My Lovely Empress Switch Review

My Lovely Empress starts out with this:

The trigger warning is apt, because despite the game’s colorful look, it is as dark as Darkest Dungeon. You see, the main plot of My Lovely Empress is resurrecting your dead wife, but in order to do that, you must keep her soul alive. To keep her soul alive, you need soul essence. To get soul essence, you must cause deadly disasters aka murder people. If you don’t want to do that, you can slaughter supernatural entities called Yaoguai, who all happen to be women with big boobs. Everything you do in this turn-based empire management sim, in one way or another, serves this end.

Most of the game will be making decisions that will affect one of four classes, soldiers, nobles, traders or commoners. Like a decision is “The workers building a border wall are tired. Like them rest or drive them on?” Rest will raise the commoner’s opinion of you and lower the soldiers, slave driving them will lower theirs but raise the soldiers’ opinion. Using Yaoguai, you can investigate the decisions to see how a decision will affect a particular faction. You can’t outright lose with low faction opinion, your life just becomes harder with low population and lower tax base. High favorability raises population, and unlocks foreign lands that correspond to each faction, and doing so helps you out further. Finally, the issues have turn limits, if you don’t do them within a set number of turns, you lose with everyone. But with a limited number of actions per turn, you have to plan smartly.

There are ten yaoguai in total in My Lovely Empress. You summon them will specific items. They are helpers, who can explore and bring back items, create disasters, do issues themselves, or investigate like I mentioned earlier. They each correspond to a particular faction and assigning them to certain issues best suited to them will result in a better outcome. You can murder the yaoguai to keep your wife’s soul alive, but you cannot re-summon them once you do. However, they do leave helpful trinkets behinds. The game wants you to make the decision to kill one seriously, and it does so well.

My Lovely Empress is a handful

I’ve barely scratched the surface of My Lovely Empress. The game is complex and honestly, kind of difficult. It is easy to lose without the right strategy and planning. But despite being punishing, I love it! I think this is a superb strategy game. Everything about it is well made, from the clean UI, stylized graphics and nice Asian soundtrack. The dark undertones send this into the stratosphere of awesome(sort of like Needy Streamer Overload). Therefore, My Lovely Empress gets a Must Play with a ten back-end score. High praise, I know, but I can’t find anything wrong with it besides repetitive issues, but that’s not enough to bring it down. And yes, it is hard, but that’s the beauty of it, learn and get better! Finally, the developer is named Game Changer Studios, they really changed the game with this one!

Overall: My Lovely Empress is a phenomenal strategy game with dark undertones. It requires precise strategy and timing, and is better for it.

Verdict: Must Play

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