said, while I don't really want to play this game more now, I totally would have wanted to play it as a kid. I would have needed to find it before RotTK3, because that game was better, but if I had I think I would have really liked this one.

Rating: B+