As a simulation of the struggle for power that gripped China around 200-300 AD, Romance of the Three Kingdoms IX has the distinct disadvantage of having a subject very few Westerners have any interest in. Still, gameplay is king, and RotTK's stands up to the best of them, but the cultural issues should be addressed first.

The back of a box has an image with the caption "Wang Yu introduces Diao Chan to Lu Bu, who instantly falls in love with her." I'd also spend a lot of time checking and rechecking my plans because I wasn't sure if I was attacking the city of Xincheng, Xiang, or Maicheng. I'm sure that to the proper audience those names would seem as plain as Detroit, Chicago, or Minneapolis, so it's not something I can hold against the title. It's just something that sim/strategy fans should be aware of before picking the title up.

The heart of your success in RotTK IX lies with the officers under your control. Each one can be given a separate order each turn, and sometimes you'll have many stationed in each city. Officers are used to raise a city's trade and farm statistics (which raise gold and food output, respectively), raise a structure's defense, draft troops for war, try to improve relations with neighbors, search out or employ other officers, along with a variety of other tasks. Every officer has several stats that will make them well-suited (or not so much) for any particular task. As you put your officers to good use they will gain experience which will then allow you to promote them to higher posts within your own empire, or increase their statistics.

The other major role of your officers is leading troops in battle. Before departing on a march, a formation must be chosen... as well as how many officers will travel with that unit, how many troops the unit will be comprised of, and more. Troop formation is all-important; it dictates the speed the unit travels, how well it will perform against structures as opposed to other units in the field, what special tactics will be triggered, etc. These special tactics can be set by the player, and advanced players may even attempt to set up chains to inflict massive damage on the enemy. There's more than enough "standard" options to keep even strategy heads happy without even delving into the finer details of combat preparation, however.

Although that's a basic summary of the flow of the game, keep in mind that things run much deeper than that. There are plots to put in motion, trust of your people to win over, troop morale to sustain, just to name a few things. To call the game mechanics complex would be a very large understatement. Unfortunately, while Romance of the Three Kingdoms IX is a good title, it's also flawed in some very basic ways.

When initially running through the tutorial I spent a lot of time wrestling with the controller, wishing that I had a mouse or that some of the menus were streamlined. Although some of those concerns were alleviated by simply spending more time with the game, some of them stuck with me through the entire experience. Anyone who's ever tried to play an RTS game on a home console knows that moving a curser across with a controller is not desirable.

Romance does the best it can to make the process smooth by employing the shoulder buttons to cycle through your cities and units, but no matter how many shortcuts you use the process always feels a bit unwieldy. Add some occasionally weird and seemingly random menu placements for tasks that you'll be repeating over and over again, and you'll find turns taking longer than they need to.

My other major concern with the game is the graphics. I always stress gameplay over graphics, but Romance's visuals are so nondescript they genuinely detract from the experience. I ran into trouble in some early campaigns because I didn't realize that one particular gray mass on the map was a mountain range and that my troops would have to go around. It can also sometimes be difficult to tell what units belong to what army, without selecting them.

In the end, Romance of the Three Kingdoms an enjoyable, if slightly flawed, strategy title. I have never experienced this level of depth in a videogame before, and if you're willing to put the time into the game, you'll learn that every single nugget has a purpose and can be used to your advantage. Picking just the right officer to lead your primary invasion squad, prefacing your attacking with some scheming, and timing your request for aid just right, all in order to take down one strategic city -- that's why I love this genre. It's clearly not for everyone, but if you have the right mentality, this game might not leave your PS2 for quite a while.