King's Quest VII - The Princeless Bride

The Short


Pros
- Beautiful, hand-drawn graphics and animations
- Excellent midi music
- Play as two different characters, a first (and last) for the series
- Refined controls from the previous games make it much easier to pick up and play
- Puzzles are the best crafted in the series, many with multiple options
- Excellently diverse side characters
- Areas you visit are fun, unique, and extremely varied
- Final adventure game in what is considered one of the best adventure game series of all time
- Full voice acting throughout

Cons
- Unlike Torin's Passage, this game hasn't aged well
- Voice acting ranges from "decent" to "ear-rippingly bad"
- Story is borderline idiotic
- Both main characters are extremely obnoxious
- Rosella (who was a strong female lead in King's Quest IV) has been reduced to a valley-girl putz
- Has had multiple versions released, making finding the "best" version difficult

King's Quest VII's art style was a rapid departure from the series' norm. 

The Long

This review comes with a story. I have, over the years, purchased King's Quest VII no less than six times (beating out Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, which I have bought four times). I first bought the game shortly after it was released, but after a freak accident where I was holding the disc while running down the hall and subsequently scraped it against the plaster of our wall (hey, I was like eleven, I was allowed to act like an idiot), I had to go buy another copy. 

A few months later we had a yard sale, the only one I can recall doing in the history of my entire life. At it, my brother and I tried to sell some games for extremely discounted prices. Well, apparently they weren't discounted enough, because some jerkbag stole about half our games from off the table. King's Quest VII was one of them, and apparently I changed my mind about it because I bought another copy.

Skip ahead to around 2004. I was going to college, and I suddenly decided I wanted to play this game again. The King's Quest Collection (the original package) was going for outrageous amounts on eBay, so I decided to just buy a vanilla copy of King's Quest VII. Well, I got my copy but to my shock it was one of the original copies pressed, meaning it only worked on Windows 3.1. Despite complaining to the seller that his auction wasn't specific, I didn't get my money back, so I bought another copy (after checking it would work in Windows 95) and finally got some King's Quest VII on after nearly a decade. 

There is literally no indication on any of the discs which version is which. I wrote "3.1" with a sharpie on my copy so I wouldn't try to install the wrong one in the future. 

Skip ahead another few years. I was at Bookman's in Phoenix with my now-wife, and they were selling a copy of the re-released King's Quest Collection for only $10. These versions had been optimized to work on modern machines (mostly, anyway), so obviously I picked it up. To my dismay, however, the version of King's Quest VII, while still working on my machine, was actually the 3.1 build which had less features (the newer version allowed you to increase character movement speed [a much needed improvement] as well as squashed a few bugs). I am actually right now considering buying the version on Good Old Games just to 1. Have a non-physical copy and 2. See if it is the better version. Somebody should probably stop me before this gets (more) out of control.

Anyway, the point of this story is so you know how much I have invested in this game over the years, so when I tell you that - even with rose-tinted goggles - this game has not aged well, you know it is really hard for me to say it.

The face only a mother could (and does) love

Before I get into the bad let's get into the good: the game still looks pretty fantastic. The animated cutscenes are sort of a downer (as you can see above, they weren't exactly of the highest quality even back in 1995), but the in-game stuff all looks fantastic. Though Rosella does look like she's sort of moping around everywhere she walks (except when she is a troll, where she has good hustle), all the animations are top notch and the background are simply gorgeous.

The areas you go in the game are well complimented by their graphics because the places themselves are really interesting. King's Quest games thrive on taking you to unique and exciting places, but King's Quest VII easily trumps them all in terms of variety and creativity. You have the underground troll caves, which are built around a volcano and feature a depressed dragon. You have Ooga Booga land, which is pretty much a ripoff of The Nightmare Before Christmas, but that's ok. You have the absolutely gorgeous mystic forest, which has in it what might be my favorite town in any game ever: a village of animals run by Arch Duke Fifi 'la YipYip, a presumptuous poodle.

This place is so stupidly hilarious. I love it. 

There's also Etheria, a mystic city in the clouds (which you only go to at the very end of the game, and with only one character), and a sort of blandish desert, but everything just looks and feels so fresh and interesting you can't help but want to explore.

The side characters, as mentioned above with Fifi, are by majority completely absurd. Again, King's Quest is known for having some weird and crazy characters in it, but this one takes it all and ramps it up to almost parody levels. You can tell Roberta Williams had a ton of fun with this and, considering it's the last "true" King's Quest game, it makes you wonder if she knew the series was finally running out of steam and made this the last hoorah.

Ooga Booga land use to scare me as a kid. There are some pretty messed up ways to die. 

The puzzles, also, are some of the best in the series. Abandoning the "look, use, walk, item" mechanics of King's Quests V and VI, King's Quest VII reduces everything to a single button click (with the exception of items, of course), essentially streamlining the entire game. Your curser will give you indication by sparkling when you can interact with something (which may or may not kill you; this is an adventure game after all, deaths are frequent), and that's pretty much it. Deaths, as I said, are frequent, but unlike previous games where a hard reload is required, instead you get scolded by the (now dead) character before being given the chance to simply try again. It's a system that Torin's Passage and almost every modern adventure game now uses, so in that regard you could argue that King's Quest VII pioneered it.

But anyway, the puzzles: they are quite good. Another "staple" of the genre (that probably helped kill it) was the fact that most puzzles were stupidly obscure. The King's Quest games have always been good at avoiding this stereotype, and VII is the best of all. Combined with the streamlined controls, puzzles are tricky enough to make you feel smart when you get them, but easy enough that you don't feel completely stumped for too long. There are a few areas (the desert at the beginning and Etheria at the end) that are a bit too open-ended, but all-in-all King's Quest VII is totally doable without a guide, which is more than can be said for most old adventure games. 

Sorry, Al Lowe. Roberta Williams isn't called the "mother of adventure games" for nothing. 

I hoped all you nostalgia people enjoyed my positive points, because now I'm going to rip this game to shreds.

King's Quest VII has the worst story in the entire series, paired with the worst characters. It's obnoxious, trivial, borderline sexist, and has one of the most tacked-on endings of any King's Quest game I've played. Almost everything Valanice (the queen, in her first and only role as a playable character in a King's Quest game) and Rosella (who was a strong protagonist in King's Quest IV) say makes you want to hit them, and considering writing and story are what makes up for the somewhat mediocre gameplay in adventure games, this is a huge problem.

The story starts off with Valanice scolding Rosella because she won't get married. Rosella, who pretty much kicked ass and took names in King's Quest IV (she fought her way out of slavery in order to take her place as the princess of Daventry), is now a whiny, air-headed valley girl who wants nothing more than to "go on an adventure." "But mother!" She whined in the opening as Valanice points out potential marriage prospects, "he's so boooooring!" Really? This is what you turned these characters into? Walking cliches? 

I suppose Valanice does get what she wants, though, because (MASSIVE SPOILER...not really) Rosella finds some guy that she met in King's Quest IV at the very end of the game and - guess what? - they get hitched. Thus proving you can have one adventure in your life, and then it's off to makin' babies. Which is probably why Valanice didn't get a game until now, and why she spends most of the game crying.

It does have giant Gila Monsters, though, and as my wife knows I think gila monsters are awesome. I usually let this one eat Valanice every time I play, just because it gives me a good deal of satisfaction.

Seriously, see in the picture above? See the comb? That's Rosella's comb. At the beginning, when the two are bitching at each other about whether or not Rosella should be able to choose what to do with her life or get married and be a good housewife (like Valanice), Rosella jumps into some pond for an unexplainable reason which turns into a magical warping portal. Valanice jumps after, but on the way down Rosella gets grabbed by a troll and sucked to the troll kingdom, while Valanice ends up in the desert land. Cue five plus hours of Valanice whining, crying, and moping about her daughter. As an added bonus, you always have the option to "use comb on Valanice," which makes her poor, fragile emotions shatter and causes her to break down into sobs every single time. 

I find this almost as offensive as Super Princess Peach, where you use her rampantly fluctuating feminine emotions to save Mario. Almost. 

As an added bonus, the "use comb to make my character cry" is the solution to not one but two puzzles in the game. What? Not to mention if you show it to just about anybody Valanice will almost completely break down as she explains how she can't find her daughter, which makes me wonder if while her kids were off on adventures in King's Quests III, IV, and VI if she just sat in bed with a bottle of anti-depressants and a tub of ice cream until they came back. 

Rosella isn't much better. She's a spoiled brat (which makes no sense given King's Quest IV) who constantly complains. She's turned into a troll right from the start (yay!) which I think is some attempt to give her character an arch as she learns that it isn't about being ugly but about not being a total bitch, but the fact that she (again, SPOILER) turns a fake troll king into a total stud who she then marries out of the blue kind of defeats that life lesson, doesn't it? She whines constantly, and at every character, and despite the fact that she's doing some pretty amazing things and besting some pretty difficult enemies, she never develops at all. Look, I don't need a lot of depth in my adventure games. I'm really not that picky. I just want to have characters that I can like and relate to. Neither of these characters do that for me. 

Add on the fact that you have literally no information with regards to why the villain wants to (essentially) blow up the world (minus the fact that she was some ex-fairie from Etheria and got booted out? Something like that?), how Edgar from King's Quest IV got roped into this, or how the crap Rosella and Valanice got home, and you have a plot that's a jumbled mess complete with an unsatisfying, "deus ex machina" filled ending.

And they all lived stupidly ever after

And that's where the rose-tinted glasses don't save this game. I still have a great deal of affection for the game. I love the music (the gravedigger song in Ooga Booga land will be stuck in my head until the day I die), I love the beautiful places you can visit, I love the side characters (Jackalope for president!), I love the art design, and I love the puzzles. I just hate everything that has to do with the characters I'm in control of, which makes replays of this game a sort of bittersweet reunion. 

Maybe I'm just being too picky, but if you don't believe me I encourage you to pick up the game and run through it again. If you are willing to overlook these rather glaring faults in the name of nostalgia, I commend you. For me, I'll still keep buying this game if they keep selling it to me, but in the end I begin to wonder if it's out of unbridled affection or just habit at this point. 

You can get it and the atrocious abomination known as King's Quest VIII: Mask of Eternity for $10 off Good Old Games. Personally, I'd suggest picking up their previous pack (which has King's Quests IV, V, and VI for $10) first, since you are basically playing $10 for King's Quest VII which, as stated, hasn't particularly aged gracefully (like Valanice, M I RITE?). They should really just take it away from that horrible eighth game and sell it on its own for like $5, but since that is currently your only option it's up to you.

For a star rating, I'd say three out of five. Yes, I complained a great deal about this game, but even just writing this review made me want to ignore its faults and play through it again, which is a sign of a game that still works despite its flaws. If you don't have any nostalgia for it, though, dock a point from the final score. 

Wait, someone made Arch-Duke Fifi 'la YipYip fanart? A BILLION OUT OF FIVE.