Romance of the Three Kingdoms 8 Remake Review
Romance of the Three Kingdoms 8 Remake is a complete reworking and modernisation of the original PC & PS2 game released back in the early 00s.
It’s nice to see this series getting some love especially as we have Romance of the Three Kingdom to thank for various spinoffs over the years like Kessen II, Dynasty Tactics, and Dynasty Warriors, the first in the ever-popular ‘Warriors’ line of games.
Gameplay
This is a slow-paced strategy game with a heavy emphasis on building social bonds and relationships. The main aim of the game is to take over China, to do this, you’ll first have to choose a class for the player character.
There are 8 different roles you can choose for your main character including ruler, viceroy, governor, tactician, common officer, chieftain, comrade, and free officer. For my playthrough, I decided to go with Tactician leaving my character with plenty of intellect but dire physical abilities.
The core gameplay is split up into three different sections with the first being your day-to-day preparations section where you will be spending the bulk of your play time and this involves looking after your land, preparing soldiers and generally taking care to keep your followers happy so they don’t revolt. You get three turns to get your affairs in order being able to perform abilities that cost points which are then regenerated at the end of a turn. As with all good management style games, you’ll have to think carefully about which actions you’ll want to spend your time on as you can realistically only do a few per turn.
After your three turns are up the season will end you are summoned to Parliament, the second section of gameplay. The parliament section is a lot of fun, you get an overview of how the map of China currently looks with who owns what etc.
From the Parliament, you can choose quite substantial actions such as sending a spy to a neighbouring land, trying to flip an enemy officer to join your cause or simply offering up some suppliers to a neighbouring land in hopes of forming an alliance.
Last up is battles, these take place on a large isometric map divided into hexagonal sections. The play style is very similar to other SRPGs like Fire Emblem but doesn’t feel as good. It’s perfectly serviceable but would have been nice to have a little more depth here and if you attempt to use the AI auto-battle it’s a coin toss on whether they will perform well or not.
Between the above three main gameplay sections we have to talk about the game’s various systems… and boy I hope you like systems! Romance of the Three Kingdoms 8 Remake can feel like endless menu diving at times but it pulls it off in a way that doesn’t make the game feel too tedious. In fact, I highly enjoyed myself going through and micromanaging everything I could.
The first system I want to walk about is the Officers, there are hundreds (if not over a thousand) different types of officers you can recruit, each with their wants, likes, dislikes, personalities etc. You can recruit any officer you see fit, you might have to bribe them or win them over in one way or another but it can be done and it’s this open-endedness which makes for a highly replayable game.
The second mechanic I want to touch on is relationships, these can be formed by working alongside someone, sending them gifts, duelling, debating or simply hanging out with them. As your relationship deepens with someone they will unlock additional abilities and stats, which can be handy during the battles. You can even get married and have kids in the game which you can influence over the in-game years to join you on the battlefield. It’s quite a deep, rewarding and in-depth mechanic.
The Tales system is one I should mention also, you can think of these as more random events and side stories. These tales’ missions soon pile up and you can tackle most of them as you please with the more pressing ones having time limits. These range from the mundane such as stopping a group of bandits or chasing off a debt collector for one of your officers to the more full-on waging wars which have multiple parts and various conditions to unlock them such as having over a certain amount of soldiers, notoriety or wisdom.
Tales are a lot of fun and I have to admit, I spent an awful lot of time slacking off from my main duties to clear these fun little challenges and stories. It’s very addictive!
Peformance
In terms of performance, Romance of the Three Kingdoms 8 Remake ran flawlessly both on my main PC and on the Steam Deck. I found myself playing more on the Steam Deck as it’s the perfect fit to knock out a few of the Tales missions when you’ve only got a limited amount of time to play.
Visually, the game is very pretty and you can tell a lot of work has gone into the character portraits which are all now partially animated and it must have been a massive undertaking with just how many characters there are in the game.
In terms of audio, the ambient music tracks are great and don’t get repetitive which was something I was worried about in the first few hours of the game. The voice performances in the game are very good also, although all are in Japanese. It’s quite comical at times hearing a Japanese pronunciation of a Chinese name all while reading English text, it’s a little jarring but weirdly you do get used to it!
Conclusion
Romance of the Three Kingdoms 8 Remake is a fantastic and addictive game. It combines all the strategy gameplay of the original while adding modern improvements, creating an experience that both longtime fans and newcomers can enjoy. Apart from a few dubious choices from your allies AI Romance of the Three Kingdoms 8 Remake will have you coming back for more.
8
Steam review code kindly provided by Koei Tecmo