Galaxy Princess Zorana

during turn 20, it may get harder for her to make the right choice(s) and hold on until turn 21

A worthy sequel to Long Live The Queen and a very fun and frustrating (fun-strating?) time!

[i]”All hail Zorana, Empress-Elect of the Celestial Empire”[/i] [i]Galaxy Princess Zorana[/i] is a game centred around its ending; it is all about the destination, but the journey is different for everyone. You craft your own allies, your own skills, your own adventure, your own princess, and across a multitude of playthroughs (probably), you harness the knowledge required to reach this one fabled line of text. Reading this declaration of victory is a great catharsis, and there is a sense of true accomplishment with your first electoral triumph. The major strength of this game is that you feel you really earned your win as a result of your expert political maneuvering. But it is also a journey that is supremely frustrating at times, with multiple seemingly random stat checks, lopsided effort and payoff, and the constant, legitimately stressful, feeling that time is slipping through your fingers. If you do not mind constant save-scumming and loss of progress (including full run resets), this is a fantastic story-driven game that achieves your dream of politically outsmarting the whole galaxy. There is no doubt that the story is the main draw of [i]Galaxy Princess Zorana[/i], and it is well written. Electors across the galaxy feel unique, and you learn to take note of every single detail they tell you in case it can help influence their vote in the future. They each have their own interests, skills, dirt you can dig up to blackmail them, and most importantly I think, their own starting opinion of you. It feels really realistic to me that some votes fall straight into your lap while others you must fight tooth and nail to secure, some people are just harder to convince than others in real life as well. It helps build a political tapestry of the cosmos as you travel around planets asking yourself which votes are reasonable battlefields and which are lost causes. I think this is a fantastically realized decision making process for the player, and probably the best thing about the game. There’s an added layer of complexity since you can purposefully save time by not 100% securing a vote under the assumption that that elector likes you enough to vote for you anyway (but wouldn't you rather have full confidence…) The main way you convince electors is by completing their personal side quests, which always locks in their vote. While these side quests are cute stories on their own, I will admit that they feel a little removed from the main plot. It doesn’t fully track that being able to clear an escape room would in any way influence your political progress. Because you can meet your electors in any order, their stories need to be entirely self-contained, and they never interact with each other. It’s a shame since it would help sell the realism even more if you could see characters react and change to actions you take outside your meet-ups with them. Electors do have allies/enemies, so you can influence people’s support of you based on who you put on your team of advisors. But it is so hard to calculate the relationship web meaningfully that you often ignore it. After all, everyone has enemies aplenty, and you have to start striking ground somewhere. There are some overarching story elements, strongest among them a secret conspiracy surrounding the disappearance of your father, and a couple of decisions you make about intergalactic relations. While these are all interesting substories in their own right, the triggers for these storylines are generally obscure, and the ramifications are too far down to line to see coming or to prepare for in your first couple of runs, where every waking moment is devoted to making sure you don’t get assassinated at your next public appearance. In general, you get a lot more out of this game on replays, and there is a lot of replay value; similar to a roguelike, but instead of gaining stats you gain knowledge. This does mean that your first couple of runs are a little weaker on the story side - although you’re probably still familiarizing yourself with the world at this point so it’s fine. At a baseline, runs are not that long, and there are enough angles to approach becoming empress that they are not too similar, but there is undeniably a sense of futility and unpleasantness when you have to start a new save file for the fourth time after a lost election or an unavoidable assassination. There are a lot of mechanics under the hood of this game. I wouldn't consider any of them particularly complicated nor would I say this is a difficult game, but it can be overwhelming to be presented with your skill page with >40 unique stats to invest in, some as seemingly pointless as “Chain” or “Layout”. With so many options, and only being able to invest 2 points of growth each turn, it can be very unclear what the right choice is. But regardless of what you do, the game certainly wants to remind you made the [b]wrong[/b] choice. You are bombarded constantly with reminders that your Zorana is incompetent and failing every skill check the game has to offer. I kid you not, I’ve done side quests failing over 20 skill checks back to back. It’s incredibly discouraging when this happens and makes you feel like you have to reset back 5 turns to invest in “Tumbling” because silly you, it turns out this is an essential skill for becoming an empress. Many of these skill checks it turns out are purely decorative because they only unlock new flavour text, yet the presentation makes you feel like you have been playing incompetently - even though it’s obviously impossible to clear over half of them in any one given run. This would be my biggest complaint of the game, the negative reinforcement the game needlessly throws your way. In general though, the different mechanics of [i]Galaxy Princess Zorana[/i] work well. Travelling around the map is cool, collecting new outfits feels great (love the art for this game - should throw that out there!), and ministers are a neat way to get you “free votes” but a limited amount of times. [spoiler]The military feels like it makes you a little too popular, every game I got military support I won the election and vice versa. But I suppose it would be very difficult to win a real election without the military’s support.[/spoiler] Marriage can be a little underwhelming, it often feels like a trump card for securing a difficult voter and nothing else, but at least there are unique epilogues for each potential mate. Lastly, an apt comparison should be made to [i]Long Live the Queen[/i] the prequel of this game and obviously the most similar title (note that you do not need to play it before this, but there are some story connections). While the gameplay is functionally identical between the two games, I think their strengths and weaknesses also lie in different parts. LLTQ has a more “enclosed” story - almost all the characters have relationships with each other and you really craft your own narrative through your decisions, including completely different endings. GPZ feels less malleable in this regard: the ending is fixed, but the scale makes the final moment more epic. I would also say that the mystery is more compelling. One is about creating a story, the other leans more into uncovering and fulfilling it. They’re both fantastic games in the end though, and I truly believe both are worth your time if you have any amount of patience for occasional dead-ends that force you to reset back a couple turns.

A life/political sim in the vein of the same dev's [i]Long Live the Queen[/i]. As the crown princess of a space empire, you're thrust onto the throne after the Emperor dies in a tragic accident and have to consolidate support before somebody assassinates you. Made in the Ren'Py visual novel engine, so it's no surprise that most of the game is interacting with an array of characters. The writing is absolutely on point here, as everyone you meet has a unique personality. They're not just pretty faces, though. Your major objective is to secure their support in your bid for the throne. Most of the time, this means doing them a favor. Sometimes this favor involves babysitting their kid for a few hours. Sometimes it involves capturing a dangerous predatory beast from planetside. Sometimes it involves reading and commenting their extremely dirty M/M fanfics. In nearly all cases, it involves skill checks. Skills are the other big part of the game- there are over 40 of them, some more useful than others, and a hard time limit of 30-ish turns means you can't be the best at everything, so you need to prioritize what's most important to you. Fortunately, most events permit multiple successful approaches. Does this work as a game? Mostly, yes. After a few runs, you start thinking of it as a big puzzlebox. You need to plan out your travel route and your skill development to hit the right nobles when you have the skills to meet their requirements, in addition to following subplots which advance at certain times. You can really get into the weeds with strategy here. If I had a problem, it's that the story kinda gets lost in the shuffle. The main storyline essentially becomes a series of vignettes. Subplots abound, but aren't always easy to devote time and effort to following, especially since most of them don't have full resolution until the epilog. It's still fun, though. It took me several times, but I did manage to finally become the empress, thanks to a lot of strategy and note-taking, and when your plans come together, it's a rush to see them go off. Absolutely worth playing if you dig lifesim games, political sims, or figuring out complex game-length metapuzzles.

I really enjoyed long live the queen and I think I love this game even more. So many branching paths, and even going into the game blind like I did during my first round, I could make my way through (with minimal deaths). And there's countless ways to play, I managed to get to the end with no combat or weapon or pilot skills, just a lot of charisma and avoiding being alone.

Wonderful game! I got this a part of the Princess Pack with Long Live the Queen. And I know a lot of people prefer LLTQ due to nostalgia, but this one is incredible. I obsessively played this for hours not moving from my chair, which had not happened to me in a long time. I typically don't like "sci-fi" themed games, but I quickly got over it with how good the story is.