What madness is this? I thought full-motion videos (FMV) were taboo for the gaming industry and buried near E.T. cartridges. When did it become a go-to experience that pushed the genre into new levels of entertainment? Where was this in the 90s???!!!!
I miss you, Night Trap. You were wrongly hated, but if you were like this game, then you might have been better received. Probably not. Early ‘90s idiocy from parent advocacy groups was thick back in those days. No amount of good production or interactivity would cure that.
Anyway, Road to Empress, from developer New One Studio, is an FMV experience that is choice-driven and quite the journey. This game harkens back to the ’90s CD-ROM FMV gaming experiments of the Sega CD era, while elevating the value of that structural adventure with fantastic production, strong acting, and engaging storytelling. The only hiccup is the game’s rigid decision-making, which makes it more about being right or wrong rather than true branching when the narrative gradually changes.
But, hey! FMV! It’s back, baby.
I knew it would be.
It took 30 years, but it’s back.
Let’s get this review going.
Story
The story follows a lowly servant girl who is making her way into the Eastern imperial court. She must navigate former friends and deadly Game of Thrones-type deceptions in hopes of becoming empress. Oh, she is also a backstabber and occasionally not the best person in the world, certainly not the hero. I’m not sure there is a hero in this story.
The story is comparable to a modern soap opera, as it features overly dramatic situations, lots of backstabbing, and twists and turns to keep the player’s attention. While I think the acting is much better than a soap opera-level performance, it’s still driven by cliff-hanging moments and enough cattiness to keep players hooked, much like a soap opera would in the 90s.
While I didn’t believe I could be interested in shaping the story and journey of the main character, it didn’t take long for it to snag me into hours of gameplay. I wanted to see how this woman’s life was going to end up, who was going to betray her, and how she was going to navigate through sticky situations. Believe me, there are plenty of the latter.
If players are going into this game with high expectations of experiencing a soap opera journey, then they will not be disappointed one bit. The game delivers with that skeletal structure and exceeds all possible expectations with good acting and amazing production quality. Road to Empress is more cinema than afternoon network cheap thrills.
The production quality for Road to Empress was top-tier level FMV. I’m not sure there has been a game to date that has brought this much good production with fantastic camera quality, huge sets, and good editing when decisions are made. At the most, I was expecting nothing but green screen, and, thankfully, that never came to fruition. Again, this was much better than I thought it might be.
Story and production delivery might be the strongest aspects of Road to Empress. They exceeded all expectations.
Limited gameplay, but rightfully so
Most FMV games back in the ‘90s didn’t come packed with a lot of interactivity. For the most part, players were just happy to see movies that they could participate in. Games like Sewer Shark and Night Trap brought with them more novelty than a heavy dose of good gameplay. With Road to Empress, it does its best to flex its interactivity a little bit more.
As players go through the story, they will make choices. For example, at the beginning of the game, the main character is gifted a flower hairpin from a childhood friend. Players can choose whether they want to accept it, decline it, or simply say nothing. If the player chooses to accept it, then shortly afterward, the player’s character must explain to a royal why they have the hairpin, knowing that the royal wears the same hairpin and that ain’t cool to mimic. If they don’t accept it, then the hairpin falls to the ground, and the royal still finds it and asks whose hairpin it is, which opens more dialogue and more of a chance to get called out. Each reaction to this single moment gives way to a different set of choices that the player must continue to make. If the wrong one is chosen in this scenario, then the player will get a flower burned into their forehead, and the adventure will end.
One of the big brags for Road to Empress was that the game shifted and moved the story every time the player made a dialogue decision. While there is a small amount of that happening in the story, the player will mostly experience their demise when the wrong answer is chosen. To say the branching narrative is thick in this game is not right, as the decision-making and consequences are comparable to a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book when the wrong choice is made, rather than a game like Knights of the Old Republic, where wrong choices ripple through the entire story. With Road to Empress, if the wrong choices are made, then the story ends. If it is the right choice, then the player will continue to the next decision.
Now, it should be noted that CYOA books had charm, and regardless of definitive endings, people enjoyed these books. Heck, they still might enjoy them. The freedom to make a choice that shifts the story in a book or a game is empowering for a player, and doubly so when it’s basically in an interactive movie experience of this type. In a way, regardless of its gameplay depth, simply having a right or wrong choice and watching where the player’s logical choices take the game’s story means that the player is still controlling the direction of the game. That at least maintains the status quo with the FMV genre.
To add more complexity to that and give the player a bit more meaningful gameplay, Road to Empress features quick-time events. These QTE moments ask players to push buttons quickly to successfully survive a momentary crisis. These are sprung on players randomly, which means players need to be on guard for them to crop up after they make dialogue choices. This gameplay element adds some variety and intensity to an already tense storyline filled with logical choices the player must make. I can’t say I didn’t panic-push buttons on some of those moments, and died by my panic. They truly were surprising aspects of gameplay that made me more aware of the story and what was happening.
Beyond QTE moments, the Road to Empress does have some hidden gems to uncover and more relationship-building elements that give it some depth. It’s more than just branching choices and good production. I dig that because it shows that FMV isn’t a stagnant or dead genre and that there is still more to improve and give to players. If nothing else, the genre is progressing into a deeper experience through games like Road to Empress.
So, will this please all gamers? Probably not, as most people expect a bit more interactivity and flexible consequences to actions that change the direction of the story. I can understand that want and need. Of course, the flipside to that coin is that this game is a little over $8, and what players get for that money is well worth it, and there is enough progress to the genre in this game to feel like the experience was well worth it.
Overall, Road to Empress’ gameplay brings a top-tier FMV experience with it, a fair number of choices to logically think through, top-notch production quality and acting, and enough beyond those aspects to be impressed with the entire package. This game was a lot better than I thought it would be.
Anyway, let’s wrap up this review.
Conclusion
Road to Empress, from developer New One Studio, is a high-quality FMV experience that might fall a bit short on bending the story through player choices, but is nonetheless entertaining from beginning to end with the amount of interactivity it does deliver within a high-quality production wrapper.
