Want to see Raider King content first? Add us as a preferred source.
On June 8, 2026, New One Studio released the heavily anticipated sequel to their 2025 FMV Adventure game Road to Empress: Road to Empress II. This game once again places the player in the shoes of Wu Meiniang, a fictionalized version of China’s Zhou Dynasty empress Wu Zetian, as she attempts to rise the ranks and go from being a simple palace maid to becoming the empress. Is this new title just as dramatic and engaging as the first, or should gamers try to conquer something else? Let’s dissect the game piece by piece and make the decision for ourselves.
As this is a story-based title, this review will be completely spoiler free aside from the occasional set piece acknowledgement.
A Perilous Adventure for Power
Just like the first game, Road to Empress II is an FMV adventure in which the player takes on the role of Wu Meiniang as she grows close to Li Zhi and gradually attempts to gain power in the palace. If you’re even considering playing this game before the original, don’t.
Road to Empress II is not a game that can or should be played without first experiencing the first game. Characters and plotlines from the original continue directly into this game with little recap of what happened before. In fact, this game doesn’t even start at chapter 1 but at chapter 17, further showing that this is a direct continuation for those who were fully immersed in the plot of the first game.
As the player watches the story of Road to Empress II unfold, they’ll frequently need to make choices to determine what action Wu Meiniang will take next. Your actions will have minimal, if any, effect on the story but will determine one important thing: Whether or not you die in the next few minutes.
Attempting to gain power in the palace is a dangerous task, and trying to do so too quickly or attempting to play both sides in a conflict will result in an almost instant dead end most of the time. Getting through a chapter of this game without dying at least a few times feels like a miracle. The more times the player is killed by the empress, the more they’ll want to keep climbing the ranks for power.
The game does a masterful job at tricking you into a dead end, even when you’re certain that you’ve made the correct choice. Thinking that you can remain safe by showing respect for the empress is a wise strategy, until you realize that neglecting to please your fellow servants will result in no one helping you the next time you face an assassination attempt.
Getting a bad ending isn’t the end of the world, of course, as the very ridiculous ways that you can die in both the first game and this title have become some of the most well-known parts of it. While there are some simple ones like merely being stabbed from behind or pushed down a well, they will quickly escalate to being poisoned with a mist that forces you to laugh or the return of the famous soup that kills you.
Seeing the words “Poison +1” appear before a game-over screen that will more often than not feature some sort of joke about how you died is the type of intentional camp that makes constantly dying and needing to redo your last decision in this game less of a pain and more of an enjoyable core part of the experience.
Stellar Visuals
With an FMV adventure game like this, I find it even more important to talk about the visuals and presentation of Road to Empress II than other games I review. As the game is almost entirely composed of its visuals and performances, they become much more important than in other games.
We’ll start by talking about the performances. While I cannot personally judge the performances of the actors portraying the characters in this game, as I cannot speak Chinese and thus would have a more difficult time telling what is and what is not a good performance, the cast does appear to be doing a good job with these roles in my eyes.
The only part I do raise my eyebrow at is characters describing Youzi as looking tough when he can probably be best described as a living string bean.
While the complexities of acting cannot fully cross the language barrier, the set design and visuals of the game do. This game looks fantastic, set pieces like the festival where Wu Meiniang nearly drowns or just normal moments like day-to-day life at the palace all look great and help sell the game’s premise.
Localization and Always Online Issues
While Road to Empress II’s presentation and gameplay premise are fun to experience, there are also multiple issues from the first game which have returned here and gradually bring down the experience.
The localization of this game, unfortunately, has many issues that detract from the experience overall.
Key among these issues is the near-constant grammar mistakes that will plague the player’s entire playthrough. Many of these involve the text switching between past and present tense during a conversation, presumably a result of the lines being translated individually, but other lines just have poor grammar and sentence structure in general.
I wish I could say that these were prominent enough to detract from the experience, but this was a constant problem, with there sometimes being multiple mistakes in a single conversation. Not only would these errors take me out of a scene completely, but they genuinely made following some parts of the game’s story harder.
Of course, that was only when I had time to fully read the text in order to see the typos. Text in Road to Empress II goes by extremely fast, to the point that even I had trouble keeping up with it as someone who often reads and watches media subtitled. You will often not be given more than a second or two to fully read and absorb a sentence before the game quickly moves on to the next.
This is somehow at its worst when the game is translating on-screen text, such as narration during the game’s various bad endings. The game could have truly benefited from longer subtitles that stay on screen longer.
One thing that both puzzles and confuses me about this title is the presence of microtransactions. Seeing missions and different types of currencies appear on your screen when booting up an FMV title was strange enough on its own, but it becomes even stranger when you see what they’re for.
The currency you obtain while playing the game is not used for anything gameplay-related, but rather allows you to “Like” and “Dislike” a character while looking over their profile in the gallery. I cannot even begin to comprehend why one would do this, let alone spend money to do so. One has to question the motivation for including this in the game, especially as it is one of many features for the player to always be online when playing through the title.
The always-online nature of the game also makes this title hard to recommend to those with slower internet connections, as the FMVs that make up the entire game aren’t files included in your download but are instead clips streamed directly to your device. This means that if you’re running the game with a slower connection, you’ll have to endure lower quality and even buffering just to progress.
I understand that high-quality video takes a lot of storage, but I would much prefer a larger download over needing to always be online and potentially having my experience with the game be ruined due to a less-than-stellar internet connection.
Closing Thoughts
Overall, I find it hard to give a general review of Road to Empress II as it feels less like a new game and more like the second half of the first title. Anything you liked about the first game has returned here, but also all of the issues that I listed in this review from the first game have also returned. If you are someone who enjoyed the first Road to Empress and are curious about where the story would go next, then of course, you will enjoy this. If you didn’t enjoy the first game, then I imagine you wouldn’t even be reading this review.
Road to Empress II
Bottom Line
Road to Empress II is less of a sequel to the first game and more of a continuation. Everything beloved by the first game such as the creative storytelling, presentation, and bad ends remains in this title, but it has also inherited all of the first game's flaws such as its rough localization and demand to always be online. Due to its nature as a continuation of the first game, whether or not you will enjoy this title will be based entirely on what you thought of the original.
