Here we are once more into the world of ancient china, the world of giant armies fighting epic battles, heroes fighting for fame.... meat dumplings and rice wine... sorry, I haven't eaten. Romance of the Three kingdoms X is, yes, the 10th installment from the original on the NES. The basis is simple; Around 190 AD there was a massive revolt in china during the dying days of the weak Han Dynasty, the first event in a long chain of events that would change the path of china forever, and usher in a period of time that saw a amazing number of heroes taking the main historical stage in a very short period of time. It would be like if George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., General Eisenhower, and a large number of other famous people came into the national light over the course of 40 years.
In the game, you pick one of the hundreds of famous people of the period and play through their lives, following history or making your own if you like. You gain fame, favor, friends, wealth, treasure, and power as you progress. If you don't want to play a character from history, you can make one, two, or over a hundred characters of your own if you want. Characters have stats and skills, stats dictating how well a character works, are it in battle, debates, or in doing basic tasks. You can up the stats, but the game is designed to keep it slow, keeping it realistic as you cannot get super strong or smart over night, and also limiting just how strong you can get in the game. You can gain skills to also use in these various tasks, requiring you gain an amount of experience in a particular field before you learn them from a sage or another character that already has the skill. You can start in a force, make your own, or work as a free officer just gaining money and fame doing request jobs at inns, also gaining experience in various fields. As for working in a force, your job becomes keeping a city, province, or an entire kingdom productive and secure before expanding outward by conquest or politics. The game does not end until you die (of old age or during an execution) and have no one to continue your quest (heir or sworn brother) or until one force controls all of china. Your goal is to be the leader of the last kingdom or at least a high ranking member in the last kingdom, but how you play the game is up to you entirely.
There are only a few differences between this game and the last ones. For one, this game is a massive improvement on the last addition. While ROTK8 was nearly perfect, ROTK9 was a horrible slap in the face that nearly killed the series. They removed the problems from the last game such as being forced to play as a ruler or not at all, the extreme difficulty dealing with barbarian armies that where impossible to stop or fight back against, the computer's ability to build up cities at the speed of light while yours where impossible to build up at a reasonable speed, amongst many other problems. Still, it keeps the time based system, where actions take time measured in days instead of using time units from the 8th game. Still, it uses them in a way to better simulate difficult tasks and travel time. There are still a few problems in the game play. For one, the special final scenario, which lets all of the characters play all at once and not get old, the game eventually corrupts the save file, making loading that particular save slot impossible. The game also has a issue of erasing all of your save data for the game if you enter in certain names for a created character. However, my biggest hang-up about the game is the fact that they removed multiplayer. They had to in order to streamline the single player mode to work with the new time system. Still, the game is a slight improvement from the 8th installment, and infinitely better then the 9th. New additions to the game include a new style of dueling, a new debate-style duel using words instead of swords, an improved city system, a new job system that lets you get jobs to raise funds, fame, and experience, and a new campaigned war which lets you wage battles on massive scale
Overall, the game is only hampered by some annoying bugs and a downgrade on game play from a few games ago, but it's still an improvement for the series and is fun to play. You will lose hours as you play through the life of your virtual character as you fight and war to become the leading dynastic ruler of china, or the best warrior.
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