The fact is that wandering through the plot of Long Live the Queen, blithely making mistakes on the assumption you'll do better the second or third time, is wonderful. Trying to actually do better is a byzantine process involving either heavy use of a guide or incredible persistence.
A unique and surpriing experience. Much like a choose your own adventure combined with the board game Tales of the Arabian Nights. A fun little story of a princess who must rise to be **** she can last that long. You must choose what studies to study and improve in...which can lead to rewards for using the right skills at the right **** they are high enough. SOmetimes it means little, sometimes it can lead to life or death circumstances. Lots of fun story areas and very replayable. Can win and lose in many different ways. Am really surprised how many ways I have won so far...even going down totally different paths. Highly addictive.
While the first playthrough is quite challenging, there is considerable depth to this game for it's length. I found myself playing it quite a bit much to my surprise.
The first weeks seem to be crucial, and it is good to note that for the price the music and story are pretty interesting, to find all of the story you have to play the game in many different ways until you see everything.
Those claiming this game has no depth may have just failed to play through every part of the game.
On a final note this game was just overall pleasant, It left me wishing there was more weeks, while I imagined what may have happened during the rest of my reign.
All the "kawai" of a magical girl violently confronted to the intrigues of a cruel and boiling kingdom, this is what makes the charm and humor of Long Live Queen. This story will give you a real headache! The choices and events could have been more varied to avoid some repetition. Maybe for the next title ?
I could not possibly put into words how many things this game does perfectly. Even if I could write a book, I'd probably still fail in reflecting all I love about this game, so I'll just talk about the bad things.
It's the type of game that appears to be unbeatable without checking the wiki and planning the correct path, but that's actually not true. If you give it enough tries, you'll find that you will be able to get a good ending and not an early death in 5-10 failed playthroughs, which isn't a lot of hours. The replay-ability of this game is on a whole other level, since depending on the paths you choose, lots of different events and dialogue options are triggered.
To the reviewers that say it lacks depth and has the illusion of choice, you just don't know what you're talking about... Check the Wiki for the amount of endings this game has and you'll be informed. An "Ending" is something very subjective to this game, and not for the superficial reasons you may be thinking of once you boot up the game and die once or twice.
Even on good endings, there are tons of things that go down very differently depending on what you do. Some trivial, and some not.
I can understand that you may become frustrated if you don't fully enjoy the gameplay or aren't fan of the genre to replay it so many times, since you will have to go through a lot of the same plot and dialogue. I, however, being an extremely impatient and easily annoyed type of player, still did not.
it's easy not to like it at first and delude yourself that it is simply a game that focuses on being too complex to fool you while it's content is ultimately narrow, but that's not the truth in this case. Seriously, if you still doubt that, just check the Wiki for this game and you'll be amazed by the sheer amount of things you can do in this game.
I'm confessing to be a biased, slightly obsessed fan, and yet still, I could not possibly explore all this game has to offer.
I played with a walkthrough and enjoyed it a lot. If you go in blind then you're going to need a bit of determination to figure the game out and keep your character alive.
Long Live the Queen is a surprisingly engrossing visual novel type experience. With a surprising number of endings and a well-written story I can readily encourage anyone who enjoys visual novels to give this one a try.
The game covers the year until our protagonist's coronation ceremony, and while there are many different endings make no mistake, living until that coronation is by no means a guarantee. With assassins, betrayals by nobility, wars, and duels both magical and non-magical there are many ways to meet an untimely end. This game even brings with it a more literal meaning to "death by chocolate." Each week you choose two topics to be tutored in, which is how you gain skills in the game. You will have a bonus or penalty to how much you learn based on your mood plus you'll learn skills you already have many points in more quickly. Then you'll choose how to spend your weekend which will affect your mood. Each week there is also an event. What happens in each event is not only affected by your previous choices, but by your skill levels. By default you can see the skill checks that the game is making, and it can be rather disheartening to see several failed checks pass by (or sometimes worse, a single one followed by a death), but it gives you some idea what you're missing and helps you plan what you'd like to be able to do differently on later playthroughs.
A lot of the intrigue can be a little hard to keep up with, but you can see the effort that went into the game's story with more and more attempts. Studying up and your history and domestic and foreign affairs will provide insight in the flavor text of the skill increases, but will also give the protagonist more insight and options in dealing with them. Quickly it becomes clear that each betrayal, each rebellion, and everyone's feelings about you are actually justified and their characters actually have consistency. On a first playthrough someone's actions can seem like a cheap plot twist, but only on another attempt do you have the right combination of skills and make the right choices to learn you actually could have seen it coming.
And make no mistake, you will play this game several times. Even should you live to your coronation a single playthrough will only take a few hours, depending on how fast you read. But there are several times the length of one attempt worth of hidden treasures that are fully worth digging for.
Long Live the Queen is a game with heart and genuine emotional involvement. If you have any interest in the genre you owe it to yourself to give this a try.
Long Live The Queen is a quirky sort of game lying somewhere in-between a simulation, a visual novel, and a choose your own adventure game. You are Elodie, the 14-year old heir to the throne. Your mother, the queen, has died, and you must prepare yourself to take the throne in 40 weeks – if you can survive that long. The game takes its name from the fact that this is no easy task; death can lurk anywhere. Or so the trailers promise, at any rate.
The trailers seemed to indicate that this game was primarily humorous in nature; you create Elodie after Elodie, training her differently each time, only for her to meet some unfortunate end along the way. While the unfortunate end bit may or may not be accurate, the humor is not; while there are a few humorous moments in the game, one the whole the story is actually quite serious, and follows Elodie as she tries to navigate the complexities of court life while being woefully underprepared for it. Frequently, Elodie is faced with some sort of situation that she has to deal with, and via a combination of her skills – which she trains herself in two of every week, at your direction – and your own decisions, you must navigate your way through the game blindly, never knowing what the consequences of your decisions are going to be in the end. Everything from deciding whether or not to attend a birthday party to choosing to assassinate a scheming noble is covered by the game, and which skills you have seem to affect the choices you can make. As you go through the game, your choices have consequences which come back on you, forcing you to deal with or benefit from your past decisions.
The story is overall passable, but nothing special, and while there is minor variability from game to game, it is relatively minor.
The flow of the game is very simple – every week, you choose classes for Elodie, then some scripted event happens that you have to respond to (or which gives you a hint to upcoming events), then finally you get to make some additional choice of what to do around the castle on the weekend for the purpose of effecting Elodie’s mood. There are a total of 40 weeks in the game, and your goal is to survive through to the end.
It may seem bizarre to say that a game which gives you a large number of choices would grant you very little agency, but this game grants practically no real agency in many situations. The problem, to put it simply, is that you have absolutely no idea whatsoever what your choices mean, and you have no idea which skills are going to come up, or when they will be important. I never once used a large number of skills, while other skills were used very frequently – and while some of those skills which were used very frequently made logical sense, such as courtly manners, presence, divination, and wield magic, others were outright bizarre, with decoration being used a considerable number of times, while I never once used the dance skill or horseback riding.
This is partially due to the choices you make – I did deliberately avoid making skill checks in some situations – but it is also due to choice blindness. While the usefulness of some skills is obvious, the usefulness of other skills is much more obscure – is knowing about horses going to be relevant? It seems like something which would be relevant, and yet, it never once came up, and only once did I ever see anything where it might have been relevant (a choice at the tournament). I only saw one instance where dancing would have mattered as well. When I went out to sea on a ship, I never made a naval strategy check or a swimming check, but I did make a climbing check of all things. Even when you’re warned of upcoming events, frequently you don’t have enough time to crank up your skill checks enough to make a difference – in many cases, a single week of preparation is all that you are given at best, while at others, you are given no forewarning at all of upcoming events, even though logically you should have been warned.
While making choices is important, if you have no way of reasonably evaluating which choices you are going to be called on to make, or the consequences of your choices, or even how high your skills need to be to succeed, your choices aren’t really meaningful – you are simply making them at random, or near-random. Even choices which had to do with how much money you have in the treasury frequently did not tell you how much money you had, nor how much you were spending. Some choices were interesting because they were nerve wracking and the pros and cons could be easily seen, but in terms of raising skills, it was hard to tell whether raising divination was a better idea than raising courtly manners, or how the two would differ.
On the whole, Long Live the Queen’s feeling of lack of agency and lack of explanation outweigh any virtues it might have; the story and graphics aren’t good enough to save it. It is an interesting idea, but the execution was lacking.
The given rating may seem overly punitive, but personally I still suspect that this product has been sold as something it is not.
Sold as brand new and polished version of "Princess Maker 2" (only in the title and setting...), this game couldn't be so completely different, and the sad part is that also in is uniqueness, "Long Live the Queen" fails to impress, amaze, or just entertain for more than a couple of hours of play.
In fact, only the relatively low price save it from a worst rating.
What is really funny, and sad, is that every ingredient seems to blend and fit perfectly in the beginning...
And then you discover that, in the end, it all comes down to a banal graphic adventure, banal as uninspired in every aspect of the plot, events, surprises and game modes.
Let's just say, without incurring in annoying spoiler, that the game is just a straight, flat, and, foolishly, perilous road, where:
- the story is always the same (the lesser relevance problem)
- events unfold and flow in the same way and with the same timing
- character growth system (so complete and intriguing at first sight) is just an excuse to extend the playing time, since there is only one way to complete the adventure and every creative variation made by the player will have the unique and only effect to kill character and reaching a premature the end of the game
- the game itself make a pride on being completely without mercy towards the player
And at the end, you will find yourself in starting the game again and again for 5, 10, 15, 30 times, and I'm not kidding, and eventually, you'll finish to save at EVERY single turn, only to try to survive and find a solution... that you'll not find!
And, I ask: can this be considered funny, or at least, interesting?
SummaryTHE QUEEN IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE QUEEN
Being a Princess is not an easy job. Being a Queen is even harder. Especially when you're only fourteen years old, and the reason you've inherited the throne is that your royal mother has just met an untimely end.
Now power is up for grabs. You may be the official heir, but much of the country...