Oh it's just a stupid pay-to-win online game that runs in web browser (you can see it at www.imperialsaga.jp if you are curious, but you need a Yahoo!Japan account to play it).
I'm horrible at being brief so here is my description of the game as short as I can make it:
The main game is a series of chapters (four) in which you play 10 quests and then the chapter 'closes' and you have to do the 'story' quest for that chapter, then you'll move to the new chapter. Your emperor dies and you select a new emperor from the members of your army. When you beat the game, your emperors are revived fully and the game starts over from the beginning. Which 10 quests you take are up to you, and each quest is like a mini-story, and there are many arcs in which the quest you take will unlock another, some even branch into many different quests depending on how you beat them, what you say in the story parts, etc. The main story itself even has 4 different story routes too. The story is just a jumbled mess of crossovers of all the other SaGa games. There's hardly any original characters and it's like random story elements from all the games got mashed together.
Outside of playing the story mode, you can play history mode (take on any quest you've done before) to get S rank on them, build up your army by hiring characters, build up your town by leveling up facilities (sacrifice characters to go work there), send characters on training/studying missions to power them up in various ways, etc. There's also regular events which include mini-stories where playing the quests drop like... quest currency that can be used for rare items in a quest shop, as well as dropping promo characters.. then there are trial of gods events where you spend these fight token things to attempt a trial, which is just a series of battles, and there's leaderboards and you get items and money and stuff the more you clear and the higher you rank, and then now there's a "combat" event where you actually face other players' parties (controlled by computer, though) and there's leaderboards for that, similar to the gods' trials.
Anyway, the characters are all individual units so like regular Katalina and Dragons-Dogma-outfit Katalina are two different characters. So it's not like Katalina herself is getting another outfit, but you have a completely different character which is... Katalina in another outfit LOL. Usually they have some kind of unique attributes or something, too. And even within regular characters there are different versions of them lol and you can have multiples so like you could have 50 Katalinas if you wanted to (I've seen people in the Combat event with parties all of one character it's funny XD)
But yeah the quests are essentially just a little set of paths your characters walk on and you can split them up to try to get all the treasures if you want. The battles are turn-based battles similar to Romancing SaGa series. And you're supposed to build up huge armies so you can use one party while one rests, or to use in events or whatever, or exchange when a quest boss has certain weakness or whatever.
There's various things that require premium currency (that you pay IRL money for with a Japanese credit card and bank account lmao) but the cool this is that the premium currency is actually available in-game. There are like... .achievement-like "missions" that will reward you with it, the events reward you with it (and there's always like 1 or 2 events running at any given moment), and then daily login bonus has premium currency every few days. So you can save up the premium currency over time. So there's nothing available to pay players that isn't available to free players. The only thing pay players have an advantage with is they can get stuff faster if they want to pay for it, and each day you can get a very small discount on hiring a new character at random if you use paid currency instead of free.
no subject
I'm horrible at being brief so here is my description of the game as short as I can make it:
The main game is a series of chapters (four) in which you play 10 quests and then the chapter 'closes' and you have to do the 'story' quest for that chapter, then you'll move to the new chapter. Your emperor dies and you select a new emperor from the members of your army. When you beat the game, your emperors are revived fully and the game starts over from the beginning. Which 10 quests you take are up to you, and each quest is like a mini-story, and there are many arcs in which the quest you take will unlock another, some even branch into many different quests depending on how you beat them, what you say in the story parts, etc. The main story itself even has 4 different story routes too. The story is just a jumbled mess of crossovers of all the other SaGa games. There's hardly any original characters and it's like random story elements from all the games got mashed together.
Outside of playing the story mode, you can play history mode (take on any quest you've done before) to get S rank on them, build up your army by hiring characters, build up your town by leveling up facilities (sacrifice characters to go work there), send characters on training/studying missions to power them up in various ways, etc. There's also regular events which include mini-stories where playing the quests drop like... quest currency that can be used for rare items in a quest shop, as well as dropping promo characters.. then there are trial of gods events where you spend these fight token things to attempt a trial, which is just a series of battles, and there's leaderboards and you get items and money and stuff the more you clear and the higher you rank, and then now there's a "combat" event where you actually face other players' parties (controlled by computer, though) and there's leaderboards for that, similar to the gods' trials.
Anyway, the characters are all individual units so like regular Katalina and Dragons-Dogma-outfit Katalina are two different characters. So it's not like Katalina herself is getting another outfit, but you have a completely different character which is... Katalina in another outfit LOL. Usually they have some kind of unique attributes or something, too. And even within regular characters there are different versions of them lol and you can have multiples so like you could have 50 Katalinas if you wanted to (I've seen people in the Combat event with parties all of one character it's funny XD)
But yeah the quests are essentially just a little set of paths your characters walk on and you can split them up to try to get all the treasures if you want. The battles are turn-based battles similar to Romancing SaGa series. And you're supposed to build up huge armies so you can use one party while one rests, or to use in events or whatever, or exchange when a quest boss has certain weakness or whatever.
There's various things that require premium currency (that you pay IRL money for with a Japanese credit card and bank account lmao) but the cool this is that the premium currency is actually available in-game. There are like... .achievement-like "missions" that will reward you with it, the events reward you with it (and there's always like 1 or 2 events running at any given moment), and then daily login bonus has premium currency every few days. So you can save up the premium currency over time. So there's nothing available to pay players that isn't available to free players. The only thing pay players have an advantage with is they can get stuff faster if they want to pay for it, and each day you can get a very small discount on hiring a new character at random if you use paid currency instead of free.