Romance of the Three Kingdoms VIII [PS2]

In a surprising turn of events the level at which you can control the aspects of your town and empire have been significantly lessened (there appears to be a heavier focus on the allocation of responsibilities), and maximizing the use of all the officers in your empire is less automatic than RotTK7. Additionally, individual officers can no longer be upgraded into ultimate warriors (it's impossible for characters to get 100 in every category) and are now limited to certain caps based on the direction of their character. Also new is the skill and trait system that allows for truly specific and deliberate customization of characters. You can even set family lineages, get married, form brotherhood bonds, and adjust the motivations, personalities, and type of warriors you can create. Want to create a warrior who is motivated by power, acts like a coward, but shows proficiency in naval warfare? With a few clicks of the button you can do just that in the character traits screen.

Regardless of how powerful your warriors are or how well you run your city, battle is inevitable. Separated into three types of fighting (duels, regular, and what I liked to call, "Nobody's home"), there's all manner of ways to attack your opponent. Should a city you're attacking have only militia protecting it or if you're watching a battle between nations other than yourself, the "Nobody's Home" battle screen pops up and you'll be privy to a little movie based on statistics -- no control for you whatsoever. Attack an army that belongs to a Viceroy, however, and the real battles begin!

Much more detailed than in times past, the battle screen plays out like the turn-based action sequences we've grown accustomed too. Only this time, the visuals have been improved significantly and the tactics and special techniques on the battlefield play a far more important role here than they did before (not to mention the fact that up to five separate nations can battle at the same time). Sitting back and using fire arrow over and over again will no longer give you the automatic boosts that you need -- you need to play smart in order to defeat your opponent, or it will take advantage of you as soon as it can. The third battle type: duels. Are similar to the way they were in previous games, with officers competing in one-on-one battles with the loser losing everything, and the winner going home a very happy war general.

Speaking of happy war generals, gamers can now select their favorite scenarios from various eras of the Three Kingdoms period right from the start rather than having to play through a scenario completely. If they'd like to play from the beginning and try to unite all of China, they can do that too -- beginning at practically any interval. And whether or not you decide to run it historically, fictionally, or a mixture of both, no two games will ever play out the same way -- it's all reactionary to what your alter ego does and goes a long way towards convincing us that the replay value will be through the roof.

Not that there shouldn't be reasons to go back and play it again anyway: not only is your character given special goals and tasks to accomplish throughout their adventure, but their accomplishments can be viewed through two special menus as well. Allowing them to view their collected items ala Dynasty Warriors as well as providing a theater-type selector for reliving story-based and accomplished cinematic moments, the game literally challenges you with the task of finding everything. A feat that the dialog box claims is close to impossible. We'll see about that.

If we had any complaints at this juncture they'd fall into two categories: Menu navigation and computer A.I. -- For reasons unknown, switching between characters and selecting the commands from your control list proves quite the exercise in memorization and patience. There are a lot of button combinations to be remembered and some of the tasks you'd think would be easy aren't aren't have no documented in the game or in the manual to tell you how to perform them (like how to switch between characters). Also sketchy is the questionable intelligence of enemy expansionists. We'd noticed that they would invade highly populated adjacent territories where they were terribly outmatched while completely ignoring the weaker or empty provinces around them. Weird.

But who's to say that it's a permanent problem? We've only now begun to scratch the surface of what really makes Romance of the Three Kingdoms VIII tick. With multiple difficulty levels, several scenarios, and various other goodies ready to be explored, there's plenty of stuff to check out before we pass final judgment in just a few weeks. During your wait, be sure and click on our media page below for the latest movies, screens, and art from KOEI's most prolific breadwinner. See you soon.

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