I hate game that pretend to give you option only to say "you know what?I changed my mind" and slap you across the face.Lost my interest the second the unavoidable rape dead end scene started being a thing.Would give zero out of 10 if it wasnt for the decent art and the fact that i dont think its possible to rate it zero.
Bottom-line: Can Queen's Glory be played for some CGs and a baseline resemblance of a game with either functional mechanics or storylines? Yes. Is Queen's Glory anything else? No.
A quick summary first:
decent CG
bare-bone VA (but voice acting exists!)
insufficient storyline (but it exists, maybe)
insufficient game mechanics
poor writing <-- note: when you have no mechanics, and no writing, how are you supposed to have a story?
bad UI/UX for today's standards
a single playthrough is probably ~2-3hr
you will most likely need to restart from scratch once in order to beat the game, which is quick and a non-issue; but if that prospective absolutely frustrates you...
The basic premise of Queen's Glory is that you role-play a princess made queen who needs to use her body in addition to making a series of text-based decisions so your country's military+political+economical situation grows out of a crushing military defeat.
The premise is good. The premise is unique even. The premise is not executed to any sufficient extent. You will be reading and comparing integers. You will realize the decisions result in net gain in total stats so you are free to trade one stat for another to meet your assigned goals -- the realization of such tells you that you "beat" the game's mechanics. So you will be back to reading and comparing integers.
Need political stability with the nobility? You shall get an integer to be >=40. Need military prowess to escape the grasp of a bullying neighbor? Well, you will presumably need another integer to be >= some other integer, the latter of which the game won't tell you (nor give you an intel mission to find out -- you wish). etc etc
The writing in Queen's Glory is naive. The writing doesn't feel realistic; is not particularly constructed to build mood, suspense, progression, a character's mental state etc etc -- whatever you think of may be suitable in the context is not there, hence, etc etc. Btw, progression of the kingdom-building is in the writing of the missions and the scaling of those integers. But progression of characters are practically absent. So it's not literally 100% ineffective writing. Just to be accurate. The writing is... naive.
The writing is paced to be quick to skim through, and given that, in itself poor writing is not a cardinal sin for an H-game. But H-game is nonetheless meant to be an interactive and immersive experience that is summed up by the word "game" on top of a series of conceptual storyboard drawings that makes the "H" part. When the mechanics is bare-bone and writing doesn't do the job of portraying any mood or character or whatever else, how are you supposed to have stories, have immersion, and ultimately, have a game?
It is the combination of lacklustre game mechanic, story writing and the hard reality that fully illustrated stories are too expensive in this world that makes a very bare-bone experience in Queen's Glory. And then, there is UI/UX to make it worse.
Made a "wrong" choice and got booted to end screen? Load the save yourself, dummy! No auto resume for ya. Oh, you weren't dum but just mis-clicked after trying to skip unimpactful monologues yet still had to re-do 12 integer reading exercises? Well, that sucks. Sucks to be you, that is.
You get the idea.
No auto resume (on top of un-impactful bad ends)
Limited number of save slots (as an H-game)
No labeling of the latest save
No log on most recent writing (which will contain the instruction for your next actions)
etc etc
Imagine the writing is lacking but the UI made it easy for you to skim and skip parts that are not important. Well, at least you get a smooth experience in-between CGs. You can tell the pacing in the writing facilitates the skipping-and-skimming but UI sternly stands in the way. What is the otherworldly explanation for slipping in the requirements of your next mission at the end of a large amount of unimpactful texts -- in the regular text box -- which the player then have no way of reviewing? The game is not meant to be some voodoo hair-removal session of sort, I hope?
Here we have an example of why UI/UX always matters so much -- in games that are immersive and in games that are bare-bone.
A passing mention to the English translation -- it sucks. Good effort by someone who doesn't know the language. But not good enough for readers to not get a lesser experience. The sentences are grammatically correct but mostly incoherent upon scrutiny and not something an English speaker would write. (If possible, the devs need people who are highly proficient in the destination languages, but with passing proficiency in the source language, in this case Chinese, to do the translation. Not the other way around.) Translation is just that though. I don't find it reasonable discredit the game based on poor translation alone. So I am quite glad that at the time of writing, reviews based on that aspect alone have already been balanced out and the game already has averaged to a score in F95 that I am about to give.
My bottomline was raised at the beginning of this review.
Despite of that, I still think one can find time spent on Queen's Glory worth their while. After some waste of time, you do learn to avoid wasting more time with its lacklustre mechanics and poor UI and get efficient at revealing its CGs and basic plotline.
Meanwhile, the CGs are decent and the whole thing is voiced -- just not particularly well voiced.
That's why I rated Queen's Glory "average". It's serviceable; also not anywhere better than serviceable. Hence, average.
The writing of this game is so piss poor that no amount of good translation could save it, not that it has any. The people that wrote this not only can't be bothered building character or tension at the most basic of levels, but can't even end a scene right.
I cannot fathom how low a person's standard would have to be to consider this at anything above a one star rating.
The art is decent and the translation is well done enough. The UI is not great but its serviceable.
The most significant problem I see with this game is the missed potential. It's almost like as you play with it you can see the broken pieces of a vision they had for the game. They wanted to make it really interesting with managing a kingdom type mechanics and trying to make politically savvy moves based upon the history it provides in the given situations. Then it turns out to be basic as fuck...
You soon come to realize that this vision at some point was not executed effectively or completely abandoned. Then its almost like they left the bread crumbs of what should have been a much cooler game in there because it would simply just take up more time to delete the code than leave it in there.
Something i found bit dissapointing is that you can either be smart with the resource management or sleep your way through most choices and it has no impact on the ending, this feels strange specially if you have a romantic interest. Another aspect that lacked more polish was the sex scene integration, dont get me wrong the CG is great but overall Alisa (MC) is not consistent on if she finds her situation repulsive or she loves decending into debauchery.
Overall a very entertaining game, I was a bit worried at first that the decisions would be biased but it was quite fun and the last year was a decent challenge.
