why all of those people who decide made this campaign stop reading Three Kingdoms at battle of Chibi lol.
Again, a Three Kingdoms themed game without Three Kingdoms
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I’d be surprised if they read the Three Kingdoms to make the DLC.
There are way less flashy and underrated stories of the three Kingdoms period, but only some made it into the pop culture.
In their defence, I remember Romance of the Three Kingdoms having exactly the same problem. Admittedly it’s over 10 years since I tried to read it – but this is one of the reasons I gave up reading it part way through the first volume.
The characters and events in the novel are based on history. I guess the novel assumed that its readers had been somewhat familiar with this, which was reasonable, since when it was created a few centuries ago its audience would obviously not have come from outside East Asia.
Cao Cao’s father get killed in Xu province, it’s unknown who is responsible, but anyway, that’s the reason he launched the invasion.
Then, The Caos literally massacred hundreds of thousands civilians. They could easily paint him as the big bad guy for the storytelling’s sake, but I guess they don’t want player to feel awkward when play as Cao Cao?
Liu Bei joined Cao Cao because get backstabbed by Lu Bu, lost almost everything, wifes being kidnapped, the lowest point is his life, you might say. But man, it feels like such a minor event in the scenario.
No reason Liu Bei would spare Lu Bu, not only he probably is the one who want Lu Bu’s death the most, also he literally has no power to decide that, when he’s Cao Cao’s subordinate in that point.
The reason for fighting against Cao Cao is mentioned once during the cutscenes, however…
I don’t recall any of that being explained in the game. One moment you are fighting Cao Cao, then Tao Qian dies and suddenly you are allied with him and Lu Bu becomes your enemy. And it happens very early in the scenario too. It’s too sudden and it’s poorly done.
All the exposition in the cutscene is about Dong Zhuo (and his death), then Cao Cao attacking Xu province, but all that happens in-game comes out of nowhere.
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Dude spent 20 years struggling, failing, even running. Finally wins one great battle and start to gain success… your story ends here, nope. lol
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That may be true, but it feels like a poor excuse. I’m not talking about the author not explaining events clearly – I’m talking about them rushing through them in essentially no depth. That’s not how you write for an audience that knows an overview of the events already, because you’re only telling them what they already know.
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At least the novel itself did much better works than the campaigns in this respect.
It’s also possible that the language loses some of its nuances after being translated.
Yes, I think the translation I was reading wasn’t ideal – although apparently it was considered one of the best English translations at the time.
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Obviously I have not read the translations because I have not needed to, so I cannot fairly judge the quality of the translations.
Each person’s personal taste is also a big factor. Perhaps the translation you read, or perhaps from the beginning the narrative style of this centuries-old literature itself, was not to your taste at the time.
If you feel frustrated reading the work (or its translation) directly, it is a viable way to approach it through other media based on its story, such as TV series, anime, manga, video games, and even children’s books . They range from reproducing the novel as accurately as possible to including a lot of their own secondary creations, maybe one of them will appeal to you.
The Dynasty Warriors series is an action-RPG that I personally really enjoy, but it obviously including a lot of secondary creation.
While Ornlu has not yet played all of them, there are still full gameplays of the other campaigns on Youtube. And my worst suspicions became true: not only do all three campaigns end on th Battle of Red Cliffs, but also the scenario map is exactly the same on all campaigns, as I feared. Plus the narrator is the same guy on all campaigns.
So… We have less campaign content (13 scenarios instead of the “standard” 15, and some DLCs even had more in the past), recycled maps, an oversimplied and extremely rushed story to the point where it’s impossible to know what is going on, boring and forgettable characters, decisions that change pretty much nothing despite being advertised as having important consequences, and there’s even magicians in multiple scenarios. I can’t speak on the gameplay because I haven’t played it.
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I’ve watched all the scenarios from this DLC on Youtube already on a channel called " てい Tei" you can check them out if you like.
From what I saw, the Cao Cao campaign seems like the best one. Although what I will say is that all the missions look really repetitive (speaking about all the scenarios across all 3 of the campaigns). Like every single mission just feels like a build and destroy scenario and they all have “capture x amount of Y point of interest” objectives and a bunch of other generic side objectives. The only scenario I saw that wasn’t like this was the battle of Changban scenario for the Liu Bei campaign which was more of an A to B type, but it still had the “capture x amount of Y point of interest” type of objective which is everywhere in this DLC. Also every “perspective” of the Red cliffs scenario looks really similar in terms of gameplay. It’s all just build and destroy with capturing point of interest, but with a different civ and different starting position. Also the side quests are a tad different. I thought it could be much cooler if they did it like the Dawn of the dukes where the actual map and style of the mission are different.
I will say based solely on appearances of the new campaigns, and having played the BfG campaign, the BfG campaign looks& feels significantly better than the 3k ones. I’ll even say victors and vanquished has much more interesting looking scenarios, although I didn’t buy that DLC either.
I wouldn’t say any of the 3k scenarios look bad (other than the hero abilities and such) they just look really… I would say safe& boring. It’s like the opposite of BfG which took risks, would result in either a really cool scenario or one that didn’t play out so well.
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I’ll have to get a closer look to all the campaigns, but I felt it was very similar to the rest. Even the pacing issues are present, like in mission two that depicts the coalition against Dong Zhuo AND the invasion of Xu province AND Lu Bu’s defeat AND Cao Cao’s first battles against Liu Bei. It’s a bit much… though I feel the cutscenes explain events a bit better than in other campaigns.
Also in that level the emperor sees you as a loyal subject, at the same time you are fighting his troops? Makes no sense.
It’s very excessive, and to make that point even more specific, is that most of those objectives are about killing a small amount of static units that won’t do anything if you ignore them, and their bases are so weak you can just patrol-attack them and win. Almost no variation on that front.
Not that you need to when most of the content is free 
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They are very efficient with the budget. They did the same thing in V&V, a single narrator to everything (and even recicled art for the slideshows). In translation for other languages, there is even no act in the narrator, he is just reading a piece of paper in all dialogue.
In the 3 kingdom they:
- Recicled the Chronicles framework.
- Used an easy to draw art for the slideshows (and no animation like BfG because its time consuming)
- Single narrator for everything
- No voice lines for units
- lower amount of scenarios
- Reuse of scenarios
Also, i’m pretty sure they are cheapening in the translation and dub department. In my language, they always had a bad translation quality, every new DLC have a worse translation, but in this one it looks like they used AI translation, because you know the Sun Clan??? They translated as if “Sun” is literally our star, the sun, being the Clan of the Sun.
How its possible that any professional doing any kind of revision could make this mistake…?
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Also add to that: extremely rushed story, your decisions make very little impact, all scenarios have pretty much the exact same objectives.
Have you considered that Sun Jian could be an alien that came from the Sun? I mean if the world has wind magicians, anything’s possible…
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Instead of making a more interesting campaign by making each faction’s campaign in a different period (in the Three Kingdoms period, these 3 characters have many other interesting periods and stories to exploit) - they chose to make all 3 campaigns in the simultaneous time lol.
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