Who wants to talk about Xiahou Dun eating his own eyeball after pulling the arrow out of his eye socket? Sign me the heck up for Romance of the Three Kingdoms 13. I initially got into Three Kingdoms through Dynasty Warriors and never looked back I play Dynasty Warriors now because I love Three Kingdoms stuff.
And these were real people real people whose deeds shaped a political landscape in ways that mattered for well over a thousand years, whose might and ambition and cunning are still discussed long after their last known descendants are dead. Parents still scare their children into obedience by telling them Zhang Liao will come for them. But Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a much bigger deal than that: one of the key characters, Guan Yu, was deified as a god of war and is worshipped to this day. The nearest western analogue I can think off is the Arthurian legends stories everyone sort of knows, partly true.
It’s difficult to communicate the mental real estate Romance of the Three Kingdoms occupies in East Asia. It feels surprisingly modern and accessible, but it’s the larger-than-life characters that have cemented its place as one of, and perhaps the, most important work in the classical Chinese canon.
Not exactly light reading, then, but its blend of historical fact, legend, and total nonsense (more politely, poetic license and political bias) is presented so compellingly that it’s worth the effort of remembering who’s who. Published sometime in the 14th century – over a millennia after the events it describes – it’s a historical saga of 120 chapters, 800,000 words and over 1,000 characters. Life is a rich tapestry and human history is full of interesting times, but the Three Kingdoms period stands out thanks to Luo Guanzhong’s novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. It takes its name from the division of China into an uneasy three-way split, which then imploded spectacularly, largely because people are people. “Three Kingdoms” is the historical shorthand name for a period of about 60 years in Chinese history when the Han dynasty collapsed and everyone decided to get a piece of the pie for themselves. Nevertheless I’m here today to talk about Romance of the Three Kingdoms 13 because I’m a great big old Three Kingdoms nerd. I’m not very good at or experienced with strategy games. I’ve not played any of the previous 12 games. I haven’t finished the game successfully even once. I found it very difficult to start playing Romance of the Three Kingdoms 13 - and then, as with so many strategic simulator sandboxes of this kind, I found it very difficult to stop. Why would anyone do this to themselves? And while we're asking questions, how do we stop?
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