Queen’s Glory is a management type game in where we play as the princess of the Norman Kingdom named Alisa. Her title is quickly reduced to nothing, as upon starting the game, we find that our kingdom has been caught in a surprise attack by the Cestern Empire. Our nation’s armies quickly fall and to make matters worse, both the king and his two heirs were killed in battle. That leaves us to suddenly deal with this mess. Someone who was never meant to fill that role nor received proper training or connections. This is on top of being a female, which in a feudal hierarchy, is crippling on its own.
Alice and in turn we as the player are shown no mercy in this grim situation. With the enemy army within marching distance of our capital, we are given a choice. Surrender or fight to the bitter end. If you choose to fight, you will quickly find enemy soldiers occupying your halls, Alice will be sexually abused, and its game over. This is your very first choice and the game showing that you are in no position to bargain or resist. Considering you were able to read the reality of your situation and choose to surrender, you will still be sexually abused by Cestern troops, but at least you still have a kingdom afterward.
This surrender came with a peace treaty you must abide by, however. Just because the enemy armies have left your lands, this does not mean it is the end of your troubles. You must pay them war reparations for 20 Gold Points every year, which is a massive amount. Somehow you have to extract that from a war-torn, demoralized nation, and still be capable of constantly fending off both internal & external threats. At this point, it would certainly be much easier to throw the crown in the bin and live as a hermit somewhere, but Alice is dead-set on restoring her dear Norman kingdom.
After the intro, we find ourselves in the game proper and must make decisions that impact the five kingdom parameters. These are Military, Agriculture, Popularity, Economy, and Politics. All of them are vital and neglecting one will likely see you at the game over screen, sooner rather than later. It is very min-max heavy and leaves little room for error. I know the dev’s call this a strategy game, but I’d argue against that. It has a very strict way it wants you to play and there are no ways around a situation. Say you have a problem with Politics i.e the nobles, and you have a very strong economy or military. Those other parameters don’t matter in the slightest, you can’t bribe or intimate them if they rebel. You either pick the choices they like and increase Politics, or you fail the game.
This involves a lot of trial and error or plain luck. There are no carrying over benefits of your choices, your gains are received immediately. You can’t plan anything, you are always at the whim of decisions you have to make, and have to hope something pops up to increase the parameter needed. It makes everything you do feel completely hollow as it is solely about numbers with no long term benefits or negative effects. Worse still is that you do not receive the information needed to properly gauge them either. Imagine someone asking you for money and only being able to say yes or no, without the critical info of “how much?”. That is Queen’s Glory in a nutshell. Only after you make the decision are you given the costs of what you just did or agreed to.
Quite often, you don’t even have a view of what resources you currently have when making some choices outside of the throne room. I hesitate to even call this management either, this is just too luck-based of a trial and error experience that you need to memorize the right choices for. It is less like building or managing something, and more akin to stacking a deck of cards you can only hold together by saving/loading your game like crazy. The gameplay really bogs this title down. Shame too because this had serious potential. Like early on, a powerful noble of your own faction blackmails you into having sex with him. Decline and that would lead to him manipulating the opinions of other nobles and hit you with a heavy decline in your Politics stats. I actually enjoyed some story-based sections where your decisions felt like they had some weight to them. It is a better visual novel than a management game is where I’m getting at.
Both the story and gameplay suffers from a less than stellar translation. It is understandable, yet some lines of text will cause you to do a double-take with its strange English wording and errors. It affects the gameplay more than the story since you are never given any stat numbers attached to them. You have to very carefully read it and hope you captured the intent of what they were trying to say. This brings even more luck, as well as trial & error to it. I get that not every choice can or should be able to be gauged, but some estimate from advisers or teaching Alice the words “how much?” would go a long way. With the story decisions, you can usually tell what a person is all about and what they want. Some do however ask questions that you have no way of knowing the correct answer to without either luck or constantly loading a save. Get it wrong and game over.
The story is one of Queen’s Glory strongest aspects. It does an excellent job of thoroughly humiliating you and wanting to keep trying until you can get vengeance on all those that wronged you. That being darn near everyone in this entire game. Towards the end, some of the sex scenes started making less sense given how powerful you are then. Like getting drunk at a noble’s ball and sexually abused. It is a hentai game, so whatever. Sadly, you can’t go on a reign of terror and replace most of your subordinates, though. When we were fighting against the mighty Cestern empire, I wanted the people around me dead just as much as I did the enemy forces. That was a really interesting feeling you rarely get from video games. You either all die, or band together to defeat the greater foe and accomplish Alice’s goal to make the Norman Kingdom great again.
You have two possible love interests in this title. Your rugged-looking counselor and the only reliable person with any power that you appointed within the snake’s den that is your courtroom. And then you have your ever-loyal maid Sigrid, who is probably better qualified to rule this nation than we are. You will be locked out of her route if you don’t pick a correct choice near the beginning of the game. Both are pretty well written (plot-wise) and interesting characters. Only Alice and Sigrid are voice acted, the rest of the cast rely solely on the subtitles. This is as much Sigrid’s story as the queen’s. You will constantly be playing as her and around half of the CGs are dedicated to her. This brings us to the hentai. There is a ton of it. Darn near everyone you meet will want to give a good dicking to either the queen or Sigrid. You are rarely in a position to say no.
Most of these are vanilla sex scenes. Only one has a bit of torture via minor whipping. Both of our female leads are usually against pleasuring them, but quickly start to get into it. I found the scenes to be oddly quiet. Other than either Alice or Sigrid reciting their lines, it is pure silence minus the rare, insignificant sound effects. It also suffers from the questionable English translation. They choose some really odd words to replace some things like vagina. It is ultimately understandable, but far from a kinky read. The artwork is what carries the poor translation and lack of any sound other than the female lead’s voice. This is some quality art and there are a good amount of them to see. You don’t even have to play the game. There is an option to unlock and experience all of the hentai scenes from the get-go. Just go to the options menu and switch ‘CG open’ to on.
Queens Glory has a lot of interesting premises, but ultimately each has some flaws that bring it down. It has an interesting story, yet the translation hampers the large amount of text you will be reading. The hentai CGs are great, but once again the bad translation rears its head and so does the lack of sound effects. Managing a down on its luck kingdom sounds fun, however the only thing you’ll be managing is a migraine and countless save states. I did enjoy the tremendous pressure from trying to hold together a dying nation. Or at least the idea of it. As it is handled here, the majority of my failures felt artificial, and my choices felt meaningless due to the heavy-handed way that it insists you play. There is little room for deviation and no problem has an alternate solution. At that point, the game should either just play itself or simply be a pure visual novel, instead of tasking us to find the precise intended way to play a “strategy” game.
- El Panadero -The Baker- Review - August 27, 2024
- Awakened Evil Review - July 10, 2024
- Let’s Look At: Anima Flux - July 3, 2024