For one, I've never liked Sima Yi, and I never will (though he himself is far more interesting and likable than just about all of his descendants, who idiotically allowed a reunified China to fall into centuries of disunity and "barbarian" rule because of their elementary mistakes). The author's choice of core protagonists will always bother me until the end. They really aren't a team you can cheer, with one kickass exception with a fake surname of Zhao.

I can already sort of predict the ending too, combining the hints in the story and what happened in the historical/original sources: Sima Yi will triumph, but not before Zhao Yun turned against him as his innate righteousness and discomfort with Sima Yi's tactics grew with distance and the influences of men like Zhuge Liang (we'll probably have something like the assault on the palace in the dreams). It would be a hollow triumph for the Sima clan, however, as Zhuge Liang would be proved right that the new Jin regime would not last without something truly substantial to uphold it...

The whole idea of the Sima clan -- or any power for that matter -- having a hand in all of the events of the era is also hard to stomach. Things like young Sun Quan working for the merchant families is like, whuh? I for one am glad that the author keeps that aspect of the story to a minimum and focuses on more peripheral yet far more compelling characters like Lu Bu, Cao Cao, Liu Bei, Sun Ce, and Zhuge Liang, whose characters he brilliantly adapts and subverts.

However, the whole Xanatos Roulette is also quite hard to accept at times. It's like every major character (especially Sima Yi and Those Damn Geniuses) seem to have predicted everything years in advance. I seriously have to ask at times like, why didn't Yuan Fang (fictional) just assassinate the rest of his brethren early on and ensure his ultimate triumph? What was he doing all those years in the Frozen North (surely Gongsun Zan, while not a fool, was no match for the heroes running around, especially the likes of the First Genius with the resources of the Yuan clan to back him?) Or why did the Eight Geniuses allow the Sima clan run amok when they could just extinguish the threat. For all that though, I'm glad that the Eight Geniuses finally breaks apart, as we can finally see their conflicting schemes clash and casualties skyrocket (when before I guess they were still each small enough, and China still had enough independent warlords to subsume, that they rarely directly clashed and even then the clashes were rarely fatal).