Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Sept 11, 2018 8:22:55 GMT -5
Post by edmonddantes on Sept 11, 2018 8:22:55 GMT -5
So here's something.
The NES game Romance of the Three Kingdoms (yes, the Koei historical sim, just in case there's another game of that title out there) used to be one of my favorite games.
Years later, I found the novel in a bookstore (the Moss Roberts translation, which at the time was the best one... there's a new translation now but I'm not sure if its superior or who its by). Ironically I also wound up picking up a translation of The Water Margin (under the title Outlaws of the Marsh), which of course inspired Suikoden... and some beat-em-ups and fighting games for some reason (basically, if there's ever a character named Li Kui, its based on or at least inspired by Water Margin).
Li Kui... isn't that the name of Sub-Zero's order in Mortal Kombat?
Now.... Water Margin kinda sucks (though I'm willing to try a different edition with more annotations--the one I had would explain puns but that was it)...
...but Three Kingdoms is probably one of the best books ever written. (Sometimes I'm inclined to call it the best, but in my brainspace its eternally rivalled by Lord of the Rings).
While you can get the basic story from Dynasty Warriors and the like, its a case where the whole is more than just a summary of its events--its one of the few cases where I find spoilers harmless because "X event happened" isn't really the point (unlike say a mystery novel, where going in knowing who the killer is, is basically cheating). It was one of the few times I actually felt my mind being expanded by a book, since the radically different cultural norms and values opened my mind to stuff that I had before been blind to, or given me a different (or in some cases, less black-and-white) understanding of ideals and concepts I had known about.
So I went back to play the NES game just recently and....
...ummm... it kinda sucks.
Well, to give the positives first, in a weird way I kinda like the graphics and music, giving both a boardgame-esque atmosphere but also kinda making me feel like this is a rich land to explore. Admittedly some of the sound is badly balanced and I remember one of the battle songs sounds kinda screechy, but overall it holds up in that department.
Incidentally... one reason I prefer the NES version is because on the MS-DOS PC version, you need the manual. Because it'll ask you "which command (1-10)?" So... which one is the "improve crop output" command? Guess where its listed... in the NES version this is all just conveniently on-screen.
It has to also be said that Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a clear improvement over Koei's first game, Nobunaga's Ambition, where every session can be summed up as:
"Get attacked on the first turn.
IF WIN: have no way to become stable again and thus are unable to fend off 2nd attack before said 2nd attack occurs.
IF LOSE: Goto game over."
Three Kingdoms has the innovation that not all the states need to be occupied, which I take advantage of (I usually play as Liu Bei) by immediately attacking the guy next to me who winds up retreating into that one state in the top-left of the map (which only has one neighbor and so you can easily block it off), and then building up in that place for a bit before moving out.
But see.... this here is where the game falls short.
Strategy/Sim games are supposed to be about, you know, strategy and simming and management.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms is all about grinding. There is no thought or any real variables. Its just "if you throw X amount of money at thing X, thing X will get better." And its ridiculously easy to have enough money to max out the stats of one state (including your troops) within 1-3 tax seasons, and so you spread out, repeat the process, until you feel like kicking some ass.
And there's no particular strategy in battle, either. In fact you can't ever do a plain melee attack because any battle like that is so drawn-out that it'll expire the turn limit (yes, there's a turn limit) due to them training just as much as you do. Instead, the most effective strategy I ever found was the "set fire" command, which has a random chance of working on an occupied tile but a 100% chance of working on an unoccupied one, so it winds up very easy to entrap people. Now consider there's two victory conditions: One, if the enemy leader is killed or runs away, the party is over. Two is if you set your butts on all of their castles. The game is iffy about both for some reason tho and sometimes won't realize you've won until a few turns pass, and I'm not sure why that is, but the point is once you realize this, the game is so easy to cheese.
... Or it would be, except that fighting each occupied state individually (and keep in mind, any units you don't capture can set up shop in another unoccupied state) gets to be a tedious, grueling task.
So the game becomes "sit around and spend years in game-time building up this state. Then attack, cheese it with fire to win. Repeat." It actually gets to a point where I don't want to conquer another state because I know if I win, it's just another thing I'm gonna have to grind up.
In my experience, Koei either took a long time or else never did fix the combat of their strategy games. the second ROTK game did make fire less broken by adding random rain, but in practice all this means is you have to defeat each enemy using the incredibly slow and tedious standard melee attacks, which isn't strategic, its just boring, and puts even more emphasis on grinding.
I dunno though, its possible I just don't like strategy games (I wasn't a huge fan of the original Sid Meier's Civilization or X-Com: UFO Defense either). What do you think?
(... I've also played the first two Dynasty Warriors games. For some reason I used to actually dig the original 1-on-1 fighter but nowadays I don't like 3D fighting games in general. As for the second game, I honestly thought it got boring quick, tho to be fair I had just played Devil May Cry and any other brawler looks lame next to that).
The NES game Romance of the Three Kingdoms (yes, the Koei historical sim, just in case there's another game of that title out there) used to be one of my favorite games.
Years later, I found the novel in a bookstore (the Moss Roberts translation, which at the time was the best one... there's a new translation now but I'm not sure if its superior or who its by). Ironically I also wound up picking up a translation of The Water Margin (under the title Outlaws of the Marsh), which of course inspired Suikoden... and some beat-em-ups and fighting games for some reason (basically, if there's ever a character named Li Kui, its based on or at least inspired by Water Margin).
Li Kui... isn't that the name of Sub-Zero's order in Mortal Kombat?
Now.... Water Margin kinda sucks (though I'm willing to try a different edition with more annotations--the one I had would explain puns but that was it)...
...but Three Kingdoms is probably one of the best books ever written. (Sometimes I'm inclined to call it the best, but in my brainspace its eternally rivalled by Lord of the Rings).
While you can get the basic story from Dynasty Warriors and the like, its a case where the whole is more than just a summary of its events--its one of the few cases where I find spoilers harmless because "X event happened" isn't really the point (unlike say a mystery novel, where going in knowing who the killer is, is basically cheating). It was one of the few times I actually felt my mind being expanded by a book, since the radically different cultural norms and values opened my mind to stuff that I had before been blind to, or given me a different (or in some cases, less black-and-white) understanding of ideals and concepts I had known about.
So I went back to play the NES game just recently and....
...ummm... it kinda sucks.
Well, to give the positives first, in a weird way I kinda like the graphics and music, giving both a boardgame-esque atmosphere but also kinda making me feel like this is a rich land to explore. Admittedly some of the sound is badly balanced and I remember one of the battle songs sounds kinda screechy, but overall it holds up in that department.
Incidentally... one reason I prefer the NES version is because on the MS-DOS PC version, you need the manual. Because it'll ask you "which command (1-10)?" So... which one is the "improve crop output" command? Guess where its listed... in the NES version this is all just conveniently on-screen.
It has to also be said that Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a clear improvement over Koei's first game, Nobunaga's Ambition, where every session can be summed up as:
"Get attacked on the first turn.
IF WIN: have no way to become stable again and thus are unable to fend off 2nd attack before said 2nd attack occurs.
IF LOSE: Goto game over."
Three Kingdoms has the innovation that not all the states need to be occupied, which I take advantage of (I usually play as Liu Bei) by immediately attacking the guy next to me who winds up retreating into that one state in the top-left of the map (which only has one neighbor and so you can easily block it off), and then building up in that place for a bit before moving out.
But see.... this here is where the game falls short.
Strategy/Sim games are supposed to be about, you know, strategy and simming and management.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms is all about grinding. There is no thought or any real variables. Its just "if you throw X amount of money at thing X, thing X will get better." And its ridiculously easy to have enough money to max out the stats of one state (including your troops) within 1-3 tax seasons, and so you spread out, repeat the process, until you feel like kicking some ass.
And there's no particular strategy in battle, either. In fact you can't ever do a plain melee attack because any battle like that is so drawn-out that it'll expire the turn limit (yes, there's a turn limit) due to them training just as much as you do. Instead, the most effective strategy I ever found was the "set fire" command, which has a random chance of working on an occupied tile but a 100% chance of working on an unoccupied one, so it winds up very easy to entrap people. Now consider there's two victory conditions: One, if the enemy leader is killed or runs away, the party is over. Two is if you set your butts on all of their castles. The game is iffy about both for some reason tho and sometimes won't realize you've won until a few turns pass, and I'm not sure why that is, but the point is once you realize this, the game is so easy to cheese.
... Or it would be, except that fighting each occupied state individually (and keep in mind, any units you don't capture can set up shop in another unoccupied state) gets to be a tedious, grueling task.
So the game becomes "sit around and spend years in game-time building up this state. Then attack, cheese it with fire to win. Repeat." It actually gets to a point where I don't want to conquer another state because I know if I win, it's just another thing I'm gonna have to grind up.
In my experience, Koei either took a long time or else never did fix the combat of their strategy games. the second ROTK game did make fire less broken by adding random rain, but in practice all this means is you have to defeat each enemy using the incredibly slow and tedious standard melee attacks, which isn't strategic, its just boring, and puts even more emphasis on grinding.
I dunno though, its possible I just don't like strategy games (I wasn't a huge fan of the original Sid Meier's Civilization or X-Com: UFO Defense either). What do you think?
(... I've also played the first two Dynasty Warriors games. For some reason I used to actually dig the original 1-on-1 fighter but nowadays I don't like 3D fighting games in general. As for the second game, I honestly thought it got boring quick, tho to be fair I had just played Devil May Cry and any other brawler looks lame next to that).