Romance of the Three Kingdoms is one of Koei Tecmo’s staple series, and it happens to be coming up on its 35th anniversary in 2020. Ahead of Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIV’s release, a series of developer diaries will be released by Koei Tecmo to go over different elements of the series with people who created them. The first entry, a prologue, stars Koei Tecmo CEO Yoichi Erikawa, who also goes by the pen name Kou Shibusawa.
In this initial video, Shibusawa goes over what led to the original Romance of the Three Kingdoms game, his favorite battles, and other elements that help shaped the series. For example, he starts by talking about how he started thinking about a Three Kingdom’s game after releasing Nobunaga’s Ambition on PCs in 1983. He reminisced about reading about it, noting Eiji Yoshikawa’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel and Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s manga were among his inspirations. He also said that the Battle of Chibi and Battle of Hulao Pass were two of his favorite fights, especially citing the latter since that’s when Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei appeared. He also says he’d like future installments to put more focus on their AI.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIV will appear on the PlayStation 4 and PC in Japan on January 16, 2020. It will appear outside of Japan in early 2020.
