#132: Gemfire

Flame on!

When I saw this next game was a Koei game I'd never played before I was tentatively excited. On the one hand if I've never heard of it then it probably isn't spectacular. On the other hand I don't know if I've ever played a bad Koei game. I didn't know what to expect with a name like Gemfire. It sounds like a jRPG?

I wanted the pink haired girl but couldn't
say no to Jim Carrey's The Riddler.

It turns out to be Romance of the Fantasy Kingdoms. It's pretty much just a stripped down version of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series with a couple of neat twists. Every army is evenly split into 4 units. One archer, one cavalry, and two infantry units. Then each army can also bring along a fifth awesome unit. Each faction has their own wizard they can bring every now and then, and you can recruit a wide variety of fantasy creatures like gargoyles and skeletons and fire breathing lizards.

Wizards are insane!

I think this is the first game in an awfully long time where I lost track of time and just kept playing the game. Probably Soul Blazer was the last one way back at #72, so more than a year ago. The AI is not great (I was able to leave provinces completely undefended and it would take a fair number of turns before the AI would attack in) and I feel like my start in one corner province with a small army was going to end up winning the game.

The music in the game is pretty good. The graphics are not spectacular by any stretch of the imagination but it conveys the information you need to know in a pretty good way.

The game was also introduced at the beginning as being part of their 'imagination series'. I'd heard of the 'historical series' but not the imagination one. I wonder if there are any more games in it? Turns out yes, kinda. There's one other game in it, a PC only game.

I definitely would have loved this game as a kid, especially since I'm sure we would have played it two player to get rid of some of the issues with the AI.

Rating: A+

#58: Romance of the Three Kingdoms II

KOEI!

I have a confession to make. I love the Final Fantasy games, and Square is now probably my favourite game company, but back in the day my favourite was Koei. I loved their historical simulation series. Uncharted Waters, Pacific Theatre of Operations, Aerobiz, Romance of the Three Kingdoms III... All awesome, awesome games. It helped that they were mostly games that could be played multiplayer so it was easier to rent them to play with my brother. RPG games aren't very good for sharing, but these neat simulation games were.

Yes, Nick Page is totally a Chinese name.

I hadn't played this particular game before, as it wasn't available for rent in any of the nearby stores. I played the sequel a lot, though. The game is a pretty interesting civ building game. You have a city and a couple generals. Each month each of your generals can take one action. It can be spending money to improve infrastructure. It can be making your army better. It can be trying to recruit more generals. There's espionage, and plotting, and all sorts of dastardly things you can do. Combat is played out on a tactical hex grid, and there's lots of stuff you can do there too. Personal combat between generals. Armies can attack in a variety of ways. You can try to bribe enemy generals. You can start fires. There's terrain that matters. If the fight doesn't end after a set number of turns the fight gets paused and you take another round of city turns, and then the fight resumes again. You need to eat food to keep this up, so you can try to win a fight by starving the enemy out.

RIP Kong Rong

Like all good simulation civ games you need to know what's going on before you can play it well. This game suffers a little in that I could spend a lot of time learning how to be good at RotTK2, or I could just go play more Civ V, and that's a game I know and enjoy. So I didn't put much time into this one. I threw my second general into a fight that it turns out I couldn't win. Oh well! I remember enough to know that I desperately needed to recruit more generals so that I could attack with more than 100 troops.

That said, while I don't really want to play this game more now, I totally would have wanted to play it as a kid. I would have needed to find it before RotTK3, because that game was better, but if I had I think I would have really liked this one.

Rating: B+