Three kingdoms4/28/2023 Three Kingdoms feels like the best of both worlds and maybe, in the grand scheme of this series, the best of all worlds. That wasn’t a bad solution, but it did make those games sometimes feel a bit on-rails for an ostensibly open-ended grand strategy series. In recent installments, most notably the excellent Attila and the Total War: Warhammer games, Creative Assembly’s solution has been to add more of an event-driven narrative arc to their campaigns to give them a more satisfying structure, and guarantee a few climactic fights along the way. They wouldn’t accomplish much in terms of building their own empires, but they would always do their best to derail yours. Taking a small faction from a backwater power to a region-spanning empire often descended into long, wearying grinds against swarms of AI opponents who weren’t so much adversaries as militant speedbumps. This is pretty classic stuff for a Total War game, but it’s also the kind of thing that the series has struggled to make hold together over the course of one of its long 25-35 hour single-player campaigns. Nobody has openly declared their ambition to become the new emperor, but from small beginnings the campaign turns into a war to re-unify China under a new dynasty. Which right from the start gives Three Kingdoms an unusual setup. ![]() You take the part of one of the legendary or infamous leaders who rose in this era who ended up fighting to supplant the Han dynasty with one of their own (a fight many would pass onto children and grandchildren as the Three Kingdoms period stretched deep into the third century). It begins late in the second century, as the long reign of the Han Dynasty is coming undone across China, with the empire reeling from the shock of the Yellow Turban revolt and a bloody palace coup by the tyrant Dong Zhuo. It’s a period most players will know something about, if only because anyone who has played games in the last twenty years has probably encountered Koei’s long-running Dynasty Warriors or Romance of the Three Kingdoms series. ![]() It is, at almost every moment you spend playing it, a game where all hell is about to break loose, or already has-In spite of your plans or often because of them. The genius here is that it doesn’t only happen once as everyone enters the final stages of the game, but every time the stakes get higher as the chaotic free-for-all of the late Han period gives way to the Three Kingdoms that give the period its name, and Total War its most satisfying strategy game in a decade. All your friends and allies will one day turn on you, but you never know when. You live in suspense when you play Total War: Three Kingdoms. Trying to win one war, I had set in motion two new ones. ![]() ![]() By the next autumn there I was beset on all sides. Former friends turned against me over the atrocity, even some of my generals were furious because of old friendships with the two men. The two heroes who were revered by half the leaders in the country. So I executed them… and immediately became the most loathed figure in China. They were the most incredible fighters I’d yet seen in Total War: Three Kingdoms, but I also knew I never wanted to face them on the battlefield again. “Kill me or release me,” was the response of both men and, honestly, I wanted to release them. But Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, now wounded prisoners, would not swear allegiance to me. Eventually, sheer weight of numbers brought both heroes down and pretty much guaranteed that the Kingdom of Shu Han would not advance into my heartland.
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