30 Aug

Long Live the Queen

Filed under: PC Games No Responses

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This is the one true queen outfit in this game as far as I’m concerned!

I first heard about this from the game diary threads on Broken Forum and promptly put it on my wishlist. I don’t have a lot of experience with these visual novel type games though I do know that Long Live the Queen has more in the way of game mechanics than most VNs. Some thoughts after finishing:

  • It’s much shorter and simpler than I expected. I wasn’t expecting something as huge as Academagia, but it’s still pretty short. You could finish a playthrough in a single day if you’re dedicated. Two days, max. Granted, you could spend a lot of time on it if you really want to get all the endings and all the achievements but most people aren’t completionists anyway.
  • The game mechanics are simple. There are only 40 weeks,which amount to turns. Each week you decide what morning and afternoon classes to take and what extra activity to do on the weekend. This mainly decides your mood for the following week. There is also usually at least one event every week to deal with. There seems to be pretty much no randomness at all. All events are pre-scripted and will trigger at the appropriate times given that conditions are met. I actually thought there would be at least some random events.
  • The moods are innovative here. Learning progression is determined by them, for example, when you’re angry you learn military and weapon skills faster. In practice, this means that you want to keep all of your moods near neutral most of the time so that they will be easier to switch around as you like using your weekend activity.
  • Playing the game to completion actually is rather hard, especially if you’re aiming for a good ending. I’m irked that success depends on trial and error, as well as memorizing events since they’re all pre-scripted. Most of it comes down to having just the right sequence of lessons and mood changes for the challenges you want to win, exacerbated by the fact that a number of the skills are almost never used. I guess there is some entertainment value in going through all of the possibilities but I would have preferred a game in which you can actually plan well and strategize.

The upshot here is that I found it kind of neat but a lot less substantial than I had expected. The story is just okay and I wish there had been more art for all of the special events. Now that I’ve satisfied my curiosity, I think I’ll stick to more traditional game formats.

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You’ll probably skip the skill up flavour text without even realizing they’re there!
Written on August 30 2014 and is filed under PC Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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