[Review] Long Live the Queen - Nintendo Switch

Developed By: Hanako Games
Published By: Ratalaika Games
Categories: Sim
Release Date: 07.15.22

Alright, time to come clean. I played a lot of those stat based dating sims on Newgrounds back in the day. I’m willing to bet a lot of people did. Though…perhaps I should have played them more, or just paid more attention to the stat growing aspect, because Long Live the Queen is giving me some real nostalgia and it was kicking my ass.

Long Live the Queen is a bit of a princess or queen rather maker. Consider the Princess Maker games, but actually aimed at girls and not otaku. We on the same page now? Great. Hope you like playing number games and reading a whoooole bunch of text.

Elodie is but 14 years old, but now is set to earn the title of Queen after her mother has passed. Naïve, immature, perhaps a bit uneducated, she’ll need to be put up to speed soon before given the crown and throne.

The main gameplay loop is sending Elodie to class to learn, then on the weekend doing events that could effect her mood, or perhaps things more dire. But we’ll get into that later. Elodie will need to learn all things important in life. Social speaking, politics, animals, sports, swordplay, manners! There’s a lot of classes to take, maybe an overwhelming amount, but you’re going to want to take them. Depending on Elodie’s mood, she’ll excel at certain classes, and perhaps in others, outright not get anything out of it but wasted time. After the week of classes though, you have plenty of choices for activity. These like earlier mentioned help with mood, depending of which you pick. There’s also a few story based activities you can do with unknown mood changers.

The weekends are went vital events happen as well. Before or after your activities, your learning will be put to the test. Parts like this make me wish I had a guide next to me, as there we so many events that go by telling me I failed a test. I’m left wondering, how was I supposed to know which class to pick or if it just go full ham with it. Sometimes this is inconsequential. Sometimes, it really isn’t and can lead to your death.

Long Live the Queen in fact has many endings. And many unique deaths for Elodie. Of which all of these are logged. So there’s plenty of replayability in Long Live the Queen. This all depends on how you handle Elodie’s stats, so get to min-maxing!

Looks and presentation wise, I’m really quite mixed. I like how the character art and backgrounds look. Everything else seems really basic and really cheap. It’s really what cemented that “newgrounds” feel to me. There’s a lot of text and a lot of numbers. But that brings up another issue I have, this is purely a numbers game. You can always rewind and redo choices, but if you stats aren’t high enough, it doesn’t really matter. And all of this makes me *really* wish I’d play with a guide.

All of this aside, I do think there’s interest to be had for Long Live the Queen. I was invested in the story, I really tried hard to not get Elodie killed. But like I said, bring a guide.