Sangokushi Eiketsuden (PC): Most Challenging Strategy War Game I Ever Played

Let's take a break from Fire Emblem for a short while, and take a look at this game.

Despite how much I complain about the sheer difficulty, it is still my favourite game of all time.

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More info (Jap ver.): https://store.steampowered.com/app/628150/Sangokushi_Eiketsuden/

It is not widely known outside specific parts of Asia as it is only released in 3 languages, namely Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Other titles related to this game can be found with the link below:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms_(video_game_series)

This game is so difficult to find that it is the only game that has a red link in the wikipedia page. Not only that, even that red link in the webpage is the SNES version, which is different from this PC version.

I had so much content for this game that I had to compress a 2-hour footage of gameplay into a 15-minute video. There are lots of stuff omitted, but they are just minor stuff like units can use items (e.g. beans, aka FE's vulnerary) for other units, shown in the video. There are also skills learnt upon leveling up for specific classes, like "taunt" (reduce enemy morale) or "confuse" (inflicts "confused" state to enemy at a certain chance) not mentioned in the video.

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Battle of Guan Yu VS Hua Xiong (with Eng Subs)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om0HutFVSOc

I don't know why the link isn't working for the timer, just skip to 8:47. Anyway, this is just part of an episode 4 that consists of the battle, I suggest watching from 2:30, for the buildup of Hua Xiong defeating the alliance generals with ease before fighting Guan Yu.

For those who wanted to know more about the 3 main characters (Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei), here's a link on how they met and became sworn brothers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_the_Peach_Garden

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About my childhood with this game:

As a kid, the only thing that interests me was the computer (Windows 3.1) that my cousin owned when he was living with us back then. Seeing how interested I was, my cousin decided to leave the computer behind when he moved away.

There are only 2 games inside, this and super street fighter 2, where the latter kinda influenced my interests in the King of Fighters series later on.. anyway, let's get back to the topic.

I started playing this game when I was 5. As the education system in my country only teach Simplified Chinese, I don't know more than 50% of the characters (words) in the game as it is in Traditional Chinese. I had to literally bug my mother every 5 minutes on how to pronounce a certain word so I know what's going on in the story. Trust me, you wouldn't want to see the look on her face when I asked her for the 3rd time onwards.

When kids around my neighbourhood are running around in the nearby playgrounds, I would always rush home right after school so that I could complete a battle (chapter). To avoid straining my eyes, my mother set a 1-hour limit on my daily computer usage, which includes the insanely long booting up/shutting down time (5~10mins!). Still, I enjoyed playing every bit of the game, even though I sometimes couldn't finish a battle on time and had to restart the very next day.

After 1 year, I finally managed to reach "the battle of Mai Castle", which is shown in the video. Due to the time limit I had to keep while playing, I couldn't do preparations, which led to the loss of Guan Yu, who is a Seth equivalent in this game. Refusing to budge, I tried replaying the map for another week, but decided that I had no choice but to restart because Guan Yu was severely under-leveled back then, unlike in this video. Loading the previous save file is pointless because my last interaction with him was roughly 7 battles prior, not just before.

Took me months to reach this dreaded chapter again. Even with some preparations, it still took me another few weeks to find the right path for Guan Yu to escape safely. The total amount of time I took to complete the game the first time is roughly 2 years.

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Fun fact: I learnt about the story from this game even before reading the novel or even watching the drama series.

If I were to rate on the difficulty of this game with reference to Fire Emblem (GBA series), I would say it is like playing hard mode of FE6, while all enemies have 100% growth rates, but with turn limits, without arenas or statboosters..

Took me roughly 2 weeks replaying it after uploading this video (while aiming for the longest route). I might have improved over the years playing FE.