WARNING: APPARENTLY I TEND TO WRITE A LOT, THIS MAY BE AS LONG TO READ AS THE MOVIE IS TO WATCH ;P
-Used FCEU 0.98.13 (nitsuja) (it'll say .12, which is what I did the first 20 minutes with before I discovered Nitsuja's better version. I checked and there were no descyncing problems or anything by the upgrade, so I kept what I'd done and continued in .13. Just so ya know)
Destiny of an Emporer (USA) in 1:46:42! While that may be a decent time for such a long, involved RPG as this, it's also, uh, still a long time to watch in real-time, so I have provided savestates here to take you straight to section changes and other major events: http://www.twistedeye.net/doae/Destiny of an Emperor savestates.zip
DoaE was Capcom's first RPG, released in 1989-90, and is based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Characters here are found in other games (as I'm so often told by people that don't know this game ;P), like Dynasty Warriors and of course the RotTK series.
The battling style of this game can be described like Final Fantasy meets Pokemon; your team of warriors versus the opposing team of warriors, and any opponents freed from their posts can be later picked up in the wilds and converted to your side! This makes the game very dynamic, and normally converting generals is a necessity because of how levelling up works: only 9 of the 200+ available characters gain health from levelling up, and your only other gain from levelling is tactics (this game's 'magic'), not all of which all characters learn. (I lose a small amount of TP in the movie that I could have gained from learning Li Jian had Zhu Ge Liang been able to learn it) How much damage a character does is determined from their strength (never changes), attack power (weapon equipped), and amount of soldiers (a weakened character will do less damage).
As fast as possible was my goal, and I tested out every plotpoint in the game to see how soon I could handle them and if I could avoid them altogether
The overworld is nearly as manipulable as other RPGs like Dragon Warrior: All unwanted battles can be easily skipped, though no matter what I do, pauses in movement do show from time to time. I tried to make those one-frame pauses occur at times when I turn a different direction in my movement so that they're harder to notice for the viewer, but really there's nothing much I can do.
As far as battles are concerned, though, they are massively manipulable. Anytime an opponent attacks or a tactic is used by other side that requires long text, the player has to hit a button to continue the text, which allows for complete manipulation of the following actions! The order that opponents fight in is determined at the start of the round, though, but whether they hit, crit, or miss is all manipulable. Also, DoaE contains an awesome speederupper: All-Out. If you intend to just hit 'Battle' over and over for every character, this function will just do that over and over at a really quick pace for you, although enemy generals are free to use tactics at will >: ( Problem with All-Out though is that except in rare cases I cannot manipulate it anymore than what frame I start it at and if and when I decide to cancel back out of it (usually to just start it all over again hehe). So I end up taking a lot of damage throughout the movie, but it really is soooo much faster than handselecting the orders and going through the text presented. It causes a ton of work to do, though, because nearly every single frame produces a different possible (usually undesirable :P) result, and making precisely what I want to happen happen at times would require going through dozens of possible frame choices. Gra.
For generals, well, I only use 15 generals total through the entire game, 6 of which are totally unavoidable and only 2 of the others are caught in the field (Han Zhong to open the backdoor to the quicker Yellow Scarves battle and Zhou Yu because silly Zhu Ge Liang doesn't learn that most wonderous of tactics, An Sha!). You can only bring 7 generals with you at a time, though, 5 that fight and one strategist that always acts like he's in back of the line. This means that at a couple points in the game I have to go to the billeting building of a major castle to dump off dead generals to make room for fresh fodder.
At no point in the game do I ever equip armor or buy anything other than Gullwings (the teleportation item which takes you to select castles). All weapons I use are freebies that are just lying around to be picked up either in chests or literally on the floor of some town for someone to trip over! Really I do it for the environment, stupid litterbugs
Battle strategies change all the time throughout the game, mostly depending on what tactics I have available to cripple my opponents with: Yi Xin stops a guy in his tracks, Ji Mian stops ALL straight attacks, Ji Rou halves all received damage, and Bei Ji doubles what one of my guys can dish out including tactics. And, of course, An Sha, to instantly remove a foe from the battle. (It doesn't work on Sun Quan, Cao Pi, or Si Ma Yi, though, the last of which is especially annoying because he has Wan Fu which FULLY HEALS him and destroys all of that All-Out progress up to that point! Gr! Each of his fights took a very long time to complete in production :( )
If you know the game, then you can pretty well know what I'm doing as I do it; if not, well, a fast reader might be able to follow along with the text ;P Just know that anything I do that seems to go out of the way is done specifically for unavoidable plot elements, like the Saltpeter and Dead Wood needing to clog the canal after Jian An.
- I cut out the section specific notes, they're pretty unnecessary and they just make this text freaking longer
So YEAH. This movie took nearly a month to make, and I'm actually pretty proud of myself for keeping up on it. I'm usually a really lazy guy, I'm surprised I was even able to write this much witho--*loses interest and is distracted by a passing butterfly*
Bisqwit: It's a long movie, but it has received ok votes (which
indicates there are probably no obvious strategical mistakes in it).
As for entertainment, it's mostly a curiosity for those who haven't seen the game before, but the same could be said about, say,
Star Tropics. Accepting.