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8. Romance of the Three Kingdoms 2 (Genesis)

This game is similar in terms of presentation to Nobunaga's Ambition 1, but it is like a world above when it comes to the depth of the game mechanics. I was pretty blown away by just how much I ended up loving this game and feeling like it does an extremely good job at what it attempts to do. It added so many features while still keeping the simplicity and charm of Nobunaga's Ambition.

If you know anything about the Dynsasty Warriors games, you might be interested to know that this series is basically a compliment to that one. While Dynasty Warriors are action beat em ups, the Romance games are turn based strategy. But they're all based around the same historical events, and even made by the same game company.

So basically the major difference between Nobunaga's Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms is this; In Nobunaga's Ambition you get one action per territory you control. But in Romance, you have a bunch of vassals under your command and each vassal can perform one action. This leads to a lot more actions per turn, and they also increased the calendar from 4 Season to 12 Months, leading to more turns overall. Adding a larger variety of actions you can perform makes it so that all of your officers are usually busy doing many different things.

If I want to say one downside of this system it's that it makes each turn take longer, and the game as a whole is much slower as a result. I have never finished a Romance of the Three Kingdoms campaign and united all of China like I did with Japan in that Nobunaga's Ambition playthrough.

Are these basic as hell strategy games going to appeal to everyone? No. But if you are like me and you're going to love these games even when you're 90 years old, I honestly think ROTK2 on Genesis might be near the top of the list for this era.

7. Romance of the Three Kingdoms 3 (Genesis)

If you've never played any of these games it might surprise you to know how different they are, even the ones that came out around the same time, despite having the same basic premise. For example I'd strongly recommend playing the Genesis versions as for me personally the SNES adaptations of these games that I tried were a lot worse in presentation and playability. Anyway, 3 adds the ability to create your own characters and offers a bigger campaign.

I think I like the battle system in 3 less, and I enjoy how 'basic' 2 is in a lot of ways, making it and the original Nobunaga's Ambition very easy to pick up and play. On the flip side, the depth of the mechanics to RotK 3 is extremely satisfying for the days when you're willing to sit down and engage with it.

This game has a much bigger focus on both politics and espionage, two play styles that I absolutely LOVE. It's extremely satisfying to pull of a trick like sending a forged letter to an enemy officer who has questionable loyalty, making him grow even more dissatisfied with his ruler, and then send a politician to convince that officer to switch over to your side in the same turn before the enemy has time to react and reinforce his loyalty. I also made a habit of allying myself with strong rulers and then asking them for money and other gifts constantly. Hilariously, asking them for gifts actually makes them like you MORE instead of LESS but I think this is a fun quirk of the game that isn't too far from reality. I've known a lot of people who were really happy to offer generous aide, and actually seem pretty offput if you refuse their gifts.

Around the time when I first played all three, I rated RotK3 as the lowest because it lacked the simple charm of the other two, but after a while it ended up being the one I continued to play the most, and rated the highest. I could write, and have written, paragraphs and paragraphs about the various ins and outs to the different mechanics in this game. But I'll just leave this by saying I enjoyed the game a lot and in my opinion this is the best Koei game of the 16 bit era. And might even be the best RoTK game overall.