izigame.me

I will be writing this explicitly for how it plays as a Generational game and NOT just as a JRPG.
In Short a Generational game is a game in which by some mechanism you move forward through generations and play as new characters as this happens. Think Crusader Kings, Agarest, Fire emblem 4, Godhood, and Wildermyth.
This games main mechanic is around appointing new emperors, which on its own would not really be much of a generational game, but it is tied to time skips and the such so it fits quite well.

Summary

Narratively there isn't a lot to say.
Story wise the memories and powers of the previous emperor are passed down to whoever is chosen as the new emperor. Unlike others of the Genre there is no Familial component, aka you do not play explicitly as your children. This felt bad at first, I was not seeing the story of a family line of emperors and there was no connection between emperors at all. However the game is very vague about who the characters are so you can easily imagine that whoever you chose is a Descendant of the previous emperor. Nothing in the game says this to be the case, but nothing in the game really implies otherwise either.
Mechanically.
Firstly there is no genetics or romance mechanics (despite the name). You will not choose wifes or do any sort of family building. Which is extremely rare for this genre, as often the reason Generations pass on at all is to serve playing as offspring, see even Fire emblem 4 where even though marriage is technically optional it is a major factor in your runs.
The execution of the lack of offspring is interesting. Since your emperor's skill levels and abilities are carried over directly from memories being passed from emperor to emperor. So there is a sense of “inheritance” but through memories and empire development.
As for your non-emperor characters there is inheritance for them as well. As you use weapons your weapon levels will increase globally in a sense, so when you time skip and pick new party members their levels will be close to your other characters. If you brute force a class to learn a weapon they don't specialize in that carries over as well.
Speaking of the timeskips, they are handled quite adeptly imo. Every few major quests, usually every 2 major quests the game will jump you forward 58+ years. The previous emperor will be gone and you will then appoint a new emperor, if anything changes over the years someone will tell you and you will get new quests like monsters rising in areas you already cleared or pirates throwing a mutiny, then you rebuild your party in the castle.
After every time skip, anything made in the smith, all skills learned, and all magics become available to all characters at the designated facilities. It helped create a sense that your empire's military is learning from its “heroes” over the years.
The Length of generations felt very good, not too long and not too short. You spent enough time as an emperor to care about them and their story, but not so long that you only get 1-2 time skips. I found each generation took me personally about 5 hours.
This game is not using an infinite model (which I don't think anyone would expect as this game is a remake of a snes era game). But this does mean that the quests that happen over the years are not randomly generated, which means you will only see a handful of them ever. This game does have a strongly defined ending which I will not be discussing here.
Final note, there are a lot of small details with each of these systems and some I probably missed/didn’t talk about partly because of char limitations.
As a Generational Game?
I was considering layout out the pros and cons but I would write a pro and there would be a corresponding con to go with it. For every step this game took forward it would also take one backwards or sideways.
So, this game's generational mechanics are very non-intrusive. Great for JRPG players who don't really care about such systems.
To summarize, when you switch someone into your party, they will have near identical stats to the previous generation. So let's say you have a knight, you made him learn axes this generation. Next generation starts, if you pick a knight again, he will have the same/similar level in axes. This is awesome if you have your favorite set up and just want to ride it out till game end, since you can keep remaking the same party over and over, since who you can recruit is always the same, you will always be able to recruit a class you recruited.
Why is that a problem? Well what is the purpose of having your party reset every so often in the first place? It gets you to do new things, it forces you to adapt to your new options rather than relying on one strategy, it can also let you relive fun parts of early progression assuming you design the game with the intent that early progression is fun. This wouldn't be a problem if only your emperor was like this, but EVERY class will scale up, even on weapons you don't use. In the later generations you barely discover skills too, which was a great part of the early game.
As such this game loses out on a lot of the fun parts of this genre. For example you never do anything to set up the future generation, bar building facilities or smithing. Which all progresses naturally as you do encounters anyways. This hurts a lot actually as making decisions that help you in the next generations feels great in this genre, things like picking up young recruits in Wildermyth since your best 3 are getting old, or things like picking who will marry who in FE4. This sort of “Generational Planning Play” is borderline nonexistent.
This might sound very negative, however this game succeeds as a generational game. Despite having a system that mechanically doesn't engage the player in the generation side of things, this game's thematic and contextual wrapping of the system hits home a lot of the time and makes you feel the generations for the most part. Things like new quests showing up in eras you liberated, the main antagonists being immortal monsters helps, one town being built *during* the game, but the biggest one is just a lot of facilities and tools open up over time as you do more things and progress. Plus even though functionally the characters are similar it felt interesting to defeat the many bosses with different protagonists who had subtly different feels because of character design.
Honestly respecing into a party of guys who look different was enough for my brain to feel like things changed despite nothing really changing for most of the game.
The cherry on top is that there is a post game role call of all of your emperors and the things they accomplished. This felt so good.
Closing thoughts / TLDR
This game as a generational game nails the feel, does a lot of unique things, and does absolutely execute on what it's selling. However mechanically if you are looking for the things generational games often do, such as encourage you to adapt to your ever changing tools, let you optimize genetics, or make you re-experience unit building/early progression, then you may be disappointed to find a JRPG that only has a thematic and contextual feel of a generational game. But if you are after a JRPG that has some systems you may not have seen, and that does cool stuff with time then this might be exactly what you're looking for.
If you like this style of generational game, my go to recommendation would probably be Agarest: Generations of war, since their system is also non-intrusive and serves a more Linear-narrative focused JRPG.
As someone who loves this niche genre its a solid entry and does alot of great things, and does alot well.
Very happy with it despite my gripes with the systems.