Others - Completed - Koihime Musou ~A Heart-Throbbing, Maidenly Romance of the Three Kingdoms~ [BaseSon]

The setting to this story crosses three genres. Its a time travel game where you're sent back to ancient China. Its an isekai game where a normal person is transported to a supernatural world. And its an alternate history game, that changes the Romance of the Three Kingdoms to fit a hentai setting.

As a 2007 visual novel, the writing is much more loose than what you'd expect nowadays. The protagonist can fuck every girl in town, but the ending will show him devoted to one. You'll often befriend people who tried to kill you earlier. And, things tend to work out perfectly no matter the odds.

The game features three endings, matched with three main girls. This was a huge disappointment since there are so many others to choose from. I wanted to marry Chouun, but got stuck with Aisha instead. The bonus harem ending was nice, but pretty unrealistic.

The game is a minimum of 20 hours long. Naturally, the MangaGamer translators made some mistakes. Usually its small typos like dialogue saying "renouned" when it should have said "renowned".

Altogether its a very linear experience. There are no branching plotlines or meaningful choices.


You're outnumbered by enemies, but Shokatsuryou the strategist appears to join your team. You're looking for a strong fighter to join, and Chouun appears. You need more troops, so Kousosan is there to help. You can trust that every plot point is going to add more characters, which eventually feels like lazy writing. Speaking of lazy writing, you fight the Yellow Turban bandits like five times. REPETITIVE!!!

Alternatively, sometimes the writing is too complex. Each girl has multiple names. For example, Aisha is also called Kan'U, and also called Unchou. These names are used interchangably, making things very confusing and hard to remember.

IN SUMMARY - This is not a casual game, its got a lot of characters and plot points and is +20 hours long. While I enjoyed it, that's because I was on vacation and played it fluidly without much interruption. If I played this under normal circumstances, I would not have enjoyed it as much.

Good game especially for people that watched the anime and want more explicit content.

The battle mechanics are simple but effective and the ecchi revolves around dates with each character at your leisure after each battle.

There are a few hours of gameplay and since you can't date everyone before your quest ends it offers some replayability, altought I would have preffered if you could unlock everything in a single playthrough.

This game has a bunch of flaws. Inconcistencies, contrivances, underutilised systems and underwhelming designs. The worst of them, the amount of loli-bait in the game may ruin the game completely for some. It came close to for me. But I genuinely believe this game is great as a whole.


The game is a fanfiction of "Romance of the three kingdoms".
My knowledge of that story is limted to having watched oversimplifieds video on the topic, and skimming it when reading chinese history.
i recognized some characters and plot beats, but i wouldn't say I know the story.

The main character has read the story, and imagines himself into it with the power of plot. Of course all major characters of the story are now cute girls, most of which are into him.
The game subverts your expectations in a good way with the opening, setting up the protagonists life in the "real world" with a friend character, a standard highschool setting, and a background in martial arts all of which don't get mentioned ever again. If this is intentional which i believe it is, it's brilliant.

You then follow the original story, establishing yourself as the new overlord of all the girls you beat.

At the end comes the big reveal.
Now for the gameplay. It's okay. You get to choose your army composition, your general, who has a special ability to use, your strategist, who determines which tactics get a boost, and then you get to play a rock-paper scissors game with ten option, whose strength depend on the composition and strategist you chose.
This system is great. There is real strategic and tactical depth to it. Except that the enemy, with one exception, never chooses more than 2 of the same tactics in one battle. So every battle consists of playing defensive for two turns, then countering the enemies whole army because they repeat those same two actions for the entire battle.
Only one battle is more chalenging. The one where the enemey just straight up cheats and gets infite reinforcements. It'll take a try or two, but the answer is just as boring. Pick the most offensive compostion you can, and rush them down.
I still appreciate that the game has this system, it definitley breaks up the monotony of a rather long visual novel, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed by the huge waste of potential.

What is really excellent about the game are the characters. While few of them have real depth, and almost all of them are walking tropes, the game excells in fleshing them out with a wide variety of scenes, both h and non-h.
The game follows the standard VN formula of you picking who you want to hang out with, 3 girls being main options with endings, and 12 more with side stories, but breaks this formula by regularly including other characters in these scenes.
This was my favorite part of the game by a mile. The charcters playing off each other works really well, and made up for the blandness of the protagonist. He is a self-insert if I ever saw one, but because the other characters play off of each other as well as off him, it works.
The best scenes are the ones where the MC is barely involved, and the other characters get to interact with each other. This goes for both h- and non-scenes. The best side character is enshou, who doesn't interact with the MC at all after leaving the main story, and gets to live out her own genuinely charming and sey adventure with her retainers.
It was a real shame that the other beaten rulers' side stories focus very little on their relationship witht their retainers, instead turning into more harem fodder for the MC. Very little of it is bad, just some wasted potential.

When it comes to h-scenes I'm a little conflicted. There is very little outstanding content. The scenes involving the MC all blend together. With the excpetion of the horny Milf, the MC takes every single virginity in his harem, and I would lie if I said that doesn't get old. As I said before, the scenes not involving the MC are the best.
I also have to mention the loli-bait.
I don't think any of the characters are actual children, but multiple ones look like it, and that made me very uncomfortable at times. I was able to tolerate it for the most part, but on one occasion, when one of the main 3 girls had just gone through a genuinely emotional scene about losing her parents and the MC filling that parental role, i was holding my breath that there wouldn't be a h-scene after that, but sadly, there was. If that had been the first route I did I would have quit right there. At that point, I was invested into the side characters, and wanted to see the true ending, and had also not seen a single scene of the third main girl, but that scene, and honestly her whole character have left a really bad taste.

But all of this pales in comparison to the many, many great moments in the stories. From a random-ass clark kent-super man situation, to the multiple heartfelt moments between the characters, to the fact that the god damn anime-stereotype gender confused gay man actually had well set-up plot relevance, and the tropey, but endearing characters.
The game has many, many flaws, but I had a blast playing it and fully recommend it.

Who is this game for:
Someone who wants to invest into a game, You will find it hard to get a quick fap because you have to understand the war game.
Someone who enjoys heroine selection without the guilt, Character don't often interact with each other in the character progression stage.
Someone who can tolerate cliche writing, because there's a lot of it.
Someone who doesn't know about the 3 kingdoms fairly well.


Graphics: (4/5)
- Aspect ratio is 4:3 ish
- entire thing zoomed by 2-3 on a 1920x1080 so it's closer to 600x400
- "animations" are CG
- Art style is closer to new anime then old anime.
- uncensored
-Proportions and form don't distract from the H scene

Story: (5/5)
-Many many many story lines
- In my personal opinion the writing is highly convoluted at parts and at other parts it's normal
-personal deference to initial character setup

Overall UI: (4/5)
-No autosave
-No gallery
-No back button
-Not unpleasant to look at
-fairly intuitive (atleast for a person who's played older eroge before)

Final Notes:
I enjoyed this game, I would recommend it. I played for 2 hours before I finally started getting a net increase in happiness. I don't enjoy reading plot irrelevant text so I skipped a lot and still managed a total playtime of about 5 hours.

Played the game all the way loved the game system and the artwork was worth the time. Lovely ladies and country conquest. Will play again. If you romance of the three kingdoms you may like this. Some hidden characters that are not hard to find and decent length to play (as long as you are not trying to skip dialog)

This suffers the same problem a lot of games do coming from Japan .... awful writing for lead characters.

From falling to bits upon seeing a bit of flesh to making some of the most idiotic decisions we're close to one of them taking a TV into the bath with them so they don't miss the football.

No matter how old the male leads are or how many women they have spoken to in their lives, the second one of them flashes a bit of flesh they turn into moronic numpty's that can't string words together while gushing blood from their noses.

So many erotic scenes ruined by writing so bizarre it was rejected by the Twilight Zones porn department for being to strange for the general public.

Joking aside it pisses me off. It shouldn't, but it does.

I've played some really well made games that have hours of fantastic gameplay and some interested and well fleshed out characters that all get ruined by weak male leads plagued with shit writing.

It pisses me off because it ruins the flow of the game. So much time and effort crafting a world and the story that fills it along with gameplay engaging enough to keep me playing all brought to a screeching halt because these writers can't seem to build a decent male lead that isn't an annoying clitoris.