Review: My Lovely Empress Can Involve a String of Bad Decisions

So, if your mom dies of a strange, seemingly supernatural disease, then your wife does as well, maybe experimenting with fickle, dangerous entities to revive one of them isn’t a good idea? That isn’t what happens in My Lovely Empress. His uncle and kingdom’s grand duke decides that the grieving Emperor Hong can have a little necromancy, as a treat. The result is we, as players, attempt to help a kingdom thrive and survive so we can be monsters who sacrifice everything for a cause that absolutely, totally, definitely could maybe, probably turn out okay.

My Lovely Empress begins with a kingdom in the throes of multiple crises. Emperor Hong’s mother, the beloved Empress Dowager Wang, died of a strange disease. Within days, he discovers his pregnant wife Xiang is facing the same affliction. There is a potential treatment that could help, but it comes as a supernatural storm bears down on the capital. Whether you prioritize the natural disaster or search for medicine doesn’t matter when it comes to her survival. Empress Xiang dies, and for months the Crimson Empire falls into disrepair. It is then that Grand Duke Chen, who was also Xiang’s uncle, reveals the Crimson Empire family secret… Yaoguai.

His father Great Emperor Khan used them to make the kingdom rise. …And then they killed him, due to him doing things wrong. Empress Dowager Wang apparently perfected the technique and ritual, using Yaoguai properly and in the hopes of reviving Khan. But she stopped for some reason and dismissed them. Now Emperor Hong is taking up the family trade to summon characters that basically are hand grenades with the pins pulled, in the hopes they can fix his country and help him get the innocent souls needed to restore the recovered Empress Xiang’s soul and revive her.

My Lovely Empress is a balancing act, to be sure. Your goal is to help the kingdom thrive, summon and strengthen Yaoguai, manage diplomatic relations with other regions… and also probably kill millions of innocent human people or some of the very Yaogui you’ve come to rely upon to resurrect Xiang. Part of this involves keeping the various factions that make up the city’s population happy, to encourage population growth and income. 

These groups you need to balance are the army, citizens, nobles, and traders. As time ticks down each day and season, events will come up across the map and remain for a number of days. In the case of ones Emperor Hong can handle, it means clicking on it to make a choice that will likely anger some and please others. You can send a Yaogui with stamina to investigate the result. However, I noticed these events start to repeat a lot very early on, so that’s usually a waste of their energy. Other events specifically require a Yaoguai’s intervention and have no negatives when performed. In some cases, a neighboring ruler might even like you more for it. 

Since there’s always too much to do and not enough time to do it, the Yaoguai become critical agents. You start with one, a nine-tail fox named Gumiho. However, quickly you’ll learn that heading on expeditions to areas to unlock new resource items and performing rituals to summon more will make your life more manageable. These characters have different specialties for certain situations, and being able to tap into that and improve them helps significantly. 

As for the empress part of My Lovely Empress, that’s where the necromancy comes into play. Once you get what’s left of Xiang’s soul via Gumiho, it is constantly degrading. You’ll need to make sacrifices to make that happen. Someone could sacrifice the Yaoguai called into Emperor Hong’s service. However, Gumiho points out that a substantial number of human lives, those of the Crimson Empire’s subjects, could be used to repair it as well. While investing in the kingdom to increase its size, acquiring materials, and building up Yaoguai forces is important, so to is deciding what choices to make. This comes into play both from the earliest moments, when you handle the medicine search and storm, to when you decide what sorts of sacrifices to make for Xiang. 

As I mentioned earlier though, My Lovely Empress can get repetitive. You’ll be going through many of the same actions or events repeatedly. Not to mention that while it is a challenge, if you manage to summon enough Yaoguai and never sacrifice any of them, it might get to be a little easy. If you get invested enough, it doesn’t seem as noticeable. However, given that there are multiple endings, I expect it’d be a bit of a challenge to get through repeated runs in succession. 

It’s also important to note that people going in expecting to be able to date the Yaoguai will be disappointed. There is romance here! However, those endings are tied to the rulers of neighboring countries and decisions made while interacting with them. You can learn more about the Yaoguai themselves by talking with them and build up relationships, but there’s no romance associated with them. Which is a shame, because the designs and background for them are often really fun. GameChanger Studio and Neon Doctrine drew from supernatural beings and mythology for their designs, and it would have been fun to see more.

I was absolutely fascinated by My Lovely Empress during my first run, when I tried to avoid as much bloodshed as possible and search for a healthy ending. I was shocked the second time around when things got much darker. It can be intriguing, even when it starts to get repetitive, and I appreciated the new approach GameChanger Studio took with the My Lovely series this time around.

My Lovely Empress is available on the Switch, Xbox Series X, and PC.