BOTTOM 192 — Week 2 — Poll 25

[This Old Neon]

Welcome to the #BGE2020 Elimination Round Lower Bracket!

Each game in the lower bracket is still seeded based on its performance in the two opening rounds of pools! Every game in the lower bracket has already been defeated by another game in a 1-on-1 poll to get to this point. This is their chance to claw their way back into the main event... but the stakes are high. The games that lose in these polls are out of the tournament for good! The games that survive will face the next crop of upper bracket losers in the next round.

Polls are updated weekly, typically on Monday. Check back throughout the week to make sure you don't miss a vote!

HOW TO VOTE

This is easy. You only get one vote per poll. The game with the most votes wins. In the event of a tie, the higher seed advances, so don't get complacent!

[Kong Wen]

Destiny of an Emperor is simply an amazing (and criminally overlooked in the general populace) NES RPG. Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy get a lot of attention, because they were excellent and spawned several sequels, but Capcom's Destiny of an Emperor stands right up there alongside those originals.

[Claytone]

Destiny of an Emperor is simply an amazing (and criminally overlooked in the general populace) NES RPG. Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy get a lot of attention, because they were excellent and spawned several sequels, but Capcom's Destiny of an Emperor stands right up there alongside those originals.

This is a pretty compelling pitch! May have to add this one to my BGE to-do list.

[Kong Wen]

Destiny of an Emperor is simply an amazing (and criminally overlooked in the general populace) NES RPG. Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy get a lot of attention, because they were excellent and spawned several sequels, but Capcom's Destiny of an Emperor stands right up there alongside those originals.

This is a pretty compelling pitch! May have to add this one to my BGE to-do list.

One of the things that makes it interesting is that it uses its Three Kingdoms war background to put a spin on traditional (insofar as JRPG mechanics could be thought of as "traditional" that early in the game) JRPG mechanics. So your HP is your soldiers, and each character in your party is a general. Most generals besides important storyline ones can only command a set number of troops, so your party undergoes changes as you recruit more capable commanders (either via story or via defeating them in battle).

Another good example is "magic spells"—in this, they are tactics. You set a tactician for your party, and they (usually) don't participate in battle, but the tactics they know are the ones the rest of your party can "cast".

It also has a great, ahead-of-its-time autobattle system so you can speed through fights that are too easy for you.

[Niahak]

Kong Wen's said most of the things I would to sell DOAE.

It also has a good soundtrack, and generally runs quickly (traversal, in general, is fast unlike most RPGs of the time).

The only real disappointments IMO are:
1 - Tactic names are transliterated chinese (e.g. "Lian Huo" is your first fire tactic) so you have to experiment to figure out what they actually do. There are some general rules around positioning in the menu (like fire stuff is always top left). Although there's a fan patch that gives them more readable names.
2 - The number of names, especially city names, makes it difficult to remember where you're going frequently.

The storyline divorces itself of the semi-historical context very early on to make things exciting, so if you played the game and then read the novel or watched the TV series, you'd recognize many names and places but be totally lost in other ways.

It hurts a bit to vote for DOAE over Cave Story, but in the end they're both refinements of a genre, in Cave Story's case one that already existed for decades. Both great games.