Raishi Was Pretty Good

1 9月 2023

yesterday, i finished a nowadays obscure and unknown take on Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Raishi by Klon, Co. is rather unique in all the good and wrong ways and i found it an enjoyable title. i believe people should at least know this series exists.

the game was originally on vita and remade on the 3DS. it was then re-released on Freem as a free game/furige alongside its sequel. the free game version has no voices, but it has everything else in the game.

quick thoughts on the three kingdoms

if people are at all familiar with ancient china, they'll likely know we chinese love our historical dramas. many tv shows then and now are often adapting the same old stuff: Condor Heroes, Journey to the West, and of course Romance of the Three Kingdoms. the latter has received many different adaptations and if you consider the Dynasty Warriors series as a series of multiple adaptations like i do, RoTK is the Skyrim of adaptations.

why do people keep returning to this historical work by luo guanzhong? plenty of reasons: it's got good confucian propaganda, is the perfect setting for drama, and has very recognizable figures who are revered as deities (as an aside, i often pray to guan yu during my trips to chinese temples).

many of these characters are larger than life because they're really walking billboards for ideologies. liu bei is the embodiment of Ren (仁), which can be translated as co-humanity). cao cao is the machiavellian figure who demands peace through all costs possible. sun quan is menhera. everyone east asian loves to take sides and defend the indefensibly stupid actions by each faction.

so one can imagine that RoTK-inspired media is oversaturated, certainly no thanks to koei-tecmo needing to publish Dynasty Warriors every few months or so. but the demand is there and i think the first Raishi game, low-budget it may be, fits right into this strange market of "too many but we still want more" games.

what makes raishi different

let's set the stage: Raishi introduces a character named Kyou (he would be named Jiang in chinese) who has to fish for his mom. a hot woman appears out of nowhere and tells him to "play my game, my lord" -- and he teleports into the Eastern Han period, right on the onset of Three Kingdoms.

he joins shu han, a faction now full of ladies who seem infatuated with kyou/jiang being naive and cute. he becomes a student of zhuge liang (fem) and fights wei, the faction led by cao cao (mostly dudes but there's some hot women). incensed by cao cao's penchant for destruction, he supports shu han joining forces with wu (also lots of women).

at first glance, the game looks like Koihime Musou with the sudden forcefemming of old chinese men. Raishi is scary HRT propaganda. however, it's also worth noting that dudes remain in the game. xiaohou yuan is a dashing otomege guy. the game goes more for a Fire Emblem gender equality thing than a full-on harem for this one guy.

as the game progresses, the game more or less follows the major plot beats of RoTK in order to get what the author thinks is the good stuff. it speedruns what are usually climatic battles (the Battle of Chibi/Red Cliff acts as a tutorial mission), which i find interesting. to use a biblical example, imagine if the christian bible story started right when jesus was going to get crucified and we get everything afterwards.

more importantly, the game revels in the deaths.

i don't mean heroic deaths either, which RoTK and the millions of adaptations have. it has plain gruesome deaths, whether inflicted on men or women in the game. we're talking organs being cut out, decapitations, and limbs being torn off. there's an IGN article with the headline 極上の人死にエンタメ！ (roughly translating to THE GREATEST IN ENTERTAINING HUMAN DEATHS) in order to advertise the game and i think that more or less expresses why i like this game.

it's bloody. it's horrifying. even cute girls get murdered and it's awesome.

how raishi approaches history

why do i think these gory death scenes of cute girls and hot dudes as interesting? a fun reason: all the deaths are already foreshadowed if you know your RoTK. you more or less know when major figures die, but you don't know how. and the how question is the most interesting and shocking part of the whole game.

how will this character i know who's going to pass away around this time will die in this game? what are the new implications of these deaths? where will the game go next?

these are really refreshing, even if horrifying thoughts to ponder about. and what's more: the death cgs don't last very long on the screen. while the game is visually gratuitous, the game is textually not so. to do so would be antithetical to the promise this game is doing something different: it's anti-cathartic, brutish, and upsetting.

and the fact that i know a thing or two about the history makes everything feel grim. for the entire game, i felt like i was fighting the history that's already written before me. i know what's going to happen and unfortunately, i know i can't stop it and my morbid fascination compels me to play more of it. it's a really interesting dynamic forced upon players like me.

ideological twisting

the campaigns of the the other two kingdoms follow this grim retelling of history and i think they're more successful at it. much of the game's excuse for slice-of-life stuff is "hot girl wanting to bang the protag", which is kinda funny once in a while. however, once kyou/jiang is out of the picture, we get a better sense of how the cast should behave.

i'm fond of the wu campaign where you follow a young Lu Xun (pictured in the image of this post) who's very smart and yet dependent on her onee-sama. much like the actual RoTK version, she's a talented strategist who ends up being unable to go against her lord's terrible orders until it's too late. her tragedy among many others stands out because she's conscious about how emotions drive this needless conflict when all three leaders simply want peace in their own ways.

it's just that this compulsion to have it "their own way" leads to this violence. the game is quite critical of people being trapped by ideologies, even if it is sympathetic to these generals and strategists. it's just that these pure hearts don't realize there's opportunistic villains out there who can twist their ideologies into venom.

i really dig the antagonists of this game: they're cold motherfuckers who feel like plausible troublemakers. not only are they historical too but the way they deceive and then betray is oh so delectable.

would i describe this game as centrist? nah, it is simply pragmatic: sticking too hard to ideologies makes it easy for leaders to be vulnerable to monsters out there who don't care about having any kind of beliefs. there are many wolves in sheep's clothing out there and they're the ones that make history tragic.

gameplay

the gameplay is strange.

historical fiction at its finest

i won't spoil too much on what makes Raishi's final chapter interesting, but i'll bring up that the next and only game in this four-part series is set in the rather obscure Spring and Autumn period (right before the Warring States period aka the period that gave the Sengoku Period in japan its name). let's just say the series is about time-traveling chinese strategies and the overall story is kinda awesome.

unfortunately, the writer has gone AWOL since ... 2020. they last tweeted a funny anecdote about how they met someone who's a direct descendant of lu xun and apologized to them; they also brought up that they're working on the scenario of the fourth game, implying that the third game's scenario is done.

and the company closed up shop a few years prior...

i would love to see the rest of the games done somehow, whether published on narou or as jank SRPGs with strange mechanics. the first game is full of charm and a love of history while obviously displaying its inclinations to quick and visceral deaths. there's much to love about this game as historical fiction, even if the SOL parts are too "harem" for my taste. it's really fun and i hope more people know about it, so we can know what happened to the last two games of the series.

anyway, Raishi is pretty cool and gruesome. bye.