I was just thinking about how there was a whole thing where people kept making platformers where you pick up boxes, but it never really coalesced into its own genre.
who is this kid again? i recently remember learning that now he's some insanely famous actor or musician or some shit that you would never guess, but i can't remember who tf he turned out to be. it was crazy, like 'the rock' level of famous. (obviously not the rock)
It's so cheese-tastic, but if you're a fan of the Dynasty Warriors games (or ROTK in general), it's the OG Pokémon game. There are a couple of fan translation patches out there that fix some of the more inscrutably shitty dialogue (like your second run-in with Lu Bu), so those might be worth looking into. Also find a translation for the different tactics' (read: spells) names, since they're in Pinyin.
And learn from my trial and error from my teen years: no, you can't recruit Jia Xu no matter how hard you try. They kept him somewhat canonical in that regard, since IIRC he wound up being a minor official in the early days of the Jin Dynasty, so he wouldn't have been shacking up with the Shu Han boys, whether at crossbow-point, for a bribe, or for a pony.