TRUE ROMANCE
Two of my generals dismount in the middle of a field to duel with their opposing numbers. The rest of the battle continues in the distance, but I’ve zoomed in to watch the flashy moves as the generals kick and stab each other instead. Occasionally a flurry of arrows or a riderless horse will pass in the background, but for the moment I’m intently focused on something that looks more like a game of Tekken.
Total War: Three Kingdoms embraces the story it’s inspired by, Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong, rather than strict historical accuracy. Soldiers can run around the battlefield seemingly forever without getting tired. Their leaders are larger-than-life figures with complicated backstories and rivalries, who carry legendary spears and are able to defeat entire units single-handedly. Characters like Cao Cao are cast as devious opera-villain masterminds able to manipulate wars into existence at the drop of a hat, when the history books suggest he was a decent ruler and also quite a good poet.
It’s a version of history that’s closer to an epic movie
There’s an option to turn some of these things off at the start of a campaign by engaging Records Mode. With it, stamina plays a more important role in unit repositioning, and it also gets rid of the duels and gives generals bodyguards to do most of the fighting instead. The alternative, Romance Mode, feels like an honest embrace of what has really been all along, though. It’s a version
