Romance of the Three Kingdoms X
Has the romance fizzled out of the three kingdoms yet? Or is X times the charm?
Tags: Romance of the Three Kingdoms X Categories: PS2 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Sep 1st, 2005
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Romance of the Three Kingdoms X (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action | No | ||
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I remember the original Romance of the Three Kingdoms, or at least the first one I can recall appearing on American soil. During the period of time when I owned a Nintendo Entertainment System (the original), ROT3K quickly became one of my favorite titles due to it’s intellectual challenge. I could easily get lost in all the statistics and resource management and people management. So much so that the battles and military conquest actually seemed more of a distraction than the main attraction, at least for me. Ultimately, though, I found a hole in the AI and realized that the key to victory, in that early version of the game, was to build up sufficient troops in your home territory, as quickly as possible, and then go on a marauding rampage, never giving your enemy enough time to respond and mount a counter-attack. Once you got to a certain point, you could invade a new territory, conquer it, leave behind one troop, conduct a quick draft, and move on to the next territory, in effect “running the table” against your enemies until none were left, since they had little opportunity to take back territory from you.
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Of course, finding that “trick” to winning eventually killed off my interest in the game and, shortly after that, I traded my NES and all those games in for a Sega Genesis, the new “16-bit” system on the block. Now in its 10th outing, Romance of the Three Kingdoms has changed greatly since the NES era; no longer a pure stat-and-resource game, it is now impossible to “run the table” like that, since the game is far more story-laden and far more complex, almost reaching toward RPG-ish aspirations. You select a character to begin as and are given basic challenges as the game begins. Some are fetch-quests, such as traveling to a nearby territory to get a certain item, within a time limit; get back in time and you’re rewarded. Get back too late and your reputation as a leader takes a hit. Other types of tasks are also available, such as raising the moral of certain troops, or their discipline, again within a time limit.
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One of my main gripes about the new ROT3K, however, is that it is so story-driven, it often feels like you have lost control of the game and are basically just watching it play itself. Many of your interactions early on are so pre-scripted that you aren’t even given multiple responses from which to choose, which makes the game seem very penned-in, to the point of claustrophobia. To make matters worse, events are so precisely scripted that you can be in the middle of a task or quest and suddenly a game event begins and you spend a LOT of time watching that unfold before ever regaining any say in the outcome. That’s not to mention the fact that often these game events will cause you to miss your deadline for completion – and you’ll STILL be penalized, even though it’s the fault of the pre-scripted event that took over while you were in the middle of doing something else. Ugh.
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In one of the most stark and frustrating examples, my character fell in battle, was taken captive by an enemy general, forced into service to that general, gained the respect of that general and allowed to return to the service of his original general, intercepted along the way by less-generous followers, and rescued by that enemy general again so his safe return to his original general is assured. All of that – well over an hour’s worth of game and story – and not once was I involved in the actions playing out before me. There were no optional responses, just a lot of stuff having with no input from me. That results in a big yawn.
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When the game’s new style tones down for periods of time and you can concentrate on familiar tasks like resource management, the game is smoother than ever pulling off such tasks; however, the frequent interruptions, lack of interactivity and longish non-interactive story segments just end up testing an eager gamer’s patience. While XenoSaga and XenoSaga II were often guilty of the same sin of long story segments, you were at least occasionally allowed some input that influenced the outcome, or at least created that illusion. And ROT3K X is no XenoSaga. In the end, it’s not enough of what people love about the series and too much of the new, story-based, sit around and watch the game play itself crap that just bores the living daylights out of you. Too bad, because those few times when the game plays to its strengths, it’s actually much improved over previous versions.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ The stat and resource management portions are smoother and well-redesigned. + The general look of the game is acceptable. |
5.1 |
| What Doesn't | |
| — Nearly everything else. Who wants to watch a game play itself for two hours before it allows you to make a choice or take part again? I could watch Spiderman 2 on PSP UMD and feel more involved in the outcome. | |
| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Romance of the Three Kingdoms used to be one of my favorite games. The newest, tenth installment is the reason I said, “used to be.” | |
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Tags: Romance of the Three Kingdoms X
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Sep 1st, 2005 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
