 during battle. Fighting near water allows you to use the more powerful water attacks, though these consume more TP. Healing spells initially waste a lot of TP, but very late in the game you gain access to Jin Xian, a skill that heals every party member for 4,000 soldiers at the meager price of four TP. In a stroke of genius by the game designer, it’s only learned by Zhuge Liang, a powerful strategist who is incapable of learning An Sha, the game’s instant death spell.
Near the end of the game, when enemies constantly use both powerful offensive attacks and full heal spells, having a back-up strategist in tow to either go into battle with a powerful healer or an instant killer isn’t a bad idea. Most generals will have between 30,000 and 40,000 armies, a number that your characters won’t reach even after hitting the level 50 cap. With the ability to effortlessly knock off 15,000 armies, use powerful full party offensive spells, fully heal anyone, and cast An Sha, these battles might feel wholly random, but strategically weakening specific generals and masterful use of tactics yields success. It’s truly difficult, but never unfair, a balance that many games never reach.
One of the nice additional features of the battle system is the “all-out” option, which causes all of the warriors to dash to the middle of the screen and start randomly attacking one another. In boss battles, this is basically a suicide button. While strategy is crucial to succeeding in key battles, the quick battle is a good option to use against enemies you know are either inherently weak or severely weakened. Breezing through the easier battles will keep you from falling asleep before you rush the next castle.
Although the game begins with only three generals, it quickly becomes evident that many more can be recruited. Characters in towns will occasionally offer to join your party, but most of the generals aren’t so casual, requiring you to defeat them in random battles on the overworld or in dungeons. After defeating a general in the wild, an option will be given to recruit them. Some will join up immediately, while others demand some sort of payment. As the game moves on, this price goes up considerably, but there’s always the option to deny payment, beat them again, and see if they’ll join for free. There’s 150 recruitable generals throughout the game, though only 70 can be in reserve. Once 70 generals are recruited, the weak must be dismissed to make room for the strong. Discharged recruits will simply return to the area they originally roamed, allowing you to recruit them again if you so choose.
Exploration is pretty limited, with the overworld feeling more like a linear path than a realm filled with mystery and intrigue. While the ultimate goal is to conquer castles by winning fixed boss battles, much of the game follows this formula: people in town will tell you where to fight next, rush there and destroy, people in that town will tell you where to fight next, and so on. Some of the areas between castles are large, but they’re almost always vacant of any real features. It might as well have been corridor, boss fight, corridor, boss fight a la Final Fantasy XIII. Add to this that every castle, mountain, tree, and cave looks absolutely the same, and exploration looks and feels pretty monotonous.
Following the basic twisting corridor pattern of most JRPGs, there are only five dungeons in the entire game. While they’re often the location of an important quest item, none of them are particularly long, with the smallest one being one short floor and the largest one fully traversable in less than ten minutes. Despite this, Destiny of an Emperor‘s main focus is dynamic battles, so the limited exploration and brief dungeons keep the player focused on progressing through the game. Along with the walking speed and “all-out” option, it reflects a general design decision to make the game fast-paced, a nice touch that keeps the game from getting too monotonous.
There’s a lot of other novel little story touches that break up the constant stream of battles. One of the best parts is near the end, where an enemy named Si Ma Yi instant kills your entire party with a thunder attack. In order to negate his attack, Guan Sun tells you to put in a specific button combination right before he uses it. Another interesting event is finding Zhu Ga Liang, who is sleeping when your party catches up with him. While Zhu sleeps, it gives you the option to wake him. Selecting yes does nothing, but picking no leads to a ten second wait after which Zhu rolls out of bed and joins your army. Although these moments aren’t too phenomenal, they certainly are memorable.
Several other key design choices fall apart by the end. Eventually, boss battles reward the player with more than enough food to last the entire game three times over. Likewise, money ceases being a problem around three quarters of the way through. Only the Five Tiger Generals, Zhang Bao, Guan Xing, Zhao Yun, Ma Chao, and Huang Zhong, increase in armies as you level up. As their armies grow, so does the strength of their physical attacks, making them an obvious choice over the other hundred plus playable characters. Still, these key game elements only fall apart near the end of the game when you’re more worried about over-powered opponents, so it’s more of a shift from worrying about buying the next weapon or more food to worrying about whether a general will instantly kill you with an An Sha. If anything, the change in focus is pretty masterful considering how high the difficulty gets.
On very rare occasions, the game does force you to back-track a little which leads to the game’s worst moments. The aforementioned search for Zhu Ga Liang involves traveling all the way back to the beginning of the game just to realize he’s not there, then back and forth between several other key areas. This only happens three times throughout the games fifteen to twenty hour duration, but it’s a pain nevertheless.
Overall, this is just nitpicking. Considering this is Capcom’s first RPG, it’s surprising how sharply designed it actually is. The game design is credited to Yoshiki Okamoto and Yoshinori Takenaka, both industry veterans. Okamoto produced many popular Konami and Capcom titles, including Gyruss, Time Pilot, Final Fight, various Mega Man titles, and many of the company’s fighting games. Takenaka previously worked on the classic DuckTales NES game. After Destiny of an Emperor, he went on to do design work for several Mega Man games, the first Breath of Fire game, and, more recently, Folklore. Both have continued their working relationship into the current millennium, working together on games like Knights Contract for PS3/360, Dragon Ball: Origins for DS, and Brave Story: New Traveler for PSP. It’s refreshing to see professional collaboration like this continue after over twenty years. The producer, Tokuro Fujiwara, has a massive list of credits, producing tons of NES classics: DuckTales, Gargoyle’s Quest, Chip ‘n Dale, Mega Man titles, Destiny of an Emperor and its sequel. His latest credits include producing and directing Hungry Ghosts and providing original game design for Madworld. With such renowned talent, it’s no wonder Destiny of an Emperor‘s battle system and quick pace are so well-executed.
Another key player in the game’s development is Hiroshige Tonomura, the sound programmer. The soundtrack for Destiny of an Emperor recalls the bouncy, melodic approach of DuckTales, which was also Tonomura’s first assignment at Capcom. Imagine the tuneful tones of that game occasionally filtered through some eastern-sounding melodies, which are appropriate considering the ancient Chinese setting.
Destiny of an Emperor is truly a forgotten gem, an overlooked game with enough unique and solid elements to warrant attention. Sequels excluded, there’s no other game quite like it, and while archaic JRPGs aren’t for everyone, it’s mix of complex battles and straight-forward progression make it far more engaging than most.
Since the dawn of gaming, development tools that require absolutely no programming knowledge have always existed. A little hex editing knowledge and a lot of effort has led to some really great hacks/mods of NES classics, but there are programmers out there who want to make NES hacking easier. With Dungeon Master and Zelda Tech, anyone can efficiently generate their own Zelda mod complete with second quest. In 2007, Destiny of an Editorappeared, completely done by Niahak as part of a project for the Lord Yuan Shu Forums.
Over the next few years, the editor went from a simple stat altering tool to a full-fledged game creation tool, allowing you to edit all text, maps, enemy encounters, and graphics in Destiny of an Emperor. There’s no tutorial required as the various functions are very intuitive, although making a full-fledged game will still take a great deal of effort. Altering generals’ stats, locations, and encounters takes quite a bit of forethought, let alone filling a new world map and storyline with these characters. Much of the editing is a simple matter of changing around some numbers, clicking different tiles, or altering some text. The text editor is actually the most difficult feature to master because it’s not exactly clear when, where, and with which characters the dialogue occurs.
As Destiny of an Editor has improved, so has the quality of the hacks. Early hacks like Destiny of an Emperor 2.0: Cao