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Feb. 28th, 2026 12:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capricioustubeThis is going to be a review for the Long Live the Queen sickos, so I will give my main recommendations up top:
This review is probably going to come off more negative than I actually feel, because what I actually feel is: WOW TWO CAKES. I have put about 17 hours into a game where one run takes maybe 2 hours? I am reading the forums. I am using Steam guides to get specific ending combos. This is a beautifully illustrated and written princess maker and I want 4 of these every year.
However, I do think Long Live the Queen is a stronger game! I think this comes down mainly to the pathing for the endings, which I will get more into later. But before I get into spoilers I will do a high-level break down. (Some mild mechanical spoilers for Long Live the Queen throughout, no spoilers for Zorana until the cut).
First of all, keep in mind I played Long Live the Queen in a frenzy during finals in college and loved it so much that I briefly got very into interactive fiction. I’ve played it since, but it is very nostalgic for me, and it opened the door to a whole genre of game. So I’m biased!
So, what are these games?
They both follow the same basic structure: you are a princess with 0 thoughts in her head and 0 skills. Your parent suddenly dies and you have a limited amount of time to train to take the throne! Every turn you can pick classes to train your skills and change your mood. How much you learn is dependent on your mood. So in an Indulgent mood, you’re extra good at studying Art.
This is going on while your princess is going around doing her daily routines and dealing with the fallout of her parent’s death. Elodie is mostly staying put and trying to win over her court. In Zorana’s case, she has to travel the empire to gain votes for Empress in a Holy Roman Emperor-style election. You might want to train your princess in Etiquette so she doesn’t act super rude and piss off all her nobles, but you also might want to train her in Tumbling and Reflexes so she can react quick enough to avoid a dart gun assassination attempt (because she pissed off all her nobles). You’re meant to fail a lot of checks, die, and use trial and error to figure out what skills you want and what skills you need to win. There were certain turns in Long Live the Queen where I knew if I didn’t have a 40 in, say, Dancing, I needed at least a 20 in Etiquette to scrape by, and I could train it up in a hurry.
Long Live the Queen has quite a few paths to a good end. The biggest main choice you can pursue in that game is a Lumen route vs a non-Lumen route. Lumens are, in the lore, super powerful magical girls/weapons of war powered by a soul-bonded crystal. Both of these routes have several variations and can lead to good endings. As far as I remember, you can go on blissfully unaware your mom was a magical girl, never realize you are a magical girl, and still win the game. You can, if I recall correctly, repel the invader that shows up near the end with either high singing or high naval skill (it’s that sort of game).
In Zorana while things look more open with the elector system, the game routes you down two pretty narrow paths. You can either get what I consider the good ending and, being vague, really firmly shut some doors on reconciliation with people you care about, or get a more neutral ending but leave the possibility of reconciliation open. In theory I like the idea that Zorana can’t get everything. In practice it’s annoying in a game with so much choice to be locked into only one way of solving the problem you need to solve to get the good ending. It’s absolutely the only choice as written for Lore Reasons and I’ll get into that when I start spoiling things, but I wish there were multiple paths there.
Now for the good: while I think Elodie is a more compelling protagonist (Zorana is much less close to her dead father than Elodie was to her dead mother and therefore is less interesting to start) I like the cast of Galaxy Princess Zorana better. Lots of people got really attached to the various super anime courtiers in Long Live the Queen, but aside from having a few favorites, they were Just Fine to me. Galaxy Princess Zorana has so many characters that it’s hard not to have favorites. Zorana’s schoolmates Vasily and Kxenia are very charming as well.
The election system in Galaxy Princess Zorana is fun but fairly easy to develop a standard routine for and very easy if you max her social stats. It’s a more elegant way to test rare stats, though. Every elector who likes you some but not enough to pledge their vote to you can give you a quest, and these can vary from “play with my kid” to “find a religious symbol in the ice on a remote planet” to “wrestle a big lizard.” So while silly, some of these quests give you a chance to build a completely different Zorana than the easier run social Zorana. And I like seeing all of the characters and the galactic lore! In Long Live the Queen, there was a long, difficult side quest involving a birthday party that was really the only place you needed some of the weirder stats, and it was very easy to skip. And while that was a fun challenge, it was a weird huge off-branch to the main story. You can absolutely skip the wrestling check in Galaxy Princess Zorana too, if you don’t take up the challenge to wrestle the lizard, but you’re more likely to run into it.
I do also think this game is a little easier overall once you get the hang of it. Note that I actually think this is a negative, even though it doesn’t bother me that much. Elodie was so good at dying. Death in Galaxy Princess Zorana is way easier to avoid if you’re well-liked, as electors only send assassins when they’re really pissed at you. Many of Elodie’s death checks are scripted.
Like Long Live the Queen, if you can deal with the anime style, the art is very polished. Zorana has a cute design, the chibi death drawings are great, and the epilogue slides are beautifully illustrated. There is a huge amount of writing as well. Playing through with different options changes a compelling amount of flavor text even when your outcomes and decisions aren’t impacted. The lore is cool! The music is pleasant to listen to! I will play another 4 hours tomorrow to get to two secret things I haven’t unraveled yet!
That said, let’s talk about spoilers (BIG plot spoilers for Zorana under the cut but not really mechanical spoilers).
Setup: your mom is from Crystal Nova, the country that Elodie was from in the first game. She is dead. Your older brother, the original heir, defected to Crystal Nova several years ago.
Once you beat the game, it is revealed that your evil emperor dad is ALIVE!!! He says he was planning to take back over if you won the election, but he’ll let you rule alone for now. If you’re engaged, he says something to the effect of pity about the engagement, but you can’t have everything. In the epilogue it’s stated he never comes back to take over but Zorana always wonders and watches her back. So cool! This is the neutral ending I mentioned earlier.
This is a great hook! So you dive back in. That’s path one, Zorana never figures out her dad is alive until it’s too late for her to do anything about it.
Path two, you figure out your dad is alive and confront him near the end of the game. He reveals you are a 98% clone of your mother and not related to him at all. He kept you at arm’s length your whole life because he wanted to MARRY YOU. (This is also why he is mad if you get engaged! Ahh!!!) However his two advisors remain loyal to him so there’s no way to straight up kill him with all three of them against you, no matter how good at swords you are. This leads to one of several options:
All bad ends. Obviously.
So path three. This path requires some fiddly work to find out you’re a clone of your mom, that your dad is alive, and a bunch of lore about Lumens. You can meet up with your brother, who says your mom is alive and needs the crystal back (though he’s very vague about why). If you research on your own, it turns out your mom is a Lumen, and her soul crystal is in the palace as dowry. Since you’re her clone, you are also a Lumen. So if you put all of this together early enough, when your dad shows up, you can trick him into taking you to see the crystal and use it to incinerate him. Even if it’s three vs one, the girl with the nuke is going to win. Yay!!!
However, because this crystal was part of your mom’s soul, she dies For Real when you use it. Whoops!
So if you want Zorana to eliminate the shadow of her dad hanging over her, she has to kill her mom, therefore ruining any chance of ever reconciling with her brother. This sucks! I wish there was another way to kill or outsmart your dad. Because Lumen crystals are established to work this way, it makes complete sense that using it kills your mom, and that this makes your brother cut contact. I think the way I would solve it is to instead add a non-Lumen dad-killing route.
The Lumen solution also forces you into a lot of checks you have to pass to get all of the info you need. I guess Long Live the Queen had a few tricky gates like this, but it felt like there were more ways to pass those. The best example is the invader at the end of the game, who can be defeated several ways with better or worse outcomes. But to explain the principle (with some Long Live the Queen mechanical spoilers):
One of my favorite checks in Long Live the Queen is when you get sent poisoned chocolates maybe ⅔ of the way through the game. It’s really good because it’s an easy thing to die on even on a ~good run. A lot of the assassination checks test physical skills like reflexes or swords, and this is a big one that tests NO physical skills. I love how creative it is: you can either realize the chocolates are suspicious with high Trade (something about the supply chain is weird) or high Dog Training (your dog will freak out if you touch them). Maybe also high Intrigue or Social-you can realize the note is suspicious. It’s silly but it’s a key part of these games, that you can make pretty disparate builds run to run and aside from a few key stats, there are lots of solutions to most problems. So while on a turn to turn basis Galaxy Princess Zorana has a lot of these wonderfully dense checks, it feels like betraying the overall design to make the “defeat your dad” ending so narrowly routed.
If you naively return the crystal to Crystal Nova on a no-dad-info run, it’s hard-ish to get the tentative reconciliation ending with your brother anyway. And it’s pretty tentative; it took me getting it a second time to realize that was the best possible end state (in all other end states he cuts contact). More content is going to slowly come out to fill out some Kickstarter goals and I think adding to that epilogue scene was one of Hanako Games’s ideas. I hope she does! It feels like there should be more there. We don’t ever get anything on why he left (presumably, for mom)/how he found out their mom was alive/what he’s up to now. Just another teensy bit would be really fun! I really like how complex Hanako Games is willing to get in these games re not resolving stuff, but because it's a video game it feels like I should be able to have it all. You pretty much could in Long Live the Queen! Perhaps this desire makes me the fool, but right now it feels like there's a better ending I am missing, and I'm just not.
So that’s Galaxy Princess Zorana: some quibbles but it’s extremely worth your time if you liked Long Live the Queen. The amount of writing is staggering, and for that it’s worth the price alone. It’s a new one of these! What’s not to love! Long live the Empress!
Some final miscellaneous thoughts:
- If you’re a Long Live the Queen fan and you want more of that, this game is well worth your 25 dollars.
- If you’re interested in this game but haven’t played Long Live the Queen, start there (it’s cheaper and the lore is connected).
This review is probably going to come off more negative than I actually feel, because what I actually feel is: WOW TWO CAKES. I have put about 17 hours into a game where one run takes maybe 2 hours? I am reading the forums. I am using Steam guides to get specific ending combos. This is a beautifully illustrated and written princess maker and I want 4 of these every year.
However, I do think Long Live the Queen is a stronger game! I think this comes down mainly to the pathing for the endings, which I will get more into later. But before I get into spoilers I will do a high-level break down. (Some mild mechanical spoilers for Long Live the Queen throughout, no spoilers for Zorana until the cut).
First of all, keep in mind I played Long Live the Queen in a frenzy during finals in college and loved it so much that I briefly got very into interactive fiction. I’ve played it since, but it is very nostalgic for me, and it opened the door to a whole genre of game. So I’m biased!
So, what are these games?
They both follow the same basic structure: you are a princess with 0 thoughts in her head and 0 skills. Your parent suddenly dies and you have a limited amount of time to train to take the throne! Every turn you can pick classes to train your skills and change your mood. How much you learn is dependent on your mood. So in an Indulgent mood, you’re extra good at studying Art.
This is going on while your princess is going around doing her daily routines and dealing with the fallout of her parent’s death. Elodie is mostly staying put and trying to win over her court. In Zorana’s case, she has to travel the empire to gain votes for Empress in a Holy Roman Emperor-style election. You might want to train your princess in Etiquette so she doesn’t act super rude and piss off all her nobles, but you also might want to train her in Tumbling and Reflexes so she can react quick enough to avoid a dart gun assassination attempt (because she pissed off all her nobles). You’re meant to fail a lot of checks, die, and use trial and error to figure out what skills you want and what skills you need to win. There were certain turns in Long Live the Queen where I knew if I didn’t have a 40 in, say, Dancing, I needed at least a 20 in Etiquette to scrape by, and I could train it up in a hurry.
Long Live the Queen has quite a few paths to a good end. The biggest main choice you can pursue in that game is a Lumen route vs a non-Lumen route. Lumens are, in the lore, super powerful magical girls/weapons of war powered by a soul-bonded crystal. Both of these routes have several variations and can lead to good endings. As far as I remember, you can go on blissfully unaware your mom was a magical girl, never realize you are a magical girl, and still win the game. You can, if I recall correctly, repel the invader that shows up near the end with either high singing or high naval skill (it’s that sort of game).
In Zorana while things look more open with the elector system, the game routes you down two pretty narrow paths. You can either get what I consider the good ending and, being vague, really firmly shut some doors on reconciliation with people you care about, or get a more neutral ending but leave the possibility of reconciliation open. In theory I like the idea that Zorana can’t get everything. In practice it’s annoying in a game with so much choice to be locked into only one way of solving the problem you need to solve to get the good ending. It’s absolutely the only choice as written for Lore Reasons and I’ll get into that when I start spoiling things, but I wish there were multiple paths there.
Now for the good: while I think Elodie is a more compelling protagonist (Zorana is much less close to her dead father than Elodie was to her dead mother and therefore is less interesting to start) I like the cast of Galaxy Princess Zorana better. Lots of people got really attached to the various super anime courtiers in Long Live the Queen, but aside from having a few favorites, they were Just Fine to me. Galaxy Princess Zorana has so many characters that it’s hard not to have favorites. Zorana’s schoolmates Vasily and Kxenia are very charming as well.
The election system in Galaxy Princess Zorana is fun but fairly easy to develop a standard routine for and very easy if you max her social stats. It’s a more elegant way to test rare stats, though. Every elector who likes you some but not enough to pledge their vote to you can give you a quest, and these can vary from “play with my kid” to “find a religious symbol in the ice on a remote planet” to “wrestle a big lizard.” So while silly, some of these quests give you a chance to build a completely different Zorana than the easier run social Zorana. And I like seeing all of the characters and the galactic lore! In Long Live the Queen, there was a long, difficult side quest involving a birthday party that was really the only place you needed some of the weirder stats, and it was very easy to skip. And while that was a fun challenge, it was a weird huge off-branch to the main story. You can absolutely skip the wrestling check in Galaxy Princess Zorana too, if you don’t take up the challenge to wrestle the lizard, but you’re more likely to run into it.
I do also think this game is a little easier overall once you get the hang of it. Note that I actually think this is a negative, even though it doesn’t bother me that much. Elodie was so good at dying. Death in Galaxy Princess Zorana is way easier to avoid if you’re well-liked, as electors only send assassins when they’re really pissed at you. Many of Elodie’s death checks are scripted.
Like Long Live the Queen, if you can deal with the anime style, the art is very polished. Zorana has a cute design, the chibi death drawings are great, and the epilogue slides are beautifully illustrated. There is a huge amount of writing as well. Playing through with different options changes a compelling amount of flavor text even when your outcomes and decisions aren’t impacted. The lore is cool! The music is pleasant to listen to! I will play another 4 hours tomorrow to get to two secret things I haven’t unraveled yet!
That said, let’s talk about spoilers (BIG plot spoilers for Zorana under the cut but not really mechanical spoilers).
Setup: your mom is from Crystal Nova, the country that Elodie was from in the first game. She is dead. Your older brother, the original heir, defected to Crystal Nova several years ago.
Once you beat the game, it is revealed that your evil emperor dad is ALIVE!!! He says he was planning to take back over if you won the election, but he’ll let you rule alone for now. If you’re engaged, he says something to the effect of pity about the engagement, but you can’t have everything. In the epilogue it’s stated he never comes back to take over but Zorana always wonders and watches her back. So cool! This is the neutral ending I mentioned earlier.
This is a great hook! So you dive back in. That’s path one, Zorana never figures out her dad is alive until it’s too late for her to do anything about it.
Path two, you figure out your dad is alive and confront him near the end of the game. He reveals you are a 98% clone of your mother and not related to him at all. He kept you at arm’s length your whole life because he wanted to MARRY YOU. (This is also why he is mad if you get engaged! Ahh!!!) However his two advisors remain loyal to him so there’s no way to straight up kill him with all three of them against you, no matter how good at swords you are. This leads to one of several options:
- you give up and go back to being a spoiled princess
- you are a ruthless enough Zorana that the game lets you marry him of your own free will
- you try to wiggle your way out, fail, and are forced into marriage
All bad ends. Obviously.
So path three. This path requires some fiddly work to find out you’re a clone of your mom, that your dad is alive, and a bunch of lore about Lumens. You can meet up with your brother, who says your mom is alive and needs the crystal back (though he’s very vague about why). If you research on your own, it turns out your mom is a Lumen, and her soul crystal is in the palace as dowry. Since you’re her clone, you are also a Lumen. So if you put all of this together early enough, when your dad shows up, you can trick him into taking you to see the crystal and use it to incinerate him. Even if it’s three vs one, the girl with the nuke is going to win. Yay!!!
However, because this crystal was part of your mom’s soul, she dies For Real when you use it. Whoops!
So if you want Zorana to eliminate the shadow of her dad hanging over her, she has to kill her mom, therefore ruining any chance of ever reconciling with her brother. This sucks! I wish there was another way to kill or outsmart your dad. Because Lumen crystals are established to work this way, it makes complete sense that using it kills your mom, and that this makes your brother cut contact. I think the way I would solve it is to instead add a non-Lumen dad-killing route.
The Lumen solution also forces you into a lot of checks you have to pass to get all of the info you need. I guess Long Live the Queen had a few tricky gates like this, but it felt like there were more ways to pass those. The best example is the invader at the end of the game, who can be defeated several ways with better or worse outcomes. But to explain the principle (with some Long Live the Queen mechanical spoilers):
One of my favorite checks in Long Live the Queen is when you get sent poisoned chocolates maybe ⅔ of the way through the game. It’s really good because it’s an easy thing to die on even on a ~good run. A lot of the assassination checks test physical skills like reflexes or swords, and this is a big one that tests NO physical skills. I love how creative it is: you can either realize the chocolates are suspicious with high Trade (something about the supply chain is weird) or high Dog Training (your dog will freak out if you touch them). Maybe also high Intrigue or Social-you can realize the note is suspicious. It’s silly but it’s a key part of these games, that you can make pretty disparate builds run to run and aside from a few key stats, there are lots of solutions to most problems. So while on a turn to turn basis Galaxy Princess Zorana has a lot of these wonderfully dense checks, it feels like betraying the overall design to make the “defeat your dad” ending so narrowly routed.
If you naively return the crystal to Crystal Nova on a no-dad-info run, it’s hard-ish to get the tentative reconciliation ending with your brother anyway. And it’s pretty tentative; it took me getting it a second time to realize that was the best possible end state (in all other end states he cuts contact). More content is going to slowly come out to fill out some Kickstarter goals and I think adding to that epilogue scene was one of Hanako Games’s ideas. I hope she does! It feels like there should be more there. We don’t ever get anything on why he left (presumably, for mom)/how he found out their mom was alive/what he’s up to now. Just another teensy bit would be really fun! I really like how complex Hanako Games is willing to get in these games re not resolving stuff, but because it's a video game it feels like I should be able to have it all. You pretty much could in Long Live the Queen! Perhaps this desire makes me the fool, but right now it feels like there's a better ending I am missing, and I'm just not.
So that’s Galaxy Princess Zorana: some quibbles but it’s extremely worth your time if you liked Long Live the Queen. The amount of writing is staggering, and for that it’s worth the price alone. It’s a new one of these! What’s not to love! Long live the Empress!
Some final miscellaneous thoughts:
- Nothing in Galaxy Princess Zorana is as charming as Elodie’s silly wink at the end of Long Live the Queen when you win the game.
- However, nothing in Long Live the Queen is as shocking as some of the crazy plot twists in Galaxy Princess Zorana, up to and including the choice to make one of your childhood friends your concubine.
- I LOVE the Galaxy Princess Zorana title screen art! Beautiful!
- Galaxy Princess Zorana really cleverly hides some content behind “good” choices. There’s a particular early choice that seems like a good choice (and doesn’t really help or hurt your chances of winning), but actually removes an important character from play and blocks off some extra content. So neat. I didn’t realize what was going on there until I started reading guides, and then I realized the entire election can go differently if that character stays in action.
- Galaxy Princess Zorana also has a huge amount of writing in the epilogue based on who you choose to marry, which is very fun.
