Much of my early game reviewing career was focused on the what and how of games. It came from an incorrect assumption that chasing objectivity in a review would somehow reveal a common truth that we could all agree on. That is, of course, not the way these things work at all and so I’ve long since shifted focus to the why of these games came about. For Road to Empress the objective is clear, to tell the dramatized story of China’s first female emperor, but why an interactive fiction? Why not follow the path of many other C-Dramas, churn out a season or two and be done with it? Whatever the true reasons are it’s clear that the usual ones of player choice are key to it, especially with 2 directly diverging plot lines available right to you from the get go.
SPOILERS FOR ROAD TO EMPRESS BELOW
You managed to survive the death of the previous emperor but now find yourself confined indefinitely to a Bhuddist temple, doomed to serve out your days as a nun. It’s here that your past as a Cairen in the court comes back to haunt you with Liu Xi, a newly-appointed Shanggong, has made sure that all your attempts to reach the new Emperor have been in vain. That all changes one day when he was to attend your temple to perform the rites of his father’s passing, granting an opportunity that you can’t afford to pass up. Do you take destiny into your own hands and claw your way back to the top of the court? Or do you reject the palace life completely and perhaps follow another path?
As you’d expect from a sequel that was released only 9 months after the original much of the same styling, sets and other visual elements of the sequel remain the same. The devs (filmmakers?) have continued to do a great job with not a lot, using the tight in drama format to their advantage to make the sets appear much larger than life. The only letdown is when the final scenes were clearly created using AI or when they ham-fistedly used face filters and CGI for certain scenes which produced results about as good as you’d expect. Reading through the various forum threads there appears to be reasons for this but whether or not you accept them is something I’ll leave up to the reader.
It’s going to be really hard to talk much about the game without getting into spoiler territory so I’ll just give you these few tidbits before I dive right on in. The game’s format is much the same as the original with the same quick time sequences, branching narrative choices and numerous untimely endings. The ancillary game mechanics, including a wild leaderboard that allows you to vote for your most liked/disliked character with flowers and eggs respectively, make a comeback and ensure that there’s a lot more to this game than simply sitting back and waiting for a pop up to come along. With that all out of the way let’s dig into the real meat of what Road to Empress II was to me.
MAJOR PLOT SPOILERS BELOW
With the game’s well earnt reputation for just straight up killing you for the wrong choices you’ll have to forgive me for thinking that the first pivotal choice you’re given wasn’t actually a choice. As it turns out, yes there is a major narrative branching arc there that leads to a whole other set of choices that don’t involve any of the same characters at all, to the point where there’s now an extensive catalogue showing no less than 4 different major endings. Whilst my initial choice led me down the most obvious path (the Main Story one) I can’t say that I wasn’t a little miffed at the prospect of another playthrough that would’ve been worlds apart from where I ended up. Another playthrough is definitely on the cards one day for the Prince of Wei route.
So I chose the love route and, you know, for a good long while there it was absolutely enjoyable as a sappy love story between forbidden loves. To be sure I made a ton of grievous errors along the way, many of which ended up with me meeting the same death-by-itching fate that I annoyingly couldn’t skip after the 5th time seeing it, but the scenes with the emperor had such an amazing chemistry to them that I couldn’t help but be pulled into them. I really can be a sucker for a good love story once I’m invested in the characters long enough.
That was enough to carry me through the middle part of the story when you start to chart your own rise to power, gathering your own officials at court and generally building out a power base that seemed to be based on uplifting and visionary principles for a true golden era for all of China. There’s a turning point however where that ambition starts to manifest itself in the most ugly ways possible and this is where I started to feel myself pull away from the story.
To be sure I understand that many of the major story beats have their roots in history (however complicated the relationship between this telling and the actual truth appears to be) so there’s some fault I can lay there. However it seems that, at least at a certain point, you’re kind of locked in to becoming this power hungry, win at all costs person who has lost all sense of what got them there in the first place. Perhaps it’s just me being the love-struck idiot that I am, wanting the real ending to be one of the many “retire in the mountains” options that I found myself tending towards, but it did feel somewhat incongruous to the game’s premise around giving the players actual, real agency.
Which is probably what had me pining for another route in the last quarter or so of Road to Empress II. It was around then I felt like I was no longer the character that I had fell in love with. Perhaps that was the devs intention here and if so, bravo, but I also can’t shake that feeling that the latter parts of the game got less attention they needed in order to bring it all home. I really should get another playthrough in honestly as you never know, those other plot lines may have finished up better overall.
PLOT SPOILERS OVER
Road to Empress II brings the series to a satisfying, if potentially uncomfortable, end in a way that feels almost foreign in this world that needs out and out success to guarantee it. To be sure Road to Empress is no small hit, selling well over a million copies initially, but it’s clear that should this have been just another C-Drama it’s very doubtful it would’ve seen that level of fanfare at all. This is all a long way of saying that I’m very much looking forward to the dev’s next work and, hopefully, my next playthrough as the summer months begin to roll in.
Rating: 9.0/10
Road to Empress II is available on PC, Android and Nintendo Switch right now for $25. Game was played on the PC with a total of 10.9 hours playtime and 38% of the achievements unlocked.
