Three Kingdoms

Three Kingdoms: Chinese Classics by Moss Roberts

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Around the time the earth cooled and life spread across the continents, I was a huge fan of the game Destiny of an Emperor for the NES. Chinese generals with names I couldn't pronounce duking it out for the fate of China enthralled me.



Years later, I was thinking fondly of the game and decided to investigate the source, Three Kingdoms. Three Kingdoms is one of the four great classics of Chinese literature.



Imagine my surprise while on my 2300+ page journey that the story of the game wasn't very much like. While the game depicts the rise of Liu Bei, the book depicts his rise and fall, as well as fleshing out the stories of his companions and enemies.



At 2300 pages, you can imagine the amount of characters to absorb. Still, it was very satisfying to read years after playing the game. The writing was a little rough getting used to but to be fair, it was written centuries ago in Chinese! The stories of Liu Bei, Lord Guan, Zhang Fei, Pang Tong, and the rest were very interesting. I was glad LuBu met his fate at the hands of Cao Cao. When he left my party, he had a lot of good equipment the rest of them could have used!







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