I’ll post them here and on Twitter every Tuesday and Thursday using the hashtag #KongsTdayTunes.

#9

Long before Dynasty Warriors cracked into the gaming mainstream, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (and, later, Destiny of an Emperor) sparked my fascination with the Three Kingdoms characters and history. I was just a kid and the Internet as we know it didn’t exist, so I didn’t know how to go about learning more. I remember asking my educated uncle if he knew anything about these Chinese generals like Liu Bei and Zhang Fei. (“I’ve heard of Zamfir,” he replied.)

This tune is the de facto main theme of the entire series. It started out as looping title & map music, and later entries revisit a snippet of the melody for their splash screens. I love every note.

Track: “Map Theme 2” (YouTube Link)
Game: Romance of the Three Kingdoms (NES, 1988)
Composer: Yoko Kanno

I’ll post them here and on Twitter every Tuesday and Thursday using the hashtag #KongsTdayTunes.

#12

Third game in a row from 1991. Peak nostalgia, I guess. I really liked this tune because of the odd tone/sound/instrumentation. This carries through the whole game, but I picked this song as an example because of the chill melody. It’s great to hear this semi-drone synth in up-tempo battle scenes.

Track: “Theme of Wei and Wu” (YouTube Link)
Game: Romance of the Three Kingdoms III: Dragon of Destiny (SNES, 1991)
Composer: Minoru Mukaiya

I’ll post them here and on Twitter every Tuesday and Thursday using the hashtag #KongsTdayTunes.

#38

The NES version of the first Romance of the Three Kingdoms game was my first exposure to China’s great epic novel and the historical period on which it’s based, but the SNES sequel absorbed far more of my time and entrenched itself as the standard to which I hold all strategy games.

Once you spend enough time on a strategy game that’s delimited in a way that many other “grand scale” staples of the genre aren’t (there are only so many specific generals, and the map is always the same shape and size), you begin to follow patterns. Each area has its own map and battle themes, and I made my home in one particular corner enough times to make this song feel like my own “toil and struggle” theme.

I like how the map themes are more ambient while the wartime themes pick up their melodies in faster, more desperate tempos. The battle version here is a short loop, so I’ve included it as a bonus.

Track: “Theme of the Frontiers” (YouTube Link)
Bonus: “War in the Frontiers” (YouTube Link)
Game: Romance of the Three Kingdoms II (SNES, 1991)
Composer: Minoru Mukaiya

I’ll post them here and on Twitter every Tuesday and Thursday using the hashtag #KongsTdayTunes.

#48

I got into the Dynasty Warriors games via Koei’s somewhat heavier Romance of the Three Kingdoms strategy series, and this track contains a nice thematic throwback to Yoko Kanno’s original main theme for those games, making the title particularly apt for me. It successfully invoked nostalgia then, and it continues to do so today.

I sing this song to my dog.

Track: “Memories” (YouTube Link)
Game: Dynasty Warriors 5 (PS2, 2005)
Composer: Masato Koike

I’ll post them here and on Twitter every Tuesday and Thursday using the hashtag #KongsTdayTunes.

#53

You know, this game isn’t even particularly special to me. I’ve been a fan of Koei games since playing the original Romance of the Three Kingdoms on NES. It prompted me to read the book in junior high, and my voracious consumption of all things Three Kingdoms eventually made me branch out into Koei’s peripheral properties.

Samurai Warriors 2 has a kind of endless castle mode where you hack & slash through floor after floor of mindless peons until your skills (or patience) fail you. Every once in a while, this peppy tune kicked in, and it was somehow the perfect match for my murderous endeavours.

Track: “City of Flowers (Sengoku 2 Mix)” (YouTube Link)
Game: Samurai Warriors 2 (PS2, 2006)
Composer: Masato Koike