Romance of the Three Kingdoms

The anime is based on Mitsuteru Yokoyama's manga adaptation of Sangokushi, which itself was based on Eiji Yoshikawa's retelling of the classic Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

While the manga continues all the way to the fall of Shu Han, the anime stops after the Battle of Red Cliffs, which is only about the midway point of the manga's story.

The original novel's ghostwriter Eiji Yoshikawa only wrote up to Zhuge Liang's death at the Battle of Wuzhang Plains, yet Yokoyama's manga continued beyond that point to depict the fall of Shu Han.

The manga was serialized in a magazine that changed its name twice, from Kibō no Tomo to Comic World in 1978 and then to Comic Tom in 1980.

As of May 2020, the Sangokushi manga had sold over 80 million copies, making it one of the best-selling manga series of all time.

Mitsuteru Yokoyama won the 1991 Japanese Cartoonist Association Award for Excellence for this manga.

The character Xiahou Dun is consistently misnamed Xiahou Chun (夏侯淳/夏侯純) in both the manga and the anime instead of his correct name Xiahou Dun (夏侯惇).

Several characters were changed from the source material: Lady Cai was altered from being Cai Mao's younger sister in the manga to his older sister in the anime, matching the original Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel more closely.

The anime introduced original characters not found in the manga, including Xianglan, a childhood student of Liu Bei who later becomes his wife and dies at the Battle of Changban, effectively taking on the narrative role of Lady Mi.

Series creator Yokoyama once remarked that he thought voice actor Kanao Otsuka (who voiced the villain King Yomi in Babil Jr.) would have been well suited to voice the character Dong Zhuo.

Unlike other adaptations that often depict Dong Zhuo as obese, this anime portrays him as thin.

The opening theme changed partway through the series: 'Toki no Kawa' (River of Time) played for episodes 1-32, followed by 'Don't Look Back' for episodes 33-47, both performed by the band Fence of Defense.

The soundtrack featured guest musicians beyond the main band Fence of Defense, including harpist Keiko Yamakawa and saxophonists Eiji Toki and Masato Honda (then of T-Square), with Honda notably performing the important theme music for Zhuge Liang.

After this anime's run ended, no other anime series held a regular weekly broadcast slot in TV Tokyo's Friday 19:30 timeslot for 28 and a half years, until Shinkansen Henkei Robo Shinkalion Z began airing there in April 2021.