A run in Eternal Palace Sakura has one shape: you are dropped into the Eternal Palace, you fight and you explore, and both of those things hand you attributes. Attributes are the game's currency and its progression currency at the same time — spending them teaches you a fighting art, and fighting arts are what let you take on the next tier of the palace. When you die, the run ends. What you learned stays.
The official description puts it as a question rather than a class list: "Will you go for speedy evasions, power through to deal damage, or charge up to sweep away the enemy?" Those are the three routes through a fight, and the game supports all of them with controls described as "intuitive" and "easy-to-learn". That framing matters, because it means the skill expression is not in the execution but in the decision — which route you commit to for a given enemy, and which attributes you bought with that in mind.
Attributes come from two places — winning battles and exploring the palace — and both routes are worth taking. Combat attributes are the reliable income; exploration attributes are the ones you get for going somewhere the smart route would have skipped. The game advertises more than fifty fighting arts, which means the attribute pool is deep enough that a full run is nowhere near seeing all of it.
The practical consequence is that the first run is a scouting run. You are not trying to win; you are trying to find out which arts you want. Later runs are where the build becomes coherent — and because the palace rearranges itself, you also have to account for the fact that the same build faces different routes every time.
The palace is described as "an endlessly changing labyrinth" and an "endless, dream-like dungeon". The store tags list Procedural Generation and Replay Value as separate user tags, which is the community telling you the same thing: the value is in the variation, not in a fixed route. Expect to learn the palace's rules rather than its map.
The official copy explicitly promises "exciting endgame content", separate from the main run. In a roguelite with fifty arts and twenty-plus enemies, the endgame is where the build you have been assembling all run finally comes together. If you are planning to sit with this one, the demo is the cheapest way to find out whether the endgame is the part you enjoy.