Koei's 三國志 (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) series is a very popular rpg set in medieval China.

The most recent game, 三國志 Online, is an mmo (massively multiplayer online game), and the second beta was just released (as of February 2008).

I thought I'd put together a guide for how to register for the game. Of course, you will need to understand some Japanese (and read some kanji) to be able to play the game, but registering for the service and installing it can be much harder than understanding the game, so I thought I'd put together a guide in English to help people out.

Registering

First, all of the instructions for registering for the game in Japanese can be found on the game's website.

Here are the steps to follow, in order:

1. Register for a GameCity ID (free). You can do that at GameCity. To register, click the bright red button that reads 市民登録をする right below "Step 4."
2. You will need to enter a valid e-mail address and confirm your e-mail with the service. Click the link in your e-mail to finish the registration. If you need help filling out the form, use Firefox and Rikaichan (also free).
3. Now that you've finished registering for GameCity, you have to use your GameCity account to register for the beta.
4. Next, download the game. This will put a program called RTKOStarter.exe wherever your downloads go. Double-click the file to start the downloader. This program will download the rest of the game to a folder (RTKOInstaller) in the same directory.
5. Once the download is finished, open the RTKOInstaller folder and double click Setup.exe. Don't worry if you get a bunch of punctuation instead of Japanese; just keep pressing enter and the game will install (this will happen if you aren't using a Japanese version of Windows and you haven't set Japanese as the non-unicode setting). Once the game is installed, you will be able to read Japanese within the game fine, so it's not a big concern.
6. Once the installer is finished, start the game with your user name and password from GameCity. Enjoy the beta!