I'm a pretty pretty Princess! Let's Play Long Live the Queen

Long Live the Queen is a visual novel / life sim game where you are a young princess scheduled to be crowned queen on your 15th birthday after the death of the previous regent, your mother. The major difficulty with this is that you live in Westeros instead of the fluffy cotton candy world the game's anime styling suggests. You'll have to keep the kingdom running while putting down rebellions, dealing with duplicitous nobles and even facing the occasional eldrich horror. To do this, we can train in a wide variety of skills ranging from etiquette and protocol to spycraft and even full on magical girl superpowers as the title screen up there suggests. Depending on what you train when, the events in game will vary based on which skill checks you pass and which decisions you make as queen-to-be.

Since we get skill training choices similar to Persona 3/4's s-links, I'll be asking you guys for input on how to train our young regent. Here's hoping you don't get her killed! You will, you monsters.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1: You can't go home again
Chapter 2: Be Our Guest
Chapter 3: A mysterious stranger appears! Command?
Chapter 4: SNAAAAAAKE!
Chapter 5: Lore of the Dance
Chapter 6: Oooooh, shiny!
Chapter 7: Full Court Press
Chapter 8: Slow News Day
Chapter 9: Trouble Brewing
Chapter 10: Unless of course, war were declared
Chapter 11: Mawwidge

We open with the ride back to the castle with what I'm assuming is our father.



Clicking on the little question mark in the corner of the dialogue screen gets you additional info on any person in the game. Joslyn here is the current regent until we officially come of age, but he'll defer to us most of the time when it comes to matters of state.



And here we are.







We're understandably upset about the whole thing. It's a guess, but we probably found out when dad here came to pick us up from school.





Has the 'stiff upper lip' pep talk ever worked? So that's the story. Our mother died suddenly and unexpectedly and now the kingdom is in our hands. Should be no problem, right?




Editors note: I'll be transcribing dialogue in future updates, but this gives you an idea of how the game presents things.

Haha yep

Now we come to the meat of the game: our room.



This is where we're going to be making most of the critical decisions that affect the progression of the game. On the right side of the screen you can see the menu setup where we input our choices for how our young queen will develop. At the top is the calendar icon, showing us what week it is. Fixed events always occur in the same week going through the game, so you can plan ahead and make sure you have the skills to deal with them when they come up. Next is the skills menu:



This is a list of all the skills in the game, what level we have them trained to and what bonuses and modifiers are currently effecting our training time. Positive modifiers speed up our learning of a particular skill and negatives slow it down. I'll explain how the training system works in just a bit. Throughout the game, we'll have skill checks against ALL of these skills. Generally if we pass, good things happen. There's so many skills that it's impossible to train in them all, so we'll need to pick which ones we want to focus on and which ones just need a just a little or being skipped entirely.

This is the mood screen:



There are 8 moods in the game and our mood will shift based on what activities we participate in and what happens during the game. Our dominant mood is the one with the most points shown on this screen. We're afraid and depressed right now, but since we're more depressed than afraid, depressed is our dominant mood. Our mood mostly impacts what bonuses we get during skill training, but it has the occasional impact during our conversations with NPCs as well.

There's nothing in the outfit screen for now, so I'm going to skip ahead to the classes menu:



Here's where we choose what we want to learn for the week. Our modifiers from the skill screen impact how fast we learn these skills. The base learning rate is 2 points per day. On a skill with no modifiers that's 2 points x 5 days = 10 points. On a skill with a +1 modifier, that's (2+1) x 5 = 15. Generally we're going to want to train skills we have a positive modifier to in order to be as efficient as possible, but sometimes we're going to have to go against the grain for a critical skill. We can train in 2 skills per week, so we can either focus our attention on one, or split it up amongst the various categories. Mood is big modifier at the beginning of the game, but we'll get better at things as we learn them too. We get a bonus to the sub-category at 1/10 of our total points in that sub-category and a bonus to the main category at 1/10th that. So if we put 10 points into Internal Affairs, we'd get a +0.1 bonus to the Intrigue sub-category and a +0.01 point bonus to the Intellectual category.

So here's what I'm going to need from you guys: tell me what Elodie here should learn. What do you want her to learn right now, and what should I be angling towards for her to learn in the future? I leave the fate of the kingdom in your hands.

History and economics.

Best to get the background stuff down now, while things are slow. I suspect we might not have time for this later.

Nonsense. If this is anime!Westeros, the only kind of diplomacy anyone is going to understand is a good old-fashioned ass-kicking. We must practice in some form of martial or magical combat, possibly to the exclusion of all else.

Well, we can't yet study how to roast dissenters alive, but we can study how to cut them up like Swiss cheese.

So go for Swords and...eh, let's try handling falcons. Maybe we can turn this into Swordbirds.

I was gonna say use the power of SCIENCE AND MEDICINE.

I vote Falcons for sure now because Falcons are awesome. I like the idea of Swordbird but I want to go with Spybird. So in the long run, Intrigue as well! Elodie shall send her faithful companion on various espionage missions* to ensure the future glory of her kingdom!

*Disclaimer: espionage missions for a falcon to be sent on may or may not actually exist, I have no idea.

Be sure to tell me which specific skill you want if you have a preference for immediate training, otherwise I'll just pick whichever one looks coolest out of the category you listed. The broader sub-categories are fine for long term training requests though.

So why is the King a Dowager? I was under the impression that "Dowager" was a title only given to women, and generally only to those older than 33 at that.

Presumably, the world is leagues ahead of us in terms of gender equality, and since the late Queen was the actual ruler, the King here is the dowager (which basically means he technically shouldn't have the title now that the Queen's dead, but there's no one to take it yet).

The term is also used in the real world to denote a widow who holds her title through her marriage to her deceased husband. What we're seeing here is an unconventional usage of the term, but I assume it means that the king held his title due to his marriage to the late queen; he's not actually in the line of succession, since Elodie is the crown princess.

Or, to put it another way, he isn't king by right of birth. He's a duke who married the queen, and now that she's dead, he doesn't get to be king any more, at least not once the queen's heir is old enough to take the throne.

Makes sense, but it raises another question.



I'm assuming Laurent there is the Queen's brother. If the queen died before the Princess was of age, wouldn't he be next in line? I have to assume if he made a claim to the throne, it would be legitimate.

Okay, new game plan. Our first order of business is getting rid of Laurent before he gets any ideas.

I forget the details, but if I remember right, Nova is specifically ruled by queens. Whatshisface is only king by necessity at the moment.

If we study Novan history, it talks about this, I think.

I see. So is any of this stuff randomly generated or are you always playing the same basic scenario starting with the same set of circumstances?

That depends on the succession system. It's not uncommon for the succession to go straight down the main line. For instance, in the UK, for Prince Andrew to become King, Elizabeth, Charles, William, George and Harry would all have to die before him.

Everything is deterministic...okay, I think there's one thing that's random, but it's an alternative to non-random choices, so yeah.

There's no random generation. You always start with the same set of circumstances and the same basic events play out at the same time every time. It's not until you have a few skill checks and decisions under your belt that things start to branch, and even then a lot of the events always happen no matter what. It's kind of like a choose your own adventure book in that if you use the same decisions every time, you always get the same ending.

Nova is apparently pretty egalitarian in terms of gender roles, so Elodie is unquestionably the favoured successor to the late queen. Well, at least in the technical sense...

Study Dogs (let's take advantage of that Expression bonus,) and then study Dance.

Study Decoration twice so that we can be the prettiest princess.

Well when Brickroad streamed this the other night we made him study accounting exclusively and that seemed to work out well, so I vote for that.

Thread title honestly should have been "Oh hey, they made a new Princess Maker game?"

But you start this game a princess. Also, there are a handful of people and one or two countries trying to kill you.

I pulled off a win today after about ten attempts. I did it without ever becoming a Lumen, which might be less interesting from a story perspective, but it does cut down on the skill investment. I also married the first guy who asked, because why not?

The game is entirely deterministic, but even so, there are enough paths to victory and branches of the story that depend on your approach to make the game very replayable. In fact, I think I'm going to replay it now.

For the record, skills that I've never seen skill checks for: Flexibility, Polearms, Ciphering, and I think Logistics. I'm sure they're checked in some paths, but I haven't come across them.

Which is why the joke works on multiple levels.

Logictics is checked early on with the shooting star/flare but I don't know what the result is because I've never made the check.

You should double down on Dogs. Dogs are your friends.

I found a Flexibility check -- it occurs if you choose to trip the lady instead of staring or flattering. Pretty easy check, too.

Horses and strategy.

I found Cyphering. If you send your friend back to try and end the civil war she sends you an encoded message at the end of it that goes into detail on how messed up her family is.

If you pass that particular check, it gives you advance warning that the invasion fleet is preparing to sail, giving you some extra time to prepare for the naval battle. I'm not sure, but I think it's necessary if you intend to win the battle the hard way.

In any case, I support going full-on Game of Thrones here, but learning weapons sounds like it's either useless or a great way to get skewered on the front lines. I say start studying Naval Strategy, at least until you stop being depressed and can start learning some social skills.