overdrive's Destiny of an Emperor review

Hey, just found this review after going through Venter's 50 NES Games. Sounds like a very interesting RPG game for the NES, so it's a shame it has those flaws. The final battles sound like something I would have no patience for nowadays. Thanks for the read!

The final battles are indeed brutal, but Destiny of an Emperor is one of the best RPGs from the NES era. If nothing else, the journey to those final conflicts is an enjoyable one. I personally think Overdrive was a little too hard on the game, but that's his right! ;-)

"it is not cool when a warlord with roughly 30,000 soldiers casts Wan Fu on himself to regain each and every one of them."

Multiply by ten when "a warlord" is the final boss. Destiny of an Emperor is among the rare breed of RPGs where the final boss, can, and will, restore to full health repeatedly if you do not find the way around it - which isn't that easy when all the spells (well, tactics, in this case) have names that mean nothing to a native English speaker, or someone who isn't even that. Among that list of tactics is the one that shuts down enemy spellcasting temporarily, and not all tacticians have it, so you want to bring one who does. Unsurprisingly, Zhuge Liang is one of them.

Nonetheless, beaten several times. Has me coming back every so often.

Well, if we use the current scoring system, it'd be a strong 3/5 in my book!

But yeah, I really loved the premise and the ability to recruit fallen generals, but there were a couple big problems like I mentioned in my review. Late-game fights were long and could be very annoying to overcome. And with only a few generals being able to level up, the only reason to recruit a lot of them was solely to prevent them from randomly attacking you every few steps.

It's the sort of game that deserves an A+ for concept, creativity and stuff like that; but just lags behind that standard in execution. It was a game I was interested in playing and I'm glad I did get a chance to, but I can't really give it more than a mild recommendation, as any RPG junkie will get a lot of enjoyment out of it, at least for most of the game.

And, like I said in the review, it is kind of educational. After playing it, I was all over Wikipedia looking up names to see who these people were.