天下制覇

I’m also curious as to what happened to Liu Bei.

Impressions:

I’ve long held that one of the best ways to adapt a hentai game is to minimize the role of the male lead since they’re pretty much always the weakest written and the lamest character all around. It’s interesting to see a show that completely eliminates the male lead entirely, but I suppose if there’s any that could do it, something based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is probably strong enough on its own to manage. Then again, I haven’t played more than maybe 15 minutes of the game, but I get the strong feeling that this really isn’t a particularly close adaptation adaptation of it even without the lead. I’m not even certain how the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is supposed to survive without a Liu Bei anyway.

Instead, this seems more like the wacky adventures of Guan Yu (Kann-u, whatever). The production values are decent enough and the fight was alright, but after watching electric girls with tonfas, it lacked a certain je ne sais quais. Well, the repeated cuts to sky in the middle of the fight to show the passage of time didn’t help either. There are other complaints I could make too. The anachronistic speech patterns and cutesy Chouhi na no da got on my nerves almost immediately na no da. Chouhi as a bawling loli who then pouts is also a completely foreign concept to me na no da. The proliferation of chibis and bright/happy shouting (I can’t call that singing) in the OP and ED also doesn’t bode well for this actually having anything to do with stories I know and love instead of just being about Kann-u and Chouhi wandering around and making friends with other ‘great’ warriors.

So basically, I didn’t like this at all and I’m a whore for the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. If you’re worried about this being a hentai game adaptation, I wouldn’t sweat it in the slightest, the guy’s not even around anywhere. It really only even has a hint of the origins in the character designs themselves. Instead, it’s just low calibur wackiness with a very very very very thin and shoddy veneer of the Three Kingdoms dropped on top of it for probably a few extra sales. It’s closer to Pokemon than it is to Ikkitousen. Sure, Pokemon with a few more cleavage shots, but at least here, you’ll never see James in a bikini. There are a few hints that it’ll get a little more serious and less stupid later, but I don’t know that I’ll even last through next week, let alone however far I’d need to get for the one episode drama plot at the very end.

Koihime Musou OP