The Ravages of Time

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I'm a fan of Kingdom (manga) and one day I saw many people on Facebook community recommended The Ravages of Time for those who love history and war, so then I checked it on google and you know what?.... Im just speechless, cuz this series, really goes beyond the word " to criticize".
It's the absolute masterpiece. The series is not simply about heroes fighting, about tactics or plans, but also goes much deeper and more complicated. The horror of intrigue, the dark and bright sides of war, the philosophical Confucian thoughts, human nature, and notions that are contrary to what we see in peacetime ... but have profound meanings towards a human life in turbulent times.
So many characters, so many betrayals, so many plot twists that make my mouth opened, so many different conceptions of loyalty and humanity in each character, in order to remember all the events that happened, I It also takes some time to think about them seriously, so it can be said that this is a very complex and deep series.
Because it is written in Chinese, each sentence, each narration is very good and poetic, leaving an indelible impression to me. As for the drawing, it is as beautiful and wonderful as the famous Seinen series such as Vagabond and Vinland Saga.
If in Vagabond, we can follow the gradual change in Musashi's nature and thoughts, in ROT, we can understand the profound sacrifice of Guo Jia when accepting the evil fame, accepting the cruelty in his haphazard tactics to sacrifice for Xun Yu's ideology.
If in Kingdom, we see Ri Boku informing his plan to calculate every step of his strategy to attack Qin in an alliance, then in ROT, we can learn practical knowledge from the use of troops and weapons, decision making for the entire match, taking advantage of the weather, sky, and people to save the most effort, which is very very realistic

Now I just want to clear my memory to start reading that series again, because it's too good, too impressive compared to the previous manga I've read.

As a story, The Ravages of Time has greatly succeeded at three things:

1. Make a strategist-type character without making the rest of the casts seem like a complete buffoon.
2. Create a world where characters are allowed to lie and deceit each other, naturally causing a complex world
3. Keeping the moment-to-moment story stay interesting without a drastic downtime between every climaxes.

To explain:

1. Make a strategist-type character without making the rest of the casts seem like a complete buffoon.
This is something that plenty of war stories, even a widely beloved classic like Legend ... of the Galactic Heroes, seem like they can't help but fall into, where the story has a clear-cut line separating the casts between competent people that actually know what they're doing, therefore labelled as strategist vs the other commanders, whose only tactic is to charge over and over again and fall for what's clearly a trap. I get that someone needs to lose so that the strategist can show off their brilliance, but if you're hoping this other commander to actually become an intimidating presence your protagonist needs to watch out for, then you have a big problem, because at some point you need to sit down and think about how many men did he lost for nothing and why he's still given a command of an entire army despite of that.

2. Create a world where characters are allowed to lie and deceit each other, naturally causing a complex world
Now, why is it so great that characters can lie at one another? Well, lies don't come from nothing. There is an intention behind it, a motivation to do or get something, and no matter what that thing is it can cause a conflict, and conflict by nature can create an interesting story. As an adaptation of the Three Kingdoms, TRoT is a political story where every major casts are trying to not just survive but thrive on the chaos that ravage the land, each with their own goals and ambition, including but not limited to: killing all your brothers to become the sole inheritor of your father's land; saving the child emperor and rescue the crumbling Han dynasty from its seemingly inevitable collapse; and massacring villages and cities and end the ongoing chaos with a swift and brutal conquest.

3. Keeping the moment-to-moment story stay interesting without a drastic downtime between every climaxes.
Something that many stories almost can't help but fail at at least once or twice is keeping the moment-to-moment events to stay engaging without a huge down time between each climax, which I often feel keep happening in war stories because there's a need to build up too much exposition so that the next battles are set up properly, especially when the enemy is a completely new cast of characters. The Ravages of Time solve this by relying on two things behind-the-scenes politic and multiple main casts. By using behind-the-scenes politic, TRoT has basically created a 24/7 conflict that allow players from all levels of status and profession to fight one another through words, coercion, and small-scale violence, resulting an endless conflict that progress naturally to the decisive battle that serve as one of the climaxes amongst many others we'll see until the story ends. Meanwhile, multiple main casts allow the story to flow naturally between each event, very beneficial especially around after chapter 30 where the line between friends and starts to blur.


Overall, easy 9/10 at least. I believe that this series will be one of the big classic people will remember in the future, an excellent example of a huge and complex story.

Okay I will readily admit that this story has it's flaws, but its peak it is the best manga I have ever read. Chen Mou has to find his story, the beginning is god awful I won't lie to you, but that changes, there is a whole damn genre change. I was suggested this 2 years ago, i didn't get past the 5th chapter, i was suggested it again and i dropped around the same place, but the third time I got to the razing of Loyang and holy shit it's incredible.

It's a hard read, you have to remember so many characters and there relations. ... It's worth it though, there is so much philosophy and differing moralities both subtle and obvious incorporated within. Plus he builds hype so well, Lu Bu burning Yuan Tai alive, Zhou Yu's spirit taunting Jia Xu, Ma Chao watching his family kill himself, based purely on their faith in him, even Chen Mou calling Sima Yi and Shan Wuling a dog and his bitch(probably my favourite page just because of how unexpected it was) is freaking poetic. Oh the art is really good and only gets better as time goes on

If you can stick with the story you will discover a masterpiece, I promise you.

^^^ the beginning is painful and its honestly shocking my favourite manga evolved from it XD