I've been playing Koei's Dynasty Warriors franchise ever since Dynasty Warriors 4. The games are a very loose adaptation on the great Chinese classic novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The novel was written almost 700 years ago about events that occurred 1800 years ago, and the story has been retold many, many times since. Anyway, the games piqued my curiosity; after all, are not adaptations almost always inferior to the original work? And if I loved the adaptations (i.e. the games) so much it only stands to reason that I would love the novel.
And I do.
I managed to find a copy of RotTK in Powell's not too long ago. It's a behemoth of a book: two volumes of about 700 pages each. The translation I have is by C.H. Brewitt-Taylor, which is a little disappointing because I really wanted the one by Moss Roberts. The drawback of Brewitt-Taylor is that he uses the Wade-Giles system of romanizing Chinese names, whereas the DW franchise uses Pinyin. There is a bit of a learning curve as far as figuring out who everyone is. Cao Ren is Ts'ao Jen in Wade-Giles, Taishi Ci is T'aishih Tzu, Jia Xu is Chia Hsu, and Diao Chan is Sable Cicada. Oddly enough, Yuan Shao remains Yuan Shao.
Another surprise was the death of Sun Jian. He dies in the first few chapters, even before Dong Zuo is deposed. Contrast this to many of the games in which he is the leader of the Shu forces for a significant portion of the story-line (I feel that after nearly 2 millennia a spoiler warning is unnecessary).
While RotTK is one of the four great classical Chinese novels, that hasn't stopped folks in Japan from using it as the backdrop for many anime and manga series. Tenjo Tenge features the famous heroes reincarnated as high school students, many of whom are female, and Koihime Musou turns every warrior into a moe girl.
Reading RotTK adds context to many works of Asian origin. The heroes and heroines of the tale have been immortalized in manga, video games, and anime series. It's a darn good story, and it would have to be in order for it to be adapted as many times as it has.
