Galaxy Princess Zorana

This is [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/251990/Long_Live_The_Queen/]Long Live the Queen[/url], but in space. Same dev - Hanako Games. Been asking her for another LLtQ-like game for ages (in comments and reviews, not directly like a crazy person), and she finally delivered. BUT IN SPACE. The princess Zorana is a [i]very distant[/i] descendant of Elodie from LLtQ, but this doesn't take place on one particular planet. The palace is - I imagine - a mobile space station of sorts, and it travels around the galaxy, from planet to planet. Via Imperial Election, some mf can challenge Zorana's place as heir, and someone does, and thus, the whole point of the game begins. You can blackmail people into voting for Zorana, [i]but[/i] pissing people off can lead to a bunch of assassination attempts. Most electors have some scandals on record, but there are some who are just straight-up horrible people that you wish Zorana would send assassins of her own after. Of course, Zorana can be evil if you want her to be. Just like in LLtQ, there are several ways to die, with cute chibi images to accompany them. COLLECT THEM ALL. It's an achievement! There are only two true romance options, Zorana's two friends: Kxenia and Vasily. Kxenia is willing to marry. Vasily is only willing to be a concubine. And yes, you can have them both at the same time. All other marriages are political and tend to be business-like, with little affection or romance in the epilogue. There are cat people, bird people, dragon people, green people, and fun combinations of aliens. And there are mysteries to be solved. Who doesn't love being like "WTF is this sh!t?" and yearning to investigate further? Do I recommend it? F*ckin' A. (Affirmative.)

As someone who played 20+ hours of Long Live the Queen, suffice it to say I was very excited to play this one. Unfortunately this game doesn't quite do it for me--the choices feel a lot flatter, the attempts on the character's life a lot more random (and therefore harder to solve around), and the cast/plot is overall a lot less compelling. I found myself getting frustrated and not terribly curious about any of the questions put forward by the game. Somehow the game appears larger than LLTQ, but overall there seem to be fewer viable paths. Maybe it has something to do with the random death pacing? If there was expansion DLC fleshing out a little more of the character cast/gameplay I would try again, but as it stands, the gameloop feels more overwhelming but less compelling than LLTQ

Since time immemorial, humanity has pondered the great quandaries of the universe. In 2012, Hanako games finally brought us the answer to one of those most burning questions which had haunted us since the dawn of civilization: "What if Game of Thrones, but with cute anime characters?" And the world breathed a sigh of relief, and all was good. Or so we thought. For another question yet remained. A question that refused to be silenced, a question that demanded an answer! "What if Game of Thrones but with cute anime characters... in space?" Now at last, after many years Hanako has again emerged to at last give us our answer. It has cute characters. It has pretty dress up outfits. It has fluffy cat people. And it has brutal politicking, murderous backstabbing, ruthless blackmailing, and bloodthirsty assassination on all sides. And it is good. Hold on to your royal shoes, because it's gonna be a wild ride.

Long Live the Queen is a hard act to follow. There's some interesting new stuff here - the business of moving the castle around and choosing who to visit is cool, and the explicit time pressure is good. The fundamental gameplay remains the same, you're learning to navigate a maze-like narrative, and it has multiple endings, various types of goodness. Definitely one of the better games in the genre, but this didn't feel like a revelation, the way that LLTQ did. Then again, I am significantly older now than I was then. This is good, well worth the time and the money. But I don't find myself as curious about how to get to the various endings as I was last time around.

this game is also gay

之前一直没写评价，补一下吧。 怎么说呢，想了下还是给了好评，但如果是打分制的话，我给的分肯定是明显低于女王万岁的。 一些其他的问题我看别的差评也有提及，比如实际剧情分支没有女王万岁多，很多角色对政治过于儿戏，谁陪她玩选谁当皇帝之类……这个问题确实存在，但我觉得最影响我游戏体验的还不是这个。 写小说时我们常常会给新手一个建议：展示而非告知。不要把大段的设定直接叙述出来，而是要通过一个情节来自然而然地展示。然而在这个游戏里，“告知”的部分实在是远远大于展示……女王万岁里不少信息也是在上课过程中了解的，但是对这些信息的运用却是体现在情节中的。然而在GPZ这边，无关剧情的”告知“实在是太多了。我每来到一个星球，马上就是大段的地理文化设定，然后每一个选帝侯出场，外貌描写，自我介绍。他们每个人都有自己的背景经历人际关系，但这些东西都是我点击调查按钮之后直接以大段文字叙述给我看的……有时候我甚至觉得这不是一个剧情文字游戏，这是谁家oc设定集= =我想着可能是GPZ没有女王万岁耐玩的最重要的原因吧。 After some hesitation I finally decided to give a recommend, but if I could rate for it, my rating for GPZ would be significantly lower than LLTQ. I've read other comment and I do agreed with some negative reviews: the actual plot branches were fewer, some Electors just treating politics like children's play and vote for whoever agree to play with them, or ask Zorana to do something that should not be expected for an empress. These problems do exist, but they're not what really damaged my game experience. A common advice for novice writers: Show rather than tell. It would be better to show your world & character backgrounds in story naturally rather than just tell it to your readers in straightforward narration. However, in GPZ I've seen much more "telling" than "showing". In LLTQ there're straightforward narration for character's background stories as well, but you will be able to use them to affect the story later. While in GPZ, there're too much narration that doesn't even have anything to do with the story. Whenever I come to a new planet, I see bunch of introductions for its geography and culture, then each Electors just come to me with bunch of descriptions for their appearance, character and family background. Yes, each of them has their own unique experience and stories and relationships, but they are simply "told" to me via long paragraphs of text, and what I need to do is just press a button. Sometimes I even forgot that this is a strategy game because I feel that I was reading an Original Character Design Collection. For me this is why GPZ feel less interesting than LLTQ.

This game was an unexpected surprise. There's a lot more depth to the game, than would appear on first glance. Surviving the assassinations is the weakest part of the game: a meta game of trial and error. Reload a previous save and train different skills, or try another room. That sours the initial impression of the game. There is logic as to which skills help with surviving an attack, but you can't train them all in a limited time and you cannot predict what kind of attack comes next and when it will happen, unless you played before. The political game has a lot more substance. The NPCs can have positive or negative relations with each other and seem to care about what happens around them. The options to manipulate them include bribery, charm, blackmail and quests and there's usually more than one way and often with consequences. The main story arc is mostly lineair with some branching paths and the assassinations appear to happen only on certain conditions, that depend a lot on the advancement of the story and also on the location and approval scores. The political game is non-lineair and you have a lot of freedom here to choose your own path. You can approach this challenge more naturally on a first run. Winning isn't really that hard, as long as your PC survives the murder attemps, but the real challenge only comes after that, which is figuring out all the hidden mysteries in the game. Now the game becomes more of a puzzle of trying to optimize a run; getting all the good bonusses early and skipping careful investigations on NPCs, before acting. The best way for a new player to get into this game, is to play as the nice, diplomatic princess (and choose the snake pet), because you get fewer assassinations that way and that approach makes the most sense for a normal character in this role. Very early in the game, in a fixed bit of dialogue, you also receive the advice to appoint ministers quickly. Don't ignore that text. It's critical advice. You don't have to, though. The alternative ways to play this game are much more interesting, both the challenges and the story branches, but require fore knowledge to plan out (or a lot of lucky guess work, but far more likely reloading old savegames). The lore and the characters are interesting, but you have to dig for a lot of it, by doing things the hard way.

I liked this game a lot and I don't normally like this style of game. In comparison to Hanako Game's previous game called Long Live the Queen, I feel like there was a lot of improvement in the fluid storytelling and being able to branch out and choose different events did make the game seem a lot more immersive than the previous game in the series. I especially liked the sci-fi setting and I appreciate the thought that went into the cultural considerations of the alien species.

every time i open the game i lose 6 hours of my life. thank u

Oh this is a very good one. I like the mood system for adjusting what you can focus on studying, since it keeps you from min/maxing too easily, though sometimes it'd be nice to have a warning when a choice was about to change your mood away from one you'd been working towards. I also like how some of your skills will give you information that lets you know what the important skills are for a choice you're about to make. Music's also good, writing is solid, there are a lot of choices and paths... if I could make one complaint it might be that Empathy and Rhetoric seem a bit too regularly compared to the other skills, but perhaps other paths make them more relevant. Another certified Hanako Games banger.