Only in my playthrough he died on about turn five. In most playthroughs, as I understand it, the big antagonist will be Dong Zhuo, a cruel but mighty leader who created a power vacuum in the toppling of the Han Emperor and leapt into it. Periodical missions, which are optional, ease you towards the path of narrative history in Romance mode.įor my main playthrough I opted for a Romance mode campaign with Cao Cao, the strategic mastermind, because he along with Liu Bei feels like one of the two "main" factions pitched to you for a down-the-middle playthrough, and because I like to pretend I'm very intelligent. They're responsible for some of its boldest decisions and some of its most vexing. The big ideas are webbed into absolutely everything - and there are so many things. Three Kingdoms, I've come to realise, is a game that is utterly defined by its setting in time and in space - more so than any other Total War, and more than probably any other grand strategy or 4X game that I've played. This might seem like an awful lot of time to spend talking about dusty books and grand chin-stroking without even getting into the game itself, but it is necessary. The other is called Records (Anorak: Extra Dry Edition) which is for people who order their steak well done - hold the seasoning, thanks. One's called Romance, and incorporates the details of the troops and economic systems - and of course taxation levies - with the narrative, catty, political intrigue of larger-than-life characters like Cao Cao and Dong Zhuo. Creative Assembly's admirably plaintive solution is to say "why not both?" and simply give the people what they want: two campaign modes. More importantly it wouldn't be true to what that era actually is, if it missed out the romantic telling which gives it its form. Total War fans are nothing if not fervent in their desire for accuracy, but a game based entirely on detailed accounts of regional taxation levies and nothing more might be just a little bland, even for them. That, of course, creates a bit of a dilemma. Creative Assembly has beaten the drum of Records-versus-Romance half to death by now but, if you weren't already aware, they're essentially two accounts of the period that can be reduced down to two books, Records of the Three Kingdoms and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and the developer has - correctly - relied heavily on both. The one at the heart of it, though, is that trade-off, between a commitment to accuracy and the romanticised telling of the story that people are more likely to know. But it's also a time of mystery, and mythology, and romance, all intertwined with other capital-letter ideas like Confucianism and Wu Xing and Guanxi to make a big, slightly headache-inducing but vastly ambitious soup of design. Three Kingdoms China starts with the fall of the Han Dynasty, around the late 100s to early 200s CE, and predictably it's a time of fractured alliances and political upheaval - so far so Total War. Total War: Three Kingdoms is absolutely swimming in big ideas - plural - to its detriment and its strength, which is probably inevitable given the deeply, intrinsically philosophical era in which it's set.
Very neat, very satisfying, very, very difficult to pull off. Everything refers back to something else and informs it, all the dangling threads of design brought tidily back in line.
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A grand philosophy, or some big unifying theory of everything, that seeps under the skin and wraps around the bones of a game to tie it all together. Let me just say this: I am an absolute sucker for a big idea. Ambitious and sometimes overwhelming, Three Kingdoms does a great job of capturing the complexity of China's vivid past.