Long Live the Queen

Zach Goodier

In the aftermath of the Steam sale, we have some cheap games to go over, and here’s one of them: Long Live the Queen.  This is a simple, yet sophisticated game that has you assuming the role of running the day-to-day life of a young princess in anticipation of her coronation ceremony after the death of her mother.  Sounds fairly tedious, at first, but there is a surprising amount of complexity to this, and the events that occur throughout the game make things a real challenge.  Let me explain, All you actually do is schedule the princess’s daily schedule, whether you train her in academics, physical exercise, or courtly manners.  The interesting part comes when the princess has encounters between daily activities that test her various areas of ability, and if you slack in these key areas, it can result in disaster. 

If you fail, you will have killed a 14 year old girl, so... no pressure.

For starters, think of this as the same vein of games that you’d find Japanese dating simulators in, just without the romance.  Very little animation exists in the game aside from scene transitions.  Your dialogue is all via text, with some basic facial expressions accompanying to match the tone the character is using.  So this game is not a visually active game.  The story is fairly simple, and while it isn’t too bad, it doesn’t generally excite all that much. 

Seems daunting at first glance, but the whole things is relatively straight-forward.  It's trying to cover all these bases that becomes the real challenge.

The key to mastering this game lies in the princess’s moods, which can boost or hinder various areas of study that you plan for her.  The secret to teaching is mastering your student, because if you assign her classes and her moods distract her from that particular area of study, then she won’t learn much, which means you’re essentially wasting your time.  However, if you learn the patterns, and how to control the moods, then you can cover a lot of ground very quickly.  Mastering different areas can unlock different outfits for the princess.  They provide skill bonuses, but that’s not why they’re really included, and we all know it.  Being an anime-type game, this feeds into the otaku urges of its fan-base well, even though it’s a young girl.

If you see this, don't think something kinky is about to happen, it means your princess is dead.

There are a few issues, however, but that’s not surprising with a small indie title like this.  I don’t like that you can just control the moods of the princess so easily.  Also, I had hoped for more random events, but they’re scripted for the most part.  However, you can make choices within the story itself that have an impact.  You choices do shape your developing princess, with ruthless militarism usually resulting in a colder, dominating figure, while courtly etiquette and decorating result in a much more stereotypical princess.  Think of her as a lump of clay that you are trying to mold into an effective figurehead, and how you play might teach you something about yourself.  However, the challenge is in getting her to survive, and over committing to one area will leave her vulnerable in all of the others, and even if you try to balance, you’ll probably still die.  The challenge is finding the RIGHT balance(s) between ruthless dictator and benevolent beauty so you can create an effective leader, and you won’t get everything right, this game is more about getting it right when it counts.

 

How will the queen you mold (if she lives) be remembered?

Overall, this was a fairly entertaining game with a great amount of depth, and if you keep in mind what you’re paying, you feel pleasantly surprised at the options in how to approach the game, yet frustrated at challenge before you in simply getting this young lady to her coronation without succumbing to politics, invasions, or assassination.  The main drawback is that the real secret to overcoming everything is just trial and error in figuring out which skills you have to train first, and which have to come in later.  This can really hurt replay value once you’ve discovered the right formula, so the depth is lost once you try really diving into it.  Still, for the money, you’re getting a solid game, it just takes time, patience, and probably a few extra save files to get through all the tests successfully.

Good:

-Entertaining challenge in learning the mechanics and how to get the princess’s skills up effectively.

-A fun mix of simple and challenging to create a game that dares you to beat it.

-The price is very right.

Bad:

-Formulaic and too controlled, making replay value plummet once you've figured out what order to do things in.

-Plenty of random ways to die, where you feel like there was nothing you could have done to avoid death (there was, you just needed to research decorating instead of archery.... Dummy).

Scully Rating: 7 out of 10