Quote Originally Posted by Anapoda View Post
I have no problem with the game having many fantasy elements personally. The main interest i have in that story are of course the characters and those are written bigger than life.

The book is a romanticized version of a historical political crisis and honestly i'm cool with that.

Heroes and villains should totally be a capital element of the game.
The "Fantasy" elements like the magic should probably be left to the wayside. The more mundane substitutions offer so much more in terms of gameplay and aesthetic. You don't need magic to cause rockslides or wildfires. Soldiers can do that just fine with some encouragement.

The "Romantic" elements I'd say I'm mostly willing to let slide as long as they don't majorly impact gameplay. Armies shouldn't wait around for their generals to finish dueling, and while warrior generals can be top tier fighters, they're not Warhammer one man armies. We had a pretty good system for hero units in Shogun 2. I don't see why it can't work here. Some anachronisms for the sake of aesthetic and tradition are alright so long as they aren't everywhere. Guan Yu can have a guandao so long as I'm not not seeing anyone else with it. Same with Lu Bu and his ridiculous looking double sided ji and Zhang Fei's snake spear. It's not something worth getting an aneurysm over.

While I like the larger than life characters of the book, the blatantly biased morality and character assassination that it engages is really grating. Most of the book's characters had real life equivalents that were just as forceful of personalities, just not as cut and dry in terms of "good guy/bad guy." I'd say adapting the book's stylistic flair and dramatizations could work pretty well if paired with a more nuanced and true to history portrayal. It doesn't even have to go all the way. Liu Bei can still be a populist hero, just don't make him Gandhi. Cao Cao can still be a ruthlessly ambitious warlord, just don't make him Hitler.