Long Live The Queen

The Short

Pros
- A "reimagining" of the old Princess Maker games...but more violent!
- Lots of varying events and activities help make multiple playthroughs different
- Single playthrough is relatively short; usually around 45 minutes to 1 hour
- Crunching numbers and min/maxing is surprisingly satisfying

Cons
- Not much to the game aside from stat raising
- Due to both the randomness and just how the game is set up, it's almost impossible to determine which stats to raise, and how high
- Emotions play a role in boosting/leveling skills, but nothing tells you what emotions do which things, meaning you can get stuck
- Deaths are frequent, and often appear random
- Only like two songs. Will drive you crazy.

Hope you like text. And bars. And numbers. 

The Long

The best part about video games is the massive range they can cover. The Stanley Parable, a semi-linear story-driven experience where the only "gameplay" is walking? Totally a game. Call of Duty, where you shoot dudes and it's like a summer blockbuster? Game. Wall Street Kid...let's just not talk about that one.

Anyway, Long Live The Queen is an interesting example of how games can be completely...different from each other. Based (sort of) on the old Princess Maker games that I never really played, Long Live The Queen tasks you with the princess soon-to-be-queen Elodie, who is a total blithering idiot when she comes to you. It's your job to decide what path her studies take her, and in that way the story will change. That's it. That's the whole game. Well, minus her dying. A lot. 

If that sounds interesting, read on!

Haven't seen this may bars since my trip to Ireland! (ba bum, chish)

The story is...well...honestly a bit mild, but it's also how you make it. Elodie is a fourteen (or fifteen? who cares) year old princess who will now become queen. Her dad, the King, is still alive, so...why do we need a queen again? Why is she so important? Is this a matriarchy, then? It's pretty clear from the get-go that your dad (usually) has to do what you say, but why is that? These things are never explained. 

While it isn't Game of Thrones levels of crazy political nastiness (though there is an army across the sea that can potentially invade, as well as a bunch of crazy in-house conspiracies), the game does a decent enough job of mixing up stuff that playthroughs feel mostly unique. And, when Elodie is failing every test left and right for poise, foreign knowledge, and even her own customs, you actually get a bit invested in trying to keep her afloat as she is completely overwhelmed. The game also has dozens of endings (most of them bad) and the paths to branch quite frequently. Play as a warlord and you'll see quite a different outcome later on than if you play it cool and simply exist to charm the court. 

The only downer is the beginning segments (before things can branch off) do tend to stay the same, though there are still enough random elements that it ends up being at least ok. Not the most compelling story ever, but interesting enough to get me invested. 

Expect to see a lot of Elodie making an idiot of herself. 

The "gameplay" segments are interesting, but often feel like random guesswork. To put it simply, there's 14 different categories where you can teach her stuff, and within these 3 specific focuses. That gives us a whopping 98 stats you can level, and with only 40 weeks in a game and the ability to raise two of those stats a week, you can't possibly max even a small percentage of them. Your first run (and maybe many future ones) will mostly involve dumb luck, failing every prompt that shows.

However, it's a game designed to be played this way. As you bludgeon your way through constant failures, never knowing what exactly you should be leveling, you'll revel in the small victories. And you'll being to understand how the game really works: min/maxing. Pick a focus, and burn all your time into it. Making her a jack-of-all-trades is a great way to fail early, even with many prompts being a bet more lenient and allowing you to pass if just one of a multitude of skills is leveled properly. 

Unfortunately, it's actually leveling these skills that Long Live the Queen's biggest problem emerges.

This thing is the bane of my existence.

See, the only way you can min/max her stats properly and with any sense of speed (only forty weeks, remember) is playing the emotions game. Based on Elodie's emotions, some skills will level faster than others. Being Angry, for example, gives a boost to Military should you choose to level it. Being Yielding adds a hefty chunk of points to her courtly mannerisms if you choose to invest (but will be cut down if she's depressed, afraid, or lonely). Every week you are given one chance to "flux" her emotions in a few directions, but there's so many and the amount gained so arbitrary, you have little to no actual control over it. 

What's worse is the game doesn't tell you what emotions govern which stat. For my entire first playthrough I couldn't level her poise because she started depressed (a -1 to it, meaning all experience gained is halved) and I couldn't for the life of me find out what to raise to make it work. There are no tooltips, no help options, nothing to give you hints, save perhaps taking extensive notes on the side or using a wiki. This lead to me basically just leveling the stuff that currently had the biggest boost, making her a bit one-sided (mostly in military) and ultimately bringing her to an untimely end because, while she was a sword master, she had no physical capabilities at all. Whoops?

You can also unlock weird clothes. 

The only other real "mechanic" is that, should you get any "set" of skills (read: the three that group together) to 30 or higher, you'll unlock a costume she can wear. This provides a decent boost to that category's skills, meaning you could (theoretically) equip it if you knew you'd need a boost the following day, but the only way you'd know that was via save-scumming, and at that point the game stops being fun. The costumes also range from "ok" to "absurd," with the "Magical Girl" outfit she wears upon learning magic completely stupid looking and not fitting the theme of the game. I get they're kind of trying to be silly, but it doesn't fit with the grisly death graphics and awful things going on to have her wear a tutu when she declares war on a foreign country because she was too stupid to study politics. 

Frustrations aside, it's addicting to level her up, and you sort of get into a groove after playing it a bit as to what you want to build towards. A big portion of the game is just giving up, realizing you will never know what the next week may require, and just pounding points into stuff randomly and hoping for the best. Not much of a game (there "strategy" here is near non-existent), but still oddly entertaining.

Oh I just can't wait to be queen.

Graphically...it's basically a visual novel, though I'd say it's a low-level one. The art is generally decent, especially of Elodie (and her weird "chibi" death scenes), but character portraits seriously look like the same people with different hair from time to time, and everybody is drawn in a style that makes them seem just out of high school, even the adults. It basically recycles the same 3-4 backgrounds for the whole game (you almost never leave the castle), so I'd imagine most of the graphical work went into Elodie's outfits. 

The music starts soft and carefree and quickly becomes intolerable, with one piano piece always playing during the portion of the game where you pick her lessons (and sometimes during the "plot" bits as well), with only two or three other music tracks breaking the monotony. My suggestion: turn off the music, turn on some dubstep, and have the most drop-tastic, bomb-bastic queen you can roll out.

SWORDED!

So...is Long Live The Queen worth your time? Well...I couldn't have gone over the game more (though watching someone play could help you get a better understanding. Keep an eye out on my YouTube Channel!), so if you like what you've been seeing than, by all means, give it a shot. The developers have a free demo on their site that's pretty extensive, and since the game is basically the same thing over and over if you like the demo, you'll like the game.

It's a hard sell, though, because mostly what I see is potential that isn't fully realized. With a better UI and more branching paths (And maybe less stuff to have to level and research, or lower costs to "pass" certain plot-wise tests) I could see this game being a very viable visual novel with a cool twist, and a true modern successor to the Princess Maker games. As of right now, however, it's more a toy than a game, something you play around in and mess with a bit, but don't really strategize or get too heavily invested in. Which is a pity, because it could be so much more.

It's running $10 normally on Steam and GoG, though I waited for the inevitable $5 price drop, which made it a much easier pill to swallow. For that price, it's a gleeful waste of time, and I'll confess I burned through it several times in my attempts to get Elodie on the throne. 

And most of them resulted in her death. Being queen suuuuuucks.

Two out of five stars. (but still recommended!)

What is this I don't even