Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a 1971 manga series by Mitsuteru Yokoyama based on Eiji Yoshikawa's retelling of the medieval Chinese novel of the same title. It was adapted into an anime series titled Yokoyama Mitsuteru Sangokushi in 1991.
The plot runs thus: The Han Dynasty is corrupt and crumbling into chaos. Evil cultist Zhang Jiao and his Yellow Turban armies are sweeping across the countryside burning, pillaging, and generally doing whatever it is that evil cultists do. Stepping up to the plate on the side of good are Liu Bei Xuande (the virtuous fresh-faced Kid Hero) and his sworn brothers, Guan Yu Yunchang (The Stoic Big Guy), and Zhang Fei Yide (the Boisterous Bruiser). Liu Bei tries to put together a volunteer army to bring peace to all of China, but unfortunately for him, there are are other factions in the neighborhood vying for power. These include the ambitious Sun family, and the sinister "survival by any means necessary" Warlord Cao Cao. Now if all this kind of sounds familiar to you, then you've probably played one of the many video games inspired by this story, namely the Romance of the Three Kingdoms strategy games or the Dynasty Warriors Hack and Slash battle games. (Notably, although the anime ends far earlier than both the novel and what the games cover, within that timeframe it actually hews to the novel itself a lot more than Dynasty Warriors does.) Or perhaps you've even read the original source novels this anime was based on
or a shorter summary of the story.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms provides examples of:
- Adaptational Attractiveness: Dong Zhuo is quite the opposite of the Fat Bastard he was in the book.
- Doing In the Wizard: Some of Zhuge Liang's moments of "omniscience," plus the "summoning" of the southeastern wind, from the novel are shown to instead be due to him and his sister secretly observing affairs.
