Ratalaika Games put together an interesting simulator/Choose-Your-Own-Adventure narrative-driven game with Long Live the Queen. You get to essentially raise and educate a young soon-to-be Queen in the art of everything. The joys of this game are the specific attributes you work with to develop the queen the way you see fit. The less-than-joyous parts of the game are the number of unpredictable scenarios that could potentially happen during your construction of a highness. There is some flip and some flop of positivity and negativity with Long Live the Queen. Let’s explore them.
It’s good to be Queen
The concept of Hanako Games’ Long Live the Queen is simple. The structure is that of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book and nothing really beyond that blueprint. You go into the game filling out specific categories for the queen, hoping that you have concentrated on the right ones when the dialogue in the game launches between rounds, and watch a story unfold that plays off those attribute choices. Sometimes it works out well, but for the most part, it’s usually more failure than success. Thankfully, much like a real CYOA book, the story doesn’t change, and you can replay it and concentrate on more successful attribute choices. That’s the name of this entire game, and it’s not bad because of that structure.
The beef of the game works in two parts: the building phase and the execution phase. The building phase is where you choose attributes or classes for the queen to build herself upon. For example, you may choose to concentrate on the category of history, which has Novan History, Foreign Affairs, and World History as subcategories. You can only choose one of the subcategories to concentrate and learn on in any single round. Once you choose one, you get a chance to choose another, and then those attributes are randomly judged on success (meaning you get full points for the category), failure (meaning there is an additional trait, such as being afraid, that harms that attribute), or you get a bonus with the attribute that allows you 10+pts of learning. The more points you have with attributes, the better the success when it comes to the storytelling of the game. Yeah, it’s a bit like DnD. However, the scale tips for your queen equal out to how she does in phase two, which is the execute phase. While I didn’t love the randomness of attribute success/failure/bonus, it did put a fun spin on what to build up and what to avoid. It’s a simple concept for a simple gameplay design.
The execute phase happens once you set and confirm your attributes. Once set, the game launches over to its story/dialogue phase which plays directly with the attributes you may or may not have chosen. In this phase, you learn if you can speak well, know history when certain parts are brought up, or if you’re good at things like dancing or royal demeanor. The first time around this phase can go in any direction because of the game’s seemingly random nature. Is that good or bad? Well, the positive is that this structure keeps the game interesting and keeps the gamer on their toes. The negative is that sometimes it causes more harmful effects on the upcoming queen and ignores any effort or skill that the gamer has made. It doesn’t make the game less fun, rather it just makes it more random and unnecessarily complicated. It does, however, also lead you back to playing the game again because the story structure doesn’t change. For example, if you don’t concentrate on Novan History and you are presented with that moment in the dialogue, then you can go back and do that the next time around. The righter choices you make, the further you go in the game. As the game progresses, the situations become more demanding and complicated, which makes for a fun time. This also potentially heightens the frustration factor of the game, something you will experience for sure, especially when you first start playing. There are plenty of mildly-frustrating scenarios in the game.
The story in Long Live the Queen is repeated when you ultimately win or fail at the game. This means, you can go back and play the same story, but make different choices along the way (be it attribute choices or dialogue choices). While the initial story is the same, what makes each experience different is the branching narrative element. If you succeed in an attribute category, you get different story choices and different responses. While this game isn’t crazy-huge with its branching, it does make for an interesting and replayable game that does bring a somewhat different experience each time. The replayability is heightened by the fact that you know what’s coming up and what attributes you should focus on in preparation for it. Of course, that shifts and changes with each success and branching narrative choice, but for the most part the groundwork is laid down for you to make better decisions. For me, that makes the game a bit more interesting, though I can’t count how many times I died and ended the game or became a servant to my kingdom as I was playing it. It was quite a few, and only the first few had me cursing.
Another factor in the game is how the queen’s mood is developing. The story revolves around the death of her mother and the burden of becoming a powerful ruler. She has mood attributes like afraid, depression, and yielding, which play into how well she rules. Between each round, there is a menu that allows you to build up or break down some of these mood attributes. The more even the mood attributes are, the better the queen will be. Keeping that balance is tough, which adds to some frustration as well. Just when you think you’re doing well, the story can knock those moods down a peg or two or lift them up. There is more former than latter when it comes to gameplay. They are just another wonderful cog in this overall machine.
Now, other odds and ends with the game include the ability to change the wardrobe the main character uses, which I know will make some customizable peeps happy. There are also options to generally check on the queen’s mood points and keep up with her stats. The stats menu will be your Godsend, as you will need to figure out how to balance out her training.
There’s nothing beyond all the above, which is fine because the game doesn’t want to go any deeper than that in gameplay. As the game is only $9.99 right now, it is worth every penny for this type of gameplay. It’s more fun than not, though it could get a bit tighter in some areas of gameplay like attribute choice.
Presentation of the game
As simple as the gameplay structure is for Long Live the Queen, the visuals and presentation are equally as simple. You essentially get two main screens for building and executing, as well as one screen for moods. All of those are filled with an anime-driven art style and are just still pictures for the most part. There isn’t anything particularly special about the art or how it is presented, which is fine because it is simple. They want you to concentrate on attributes and dialogue more than art and they accomplish this by not including animation or some unnecessary screen that offers nothing to the gameplay structure. The art is pretty, but it takes a back seat to the gameplay, as it should.
On that sweet note, let’s wrap this review up.
Conclusion
Long Live the Queen from Ratalaika Games is a simple and unpredictable simulator that offers up a minor amount of branching narrative moments and an attribute juggling extravaganza. It keeps it simple, somewhat fun, and at the same time mildly infuriating. While it acts as a choose-your-own-adventure novel, it does offer up the same amount of replay value one of those novels contains.
