The Charming Empire is a visual novel with a heavy emphasis on otome, a story setup meant primarily for women. The focus of games like this is to form a deep relationship with several characters while following a plot that involves all of them, which is also the case in The Charming Empire.
Story
A visual novel is not much without a good story. The Charming Empire gives you a pretty good setup: you’re the estranged step-sister of the sitting emperor and you’ve been summoned to the imperial palace in order to get polished up and married off for the good of the country. After arriving, you find yourself in the sights of one lucky dude who will do everything he can in order to draw your attention. There’s also an entire background story about a potential government coup, the downtrodden lower class, and cultural clashes between Eastern and Western civilizations. However, these topics get swept under the rug for most of the game. Instead, the narrator favors talking endlessly about your thoughts regarding boys, your childhood and how weird the city is.
Although your focus is on trying to find out who the love of your life is in games like this, It’s also important to make sure that the player experiences some development of their player character. The Charming Empire, sadly, doesn’t capture a ton of variety in what the player character has potential for. With several paths to choose from (including a town rebel, the emperor’s advisor, and the emperor himself), you still find yourself walking some of the same paths over again. To be fair, if you only play a single storyline, you may feel frustrated about not learning more regarding the world around you. It actually takes multiple playthroughs and multiples chances at love to flush out entirely what’s happening, but even then, it’s not that exciting. Then again, the story is just a framing device for the boys, and it works out in proper fashion. With plenty of opportunities to be wooed, to go to festivals and a lot of grabbing of hands, pats on the head and deep eye contact, it’s clear that the developers accomplished what they set out to do: get a bunch of pretty anime dudes to woo you.
Visuals
The art is pretty decent. Although several of the backgrounds get recycled throughout the storylines, it gives you a good sense of the shape of the castle and the empire in general. Sometimes things were confusing, as the descriptions of the story didn’t match the pictures. A couple of times, the protagonist marvels at chandeliers that are clearly just hanging lamps in the background art or asks the floor is made of stone, when it has a wooden texture. It’s bizarre and takes you out of the story. Your love interest, however, is always well drawn, and moves through four sets of facial expressions throughout the dialogue. These portray their reactions and emotions perfectly. The same thing can’t be said about the female protagonist. She frequently looks like she was drawn by someone else and then superimposed afterwards. I don’t understand how there was such a difference in how she looked.
Audio
The music throughout the game is kind of weird. When I saw that everyone was wearing kimonos and the townsfolk wore early 20th-century Western wear, I didn’t expect to hear a lot of accordion and piano. It’s not particularly varied and changes abruptly when the tone of the scene changes. Nothing seems inappropriately out of place, but you’ll always have the feeling that the music should have been different. The voice acting is also pretty good. Everyone except the female lead gets their own Japanese voice work, and they pulled in some strong performances. They give a great air of sincerity to the lines, but anything more than a single sentence pulls you out of the moment due to weird spacing. A character would speak, pause unnaturally long, and then speak their next sentence. It doesn’t ruin the overall experience, but it’s something that stands out.
Gameplay
There isn’t a ton of gameplay in visual novels to begin with, and The Charming Empire doesn’t add anything new to the experience. Depending on your storyline, you may only be given choices when speaking directly to your love interest, and most of them are pretty straightforward. If you want the True Love ending, you pick the choice that seems more romantic. If you want the friendship ending, you choose the line that would best fit a man you don’t really know invading your personal space. On one of the more difficult routes, the step-brother, the difference between romance and friendship can be very blurry, which makes this particular route feel wrong and downright creepy at times. Luckily, you can easily reload save-files to undo any mistakes you make and experience every storyline without having to replay the game in its entirety.
Conclusion
The Charming Empire is a perfectly serviceable otome visual novel. It doesn’t do anything unique, but it does offer a genuinely enjoyable experience if you like visual novels. The only real issues I had with it were the sometimes lacking background art and the step-brother route that can be creepy at times with its blend of romantic and friendly dialogue options. In the end, The Charming Empire is nothing special but can be enjoyed by most visual novel fans.
