Retro Roulette #97: Destiny of an Emperor (NES, 1990)
I feel like an emperor’s destiny is to be, like, an emperor. Right? I feel like it’s fairly straight forward.
1990′s Destiny of an Emperor is a strategy RPG by Capcom based on the historical manga Tenchi wo Kurau (which has the much cooler meaning “The Devouring of Heaven and Earth”). Capcom managed to make four entirely different games based on it, including the arcade beat-em-ups Warriors of Fate and Dynasty Wars. The story is based on the classical Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is itself the subject of a super popular Koei series that now has...let’s see...*checks* 13 entries now?! That’s almost 40 kingdoms! Such history.
Unlike some of its brethren, this is not a beat-em-up game. Not by a long shot. Destiny of an Emperor is an RPG, along the lines of the early Dragon Warrior games. It looks something like this:
Hang on, that’s the wrong Destiny.
No, that’s...somehow even more wrong.
No!
Okay, there we go. That looks like Dragon Warrior alright. At the start of the game, you start with a few solid generals and are tasked with fighting of bandits, recruiting more/better generals, and then repeat that process as you get stronger, get better items, and so forth. You’ll need to make sure your armies are fed and well-equipped. If you know how RPGs work, you get the idea.
The game’s combat looks a lot like similar 8- and 16-bit games in the genre, with ‘tactics’ taking the place of the “spellcasting” that you normally see. Those can be very handy at times, but more often than not I found myself sticking with standard attacks and having good luck with those. As a result, while I appreciated the quantity of available options, the game started to feel tedious quite quickly. This is more of a matter of personal taste, but I also found the setting to be a bit more dull than Dragon Warrior and its ilk - at least in the latter, you’re killing cute slimes and so forth. This one feels a bit more like looking at a spreadsheet, which I do enough at work.
While it can be a bit repetitive and lacking the fantastical stuff that most other RPGs do, Destiny of an Emperor is well-executed and has a good amount of fun to offer if you’re willing to put in the work. There are a lot of characters to talk to recruit, defeat, and so on. That ultimately means that it’s impressive, but not for everyone (or even a majority of gamers, realistically). If the above sounds appealing to you, though, I’d say go for it.
As another aside, one of my favorite things about playing second-hand copies of old games is that sometimes you’ll come across an old save file that makes you laugh hysterically:
Heh.
Next week’s game is a 16-bit action title that I know nothing about, but it seems 90s as heck. Is that good? Probably not, but we’ll find out together.
