Last fall, a woman clad in ornate Chinese attire staring straight out of the screen took over gaming YouTube in an unforgettable storm. That woman was the protagonist of “Road to Empress,” the first part of which came out last September. This June, the series came back with a sequel. “Road to Empress II” launched simultaneously on Steam, iOS, and Android, selling over one million copies in just five days and two million in 12, bringing cumulative sales for both games to over five million. With roughly 1,500 minutes of live-action footage and multiple endings to explore, the game is hard to write off as a simple repeat of its predecessor’s winning formula. The sequel pushes beyond the original in narrative, interactivity, and with the overall landscape of the industry. Together, these advances show that the gamified short-form approach the first game unlocked has entered its next phase.

A women’s narrative that moves beyond harem intrigue
Most harem intrigue stories set in palaces share familiar tropes— women locked in power struggles, jealousy over winning the emperor’s favor, and a victory for whoever comes out on top at the end of that storyline. Within this framework, female characters are always confined to being someone else’s choice, and nothing else. So presumably “Empress II” follows the same premise, right? Wrong. For protagonist Wu Yuanzhao, the position of empress is no longer the peak of royal favor. Instead, it becomes the bare minimum starting point for building political alliances. In the sequel, favor and survival are no longer the same thing, and Wu Yuanzhao comes to be repositioned as someone who’s calculating about power and engineers alliances.

The first choice in “Road to Empress II,” a key point where players decide which route to follow: one with Li Zhi, or one with Li Tai.

This repositioning also shows up in the game’s branching structure. “Empress II” gives players the option of both the historically faithful Li Zhi (Prince of Jin) route and the Li Tai (Prince of Wei) route, which takes more liberties with the historical record. Both routes have become popular in their own right, but which one fans love more isn’t really the point. What matters is that the Li Tai route, despite straying from history, is a fully realized standalone substory. In a drama, a storyline that branches from the historical record like this would be hard to keep around and fully resolve, but this isn’t a drama, it’s a game—specifically, one that borrows the format of interactive short-form drama built on choosing branching paths. That’s precisely what allows it to set up a second, equally fleshed out ending beside the one history has already written, and then have players decide for themselves. Just as Wu Yuanzhao takes control of her own fate, players, too, can choose their own path instead of simply following the historical record, and they’ll be rewarded with a full ending regardless. When the character’s agency and the player’s freedom to choose align, the game takes a step back from the passivity that has long defined the harem intrigue genre.

The Li Tai route unfolds in a way that’s entirely at odds with real-world history.

Bad-ending design that makes failure engaging
One of the things that earned the first game praise was that losing didn’t mean flat-out failure. A wrong choice would lead to a bad ending—death, exile, or the like—but the loss was designed to feel light so players could jump right back in without hesitation. The sequel introduces a key difference to the formula in the form of accumulative consequences. A common refrain about “Empress I” was that all you had to do was pick each right choice as you go along, but in the sequel, previous choices come back like karma to shape the future. It’s a shift from making the “right” choices as they appear to a game where the consequences of your choices snowball over time. This one change makes players weigh each decision more carefully, while also prompting them to imagine how a given choice might come back to shape things later on. Rather than poor choices leading to flat-out losing with a bad ending, “Empress II” shakes things up, and now your choices stick around to affect the story in novel ways.

There’s also a meta layer to the game design that exists outside the story itself. The game tracks five traits—fortitude, strategy, ambition, decisiveness, and prestige—which improve based on the player’s choices. These have no bearing on story progression, but maxing out all five unlocks an achievement called the Perfect Monarch. Even though this achievement system has no narrative payoff, it gives players another reason to explore the game in full without fear of failure. It’s fine not to make the “right” choices. Picking a different route is perfectly valid. The satisfaction of building up your traits and unlocking achievements offsets any anxiety over failure. As a result, players will deliberately pick choices that raise their decisiveness regardless of the apparently correct path, or replay chapters they’ve already seen the ending for just so they can boost their stats. The effort that goes into building up traits for the sake of unlocking achievements is a journey of its own, entirely separate from the journey to find all the right answers.

The choices in each chapter give players an opportunity to improve five different traits.

Beyond the game to fans and industry
The ripple effects of the “Road to Empress” series throughout the industry are even more visible outside the immediacy of the game itself. The lead and supporting actors have developed their own dedicated fandoms, holding fan meeting events in Korea and several other countries since the game’s release. Around 300 fans gathered at an event held at Gabin Art Hall in Seoul on June 22 to spend time with the four lead actors, which was an extension of a fan meeting tour that had already passed through Nanchang, Wuhan, and Shanghai between the release of the two games. The game has grown beyond a stand-alone piece of media into an evolving ecosystem of real-world, in-person events.

A fan meeting held to celebrate the launch of “Road to Empress II.” (Source: “Road to Empress II” X account)

There’s one more feature here worth pointing out. The first game had a voting system where players could send flowers to characters they liked and throw eggs at characters they disliked, and the sequel adds an interesting twist here too. Depending on how many flowers a player gives, and whether they give them consecutively, different reaction videos from the actors play. This is a new twist that’s aimed squarely at the core fandom, not unlike an idol group’s thank-you video for a concert or a popular streamer giving thanks for donations. Gifting 99 or 9,999 flowers in a row triggers its own unique video, and giving numbers that echo fan-coined couple names—like 4599 or 9599—triggers yet another reaction (using the Chinese phonetic pinyin system, 4 stands for the fourth prince, Li Tai, 9 for the ninth prince, Li Zhi, and 5 for Wu Yuanzhao). This approach, where the game developers echo fans’ own language back to them as bonus content, is the clearest case of “Road to Empress” proving its potential in a way legacy media rarely touches.

“Road to Empress”: The proof is in the playing
The game’s story has moved on from being about a competition for imperial favor to about a political agent, and its interactivity has evolved from picking the right answer to a web of choices that contribute to increasingly complex outcomes. The industry has expanded even further into a cycle where actors build up their personal international fandoms, and those fans in turn provide material for real-world events and Easter eggs within the game. “Empress II” proves that the gamified short-form approach that the first game successfully opened the lid off wasn’t a fluke—it was a repeatable design. All that’s left now is to wait and see how that design gets refined with whatever comes next.