Title: Review - Long Live The Queen Date: 2011-11-11 00:00 Category: Reviews Tags: steam, games, os x Slug: review-long-live-the-queen Author: bryfry Summary: Review of Hanako Games’ Long Live The Queen

Long Live The Queen had a sarcastic enough trailer to interest me.
After spending a few hours playing it I have some positive and negative thoughts to share.

LLTQ is a choose your own adventure style stat management RPG game that follows the 40 weeks prior to Princess Elodie’s coronation. The game mechanics consist of:

• Examining current skills/mood/outfit
• Scheduling weekly classes (stat improvement),
• Choosing weekend activities (mood altering),
• Interaction sequences (choices).

Read the wiki for more info.

The story is interesting and enough plot elements occur to look past the feminine interfaces. I actually couldn’t tell if the interfaces were tongue in cheek, or if they were actually trying to target a female demographic. Either way, it was a fun and playable game that kept my interest for a number of deaths (you die a lot).

My real criticism takes issue with the mechanics that end up being most of the user experience Every week you engage in the above mentioned four actions to effect your character’s story: each interface has issues, but overall they could have been combined into a single view.

The first interface shows the current skills:

The biggest thing missing in this view is which mood is causing the buffs/nurfs shown next to the Class Categories. I mostly just fumbled around in the dark, manipulating the moods in order to target specific Class Categories, but it was far from intuitive.

The next most-frequented interface shows the possible classes to be taken each morning and evening.

All of these are identical Class Categories and Classes as seen in the skills view, but for some reason the interface has been changed. I assume this is to make it easier to click and choose, however, it ended up being very difficult to remember which course I wanted to take. A normal week you need to look at your buff’s in order to determine which classes are the best to take (highest multiples). I ended up switching back and forth many times, as I couldn’t remember the 2nd class I wanted to take after I had found the first. There are lots of ways to fix this but at the very least, keeping a similar visual mapping (horizontal / vertical) can really help.

Finally the mood interface is just too big.

Four sliding scales do not need their own view. Which brings these critiques back to the original one: All of these choices and views really could be shown in one view. Real keyboard shortcuts would help too.

Overall, aside from the frustrations with the interface, the game was fun and playable. It was technical and skill optimization focused enough for me to find it interesting, but I could also see it being entertaining for others purely for the storytelling aspects.