Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire
Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire is the fourth main title in Koei's Romance of the Three Kingdoms grand strategy series, first released for PC-9801 in February 1994 with a SNES release following in 1994–1995, and later ports to 3DO, Saturn, 32X, PlayStation, and Windows. It was the last Romance of the Three Kingdoms entry to appear on SNES. The game is set during the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history, with the player taking the role of a warlord/ruler managing territory, officers, and armies.
Availability: Nintendo Switch Online — Super Nintendo Entertainment System app (Nintendo Classics)
This is a systems/mechanics guide rather than a linear walkthrough — a fixed step-by-step route isn't the useful format for a tactics title.
Controls / Starting Systems
Gameplay is turn-based: the player manages territories, recruits and can dismiss ("sack") officers, trains troops, and chooses between peaceful diplomacy and open warfare with rival factions. The interface and design emphasize political intrigue and battlefield strategy rather than pure spreadsheet-style number management, per contemporary description.
Progression Architecture (Scenarios)
The game includes six historical scenarios spanning AD 189 to 235, including Dong Zhuo's seizure of Luoyang, Liu Bei's refuge at Xinye, and the Battle of Red Cliffs ("Wall of Fire," the game's subtitle, referencing this battle). A separate power-up kit added three supplementary scenarios, but this was specific to the PlayStation and Saturn versions, not the SNES release.
Required Objectives / Battle Systems
Special battle features include warships that can set other warships on fire, archers who can fire flaming arrows at soldiers and catapults, the ability to summon barbarians to raid enemy territory, and alliances with other warlords — alliances are explicitly temporary/non-permanent rather than fixed. Because the subtitle "Wall of Fire" directly references the historical Battle of Red Cliffs and that battle is one of the six included scenarios, the Red Cliffs scenario is likely the title's signature/flagship scenario for Phase 1 coverage purposes, though this framing is an inference rather than a directly sourced claim.
Major Bosses
Not applicable in the scripted-boss sense; the game's opposition is composed of rival historical warlords and their forces within each scenario, consistent with the Nobunaga's Ambition-style Koei strategy format.
Completion Path
Completion structure is scenario-based: the player selects one of the six historical scenarios, then manages territory/officers/troops and engages in diplomacy or war against rival warlords until that scenario's historical conquest/unification goal is achieved. The specific per-scenario victory conditions (e.g., number of territories or specific rival defeats required to "win" a given scenario) were not detailed in the sources accessed and were not confirmed.
Still confirming
- Exact per-scenario win conditions and starting positions/rulers available in each of the six scenarios were not itemized from the sources accessed this pass.
- Specific mechanical differences between the SNES version and other platform ports (aside from the confirmed absence of the PlayStation/Saturn power-up kit's three bonus scenarios) were not verified in detail.
- As a niche, history/strategy-focused Koei title, deeper mechanical detail (diplomacy formulas, officer stat systems, specific unit types beyond warships/archers/barbarians) could not be fully verified in English-language sources during this pass.