Developed by Hanako Games and published by Ratalaika Games, Long Live the Queen is a brand-new visual novel strategy title in which your goal is to train a princess to be a queen and try your best to keep her safe as well. Long Live the Queen has been out on PC for more than 10 years and now the game is finally heading to consoles bringing the iconic visual novel art style and the complete experience to consoles. This is our review of the PS5 version of Long Live the Queen in which we learn to rule a kingdom and hang our own uncle for treason.
Long Live the Queen follows the life of the young princess Elodie who recently lost her mother, the Queen, and now she must train and grow up to be the new Queen. She is living in the castle of Nova and preparations have already started for making her the new Queen of Nova so she has only a few weeks before her coronation. During these few weeks, Elodie must train, develop her skills across a vast tree of knowledge, try to keep the kingdom under control, and keep the assassins at bay as well since she is currently the most important person in the whole kingdom. All of this falls down on your shoulder as you are in charge of choosing the princess’ fate and her decisions which could make her the Queen of Nova or make her dead before that happens.
The gameplay of Long Live the Queen is basically just you choosing between different things. Basically, the game wants you to train the princess so she can become a good queen. The definition of good is however not straightforward and depending on how you train the princess, she will become a different type of queen for everyone. This is the beauty of this game because it is extremely heavy on choices, and this makes every playthrough of the game a different one. One of the key mechanics at play here at the princess’s mood. Depending on her mood, the princess will take interest in certain skills and absolutely detest others. Each day, you have to choose one class for the morning and one class for the evening.
The classes will increase the princess’s mastery of that particular skill. These skills range from everything that you could think of including weapons, faith, history, royal demeanor, agility, and a lot more. Each of these main categories has further three options to choose from as well. For example, if you decide to teach her weapons, you can choose from Swords, Archery, and Polearms. Similarly, Conversation comes with Public Speaking, Court Manners, and Flattery. Keep this going and each of the main categories has a further three options however you can only choose one for each class of the day. Two classes each day means that you can enhance only two skills of the princess each day.
These are then affected by the mood as well. For example, if the princess is feeling Willful, she will take interest in subjects like Intrigue, the Military, and Lumen. On the other hand, she will not take interest in subjects like Royal Demeanor, History, and Economics. For me, the hardest skill was to teach my princess Royal Demeanor. No matter how hard I tried and changed her mood up and down, she would always not take an interest in Royal Demeanor, and it was always in the penalty zone. Maybe because the princess just saw her mother die and she was in no mood for royal courtesies. However, even with all of the penalties, I managed to slowly build up the skill eventually since it is the most suitable for the Queen to learn if she is to rule over her country.
But that is just my thought. In your playthrough, you can just ignore all royal status and just train a queen who is absolutely vicious in battle and has a mind for the best war strategies with plenty of Military training. This is what I really liked about Long Live the Queen you have complete control over how you want to train your princess. You can keep your mood in check and always go for favorable moods for the skills that you want to train the princess in and then go ahead with that build. After your classes are over, you can go out and do various activities that will affect your mood. For example, you can sit in the court with your father, or you could go to the garden and walk by yourself. Each of these activities affects your overall mood which in return, affects the skills you can learn the next day in classes.
Between this, random events will also happen where your learned skills come into play. Sometimes you will need to decide whether to execute someone or not or sometimes you will need to make important decisions to support your allies in war and send your troops. Nearly all of the time, you will need a good command of relevant skills to make proper decisions. For example, a woman approached me for constructing a hospital in my kingdom for treating ill people but since I lacked the proper skill and information, I just blatantly refused her. The game did not even give me an option to choose from. When you have the right skill, the game will give you the option of choosing and this is basically what you want with the most important decisions in the game. My strategy for my first playthrough was that I should have at least a basic knowledge about everything but there is just not enough time in the game, and you end up with a Queen that is pretty weak in all aspects. For my second playthrough, I went full military with weapons proficiency and during my third playthrough, I tried my princess to learn as much as possible as running the court while being the most traditional Queen possible. The game gives you complete freedom, and this is one of the reasons why this game has exceptional replay value.
The story and gameplay are similar to visual novels and there is very little audio narration in the game. Most are just text-based, and the story progresses in the form of a visual novel. The art style of the game is pretty basic and something that you would normally expect from a visual novel. These areas have different backgrounds, but the overall animations are pretty limited. The princess’ facial expressions change in the game based on her mood and apart from this, there are not many animations in the game. You can unlock different costumes and change the attire of the princess as well. Most of the tasks in the game are done on their own in the background and you only get a status report on the screen. Your decisions work in the background as well and you only get the results on the screen which could be sometimes an early death because the life of a princess is not easy and assassins are very where to kill her.
Long Live the Queen is a blast to play if you have been playing titles like this before. It is simple in concept and exceptionally detailed in terms of depth and gameplay. The game portrays the royal issues in a very authentic way and lets you loose on a kingdom that you can rule any way you want. The controls are perfectly fine on the PS5, and I do not remember a single instance where I thought that this game will be better to play on a PC. The PS5 controller works just as fine to play the game as a mouse and keyboard would. The game reminds me a lot of Sort the Game however with added features where you must build your character’s skills and watch out for their mood as well along with the people in your kingdom and other nations around you. It is a pretty fun game and one that demands a lot of time if you are a completionist.
Final Verdict:
Although the game might appear to be simple enough, it brings enough of a challenge to keep your sanity in place. With all of the different moods and random events happening and with a huge tree of skills to go through, the game quickly picks up the pace and you are left with no clue what to develop first and which ones to stop using. The game offers an insane amount of replayability with each playthrough giving you different opportunities based on your choices and in-game events making it a good purchase for players who are looking to invest a lot of time in their games. With its visual novel style gameplay, tons of endings to go for and plenty of tasks to complete, and a lot of skills to learn Long Live the Queen is a game that offers hours of fun and challenge.
Final Score: 8.0/10
