Destiny of an Emperor

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Item Condition

Game + manual: the cartridge and its manual, no box. Look over the photos for condition, packaging and details. Every cartridge's shell, label and board are checked for authenticity when it comes into the store, and it's tested before it's listed. It ships in a collector's bag or a hard plastic case.

Item Description

Most NES role-playing games hand you a party of four adventurers. Destiny of an Emperor hands you an army. Capcom's take on the Three Kingdoms saga, adapted from Hiroshi Motomiya's manga Tenchi wo Kurau, puts you in charge of the sworn brothers Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei as they rise from a village militia fighting the Yellow Turban rebels into a power with a real claim to uniting China under the Shu Han banner.

On the surface it plays like a classic turn-based RPG, with an overworld to cross, towns to visit and random encounters to survive. The twist is in the numbers. Each general commands a body of troops, and his soldier count works as his health, so a seasoned officer at the head of thousands of men can shrug off blows that would rout a fresh recruit. Five generals fight at the front, a reserve waits to replace the fallen, and a designated tactician supplies battlefield tactics in place of magic. Defeated enemy officers may offer to join you, usually for a bribe of gold or horses, and the roster can swell to dozens of famous names from the novel. When a fight is beneath you, the All-Out command lets the computer blitz through it at high speed.

That army-scale framing is what makes the game memorable. Leveling up feels like building a fighting force rather than grinding stats, and the long campaign borrows the drama of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, with the legendary strategist Zhuge Liang among the figures who shape the campaign. The plot takes liberties with history and with the novel alike, but the sweep of shifting alliances, betrayals and campaigns across a divided empire gives it a scale few 8-bit RPGs ever reached.

It is also a fascinating outlier in Capcom's NES catalog, a sprawling historical RPG from the company best known on the system for Mega Man and its arcade conversions. Japan later received a Famicom sequel, Tenchi wo Kurau II, that never came west, which leaves this cartridge as the only chapter North American NES owners got. If Koei's strategy games ever made you want to live the Three Kingdoms story from the saddle of a general rather than the throne of a map screen, this is where that journey starts.

Fast factsgame data via IGDB

Released: 1989
Publisher: Capcom
Genre: RPG, Strategy, Adventure
Players: Single player

About the game

Liu Bei, Zhang Fei, and Guan Yu form a small militia to defend their village from Yellow Turban rebels, followers of the sorcerer Zhang Jiao. Liu Bei gathers peasants and farmers from nearby villages and camps, eventually defeating Zhang Jiao and his people. Tao Qian, the governor of the region, falls ill and requests that Liu Bei assume his position. Liu Bei hesitantly agrees, thus beginning the events depicted in the novel, albeit with significant alterations. Upon successfully completing the game, the player successfully unites China under the Shu Han banner.

Summary from the IGDB community database — the condition and contents of this listing are described above and in the photos.

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