My Lovely Empress

An empire sim where you use decisions and agents to balance stats to make progress, this game has dialogue issues. By that I mean, the dialogue is good and well written, great even. But there's no way to turn it off on repeat playthroughs and like 50% of it is tutorial or exposition. It's that Genshin Impact approach to dialogue, where there's a trillion partitions of text and while there's technically a skip button, it just takes you to the next partition OF THE SAME DIALOGUE. Or maybe you get to advance to another menu, and it hits you with another wall. Sometimes you have to click OK between partitions, or you have to select one of two options but neither option seems to have any impact. There is no true non-neutered skip option, and I don't think the toothless, watered down skip we do have is good enough for getting through the mountains upon mountains of text I've already seen. Another frustrating element is the balance of endgame resource sinks. I guess there have to be resource sinks in any game where you accumulate resources, but I dislike how the empress' soul keeps rising in costs and how each season the merchants bleed me for either a huge amount of reputation or a huge amount of income. "But that's required to keep the game tense and engaging, otherwise our players stopped being invested." I'm not a game designer, so that isn't my problem. I don't like this solution. In summary, this title is okay and often steers into even being kinda good. It's just you lose five minutes or more of your life everytime you replay sections, and the endgame is designed to waste still more of your time.

Came from "My Lovely Wife", thinking this was going to be even better. Sadly, wasn't the case. The game has a great foundation - an emperor in charge of managing his empire, dealing with diplomacy (whilst flirting) as well as the moral dilemma of ressurrecting your wife even if it means dooming your very nation. Unfortunately, as far as I played (3hrs+), this is all overshadowed by massive, massive amounts of grinding for resources on non-ending repetitions. The gameplay loops feels... bland. Lifeless. Even when dealing with other nations, you still do the exact same thing you do on your own nation; grind for resources and numbers. The entire game is such a massive grindset that it heavily detracts from the tragic story it's trying to tell. If you're fine with a LOOOOOOOOOOOT of grinding, this game is just nice. If not, it's simply frustrating.

I liked the previous "lovely" games, but this one is definitely the best! I can't wait to play it some more!:)

Of your attention