Romance of the Three Kingdoms NES

Romance of the Three Kingdoms is Koei’s NES adaptation of its own 1985 PC strategy original, based on the classical Chinese historical novel of the same name. You take command of a warlord during China’s Three Kingdoms period, managing cities, recruiting officers, and directing armies across a turn-based map in pursuit of unifying the fractured empire.

Its systems — city development, diplomacy, officer loyalty, and large-scale battles resolved through troop and terrain calculations — were unusually deep for a console strategy release at the time, closer to the PC strategy genre than the arcade-derived action games that dominated the NES library. It became the first entry in a long-running Koei strategy series that continued releasing new numbered installments for decades afterward.