Empire of Angels (天使帝國)

This game looks at the world like a Renaissance painter — all character faces are beautiful, and every single battle is long. Empire of Angels from 1993 is a Taiwanese tactical RPG that tells you plenty about what path developers were willing to take with graphics quality in exchange for a mountain of content.

It's basically a game book with maps. You lead a group of men, women, and semi-goddesses across several continents and decide who to take into battle, who to let rest, and who to simply let die, because party capacity is limited. Each character has their own storyline, narrative arc, and stats that grow painfully slowly at first. The goal is classic — save the world, defeat the emperor, figure out why nothing is quite what it seems.

During combat you stand on a hexagonal grid and watch your units move and attack — turn-based tactics without much flash, you just pick an action and the game handles it. Nothing to grab onto, nothing to mash, no reason to move the mouse unnecessarily. Battles drag on forever. The worst part is they take just as long whether your well-trained squad wins or your squad that you'll be watching struggle for the rest of the game.

But that's not the strangest thing. The strangest thing is that we remember it. For those graphic flourishes and how the game felt like a collection of illustrations in a sprawling novel where you got to decide how the story continued. Given how much text the game contains and how few English translations existed back then, it was practically the only Eastern European way to experience this work.

Today you can play it in your browser and be surprised. Surprised by how much that sequence of static images and hammer-blow combat screens gets to you. Not because it's modern or fun — but because it breathes ambition and how seriously its creators took their own story. And that was rarely done on DOS back then.