Galaxy Princess Zorana Review: All You Need is Skill(s)

Although I’d played several visual novels before it, Long Live the Queen was the first game I can recall that really made me sit up and take notice of the genre. It wasn’t that the visual novels I’d previously played were bad - as a matter of fact, they were Ace Attorney and Hatoful Boyfriend, both arguably far more popular and in the mainstream consciousness than Long Live the Queen - but it felt as though Long Live the Queen was really utilising the most of the format. It embraces the conceit of multiple routes and outcomes, and really does make it that every choice you make will have consequences, even if it doesn’t seem like it at the time.

So with all of that in mind, you can bet that I signed up for Galaxy Princess Zorana’s Kickstarter when I first heard of it, and was keen to play it as the days ticked closer to its release. Although it had been nearly ten years since I had last played Long Live the Queen, I still held good memories of my experience with it, and I was hoping that this game would scratch the same itches.

Thankfully, Galaxy Princess Zorana was able to do that, and oh so much more. The game is more than a worthy follow-up to Long Live the Queen, expanding on not only its gameplay, but its world, lore, and experience. Let’s get into how and why.

Story

The macro story of Galaxy Princess Zorana is fairly simple: as the titular princess, you must travel around the galaxy and convince electors to vote for you, so that you might claim the throne left by your recently-deceased father. Zorana begins the game naïve and unprepared, meaning that along the way she will need to build up her skills so that she will not only survive to inherit the throne, but show the electors why she’s the best fit.

The macro story is a good set-up, but it’s in the multitude of micro stories that the game really shines. Each elector has their own motivations, backstories, and web of connections that you can potentially manipulate for their vote. While they may present a single side to themselves most of the time, investigating their backgrounds will reveal complex histories and relationships, and it’s clear that plenty of thought has been put into crafting these. 

The depth of characters also feeds back into the gameplay - an elector who seems hell-bent on opposing Zorana might be surprisingly easy to win over once you know where their real weak points are. One elector turns against Zorana quite quickly upon a second candidate entering the race, but I was consistently able to win them over once I discovered a particular combination of actions, rather than having to invest in any particular skill. There was another that I assumed I needed a minimum level of skills to convince, only to discover that failing their personal quest in one way turned them over to Zorana’s side out of guilt.

Aside from the electors, different plot threads are weaved organically into the story, leaving the player with more to focus on beyond just the election. Zorana has the option of investigating her father’s mysterious death, discovering a secret message from her long-lost brother, having to deal with a potential pandemic, and much more. Sometimes you’ll find yourself ignoring the election in your haste to focus on a particular subplot, or wondering whether you should start a new game and invest in the skills to succeed at another. 

There are always a multitude of options for the player to pursue, and none of the subsequent plots felt contrived or weaker than the other storylines. Several of the plot threads reference or feed into others - there’s a very good sense of continuity here, and that the entire game is an organic, living universe. Things feel consistent and believable even with different outcomes and endings, which, in themselves, are more fodder for the player to seek out.

Assisting with all of this is some excellent worldbuilding, with different alien races and cultures being much more complex than a single trait applied to all of their members. Upon first encountering each race and world, the player is given information to prepare them, and none of it feels particularly derivative. The world is also unapologetically LGBT+, with many characters having same-sex spouses or lovers casually mentioned (Zorana herself can be married to people of any gender). It’s a very diverse world, and feels both inclusive and positive (aside from all of the realpolitik and political backstabbings, of course).

Gameplay

On paper, the gameplay of Galaxy Princess Zorana sounds kind of dull: choose stats to upgrade, make choices, and see whether your current stat values will allow you to pass checks. Boring paperwork that’s just about how long it takes you to find the optimal path, right? Wrong. You can never be too sure which skill will be required for a check, so all of them feel equally viable to invest in. Sometimes you won’t have a high enough skill to pass a check, but a combination of the initially-presented skill and another one will be sufficient. Sometimes a skill check will be incredibly high and you’ll anticipate having to invest heavily in a skill, only to discover that a different choice requires a much lower score for its associated skill.

As a result of this you’ll find yourself constantly wanting to experiment with different skillset builds, which, when combined with the multitude of story threads mentioned above, leads to a lot of differing outcomes and variety in the game. Adding to the complexity is Zorana’s mood, which affects how much a skill will increase when trained. You want to raise her Rhetoric to 50, which you can do this turn, but her Blade skill could potentially gain 30 points thanks to her current mood - could this save you a headache later? On top of that, skills can’t be raised above 50 (out of 100) until their related skills have a minimum value of 25, meaning that, if you want to invest heavily in a skill, you’ll also need to consider how to juggle the training of skills which you’re less interested in.

I’m not going to say that all of the above leads to no two runs of the game being the same, as there’s nothing stopping you from training the same skills and making the same choices across two different games. I will, however, say that you’re incredibly unlikely to have two runs of the game be the same, as you’ll naturally invest in different skills either as a result of experimentation or to pass difficult checks, only to discover that a check you previously took for granted has led to your death, or has led to a different outcome. Balancing all of the different skills is the heart of the game, and it’s something that it absolutely succeeds at.

Zorana’s goal in the story involves more than just training herself, of course - she needs to convince enough electors that she’s the best candidate for the throne. When approaching an elector, you have a variety of options for how to persuade them, and it’s here that the story and gameplay blends together best. Choosing to negotiate with them will ideally have them agreeing to vote for you, based on your previous choices and existing relationships. More often than not, however, an elector will give you a quest to pass, which usually requires multiple skill checks. If your skills are sufficiently high, you’ll win their vote.

Nothing is ever guaranteed, however. Some electors frown upon being asked how you can win their vote, and so you might be forced to investigate their background and blackmail them (provided your Media and Menace skills are high enough, of course). Alternatively, you could offer to make them a member of your cabinet, which also grants you a bonus to the position’s related skill, but positions are limited, and there might be more viable candidates. This is all, of course, assuming that the elector feels positive enough towards you to even meet for discussions. If they don’t, you can denounce their enemies, declaring that they have displeased you, but you’ll need to investigate their network beforehand, and you’ll automatically lose the vote of whoever you denounce.

In addition to all of the above, Zorana can’t simply visit whichever elector she wants - her spaceship-palace has to travel to the planets that the electors reside on, adding yet another element to manage. You’ll only have a certain number of actions that you can perform at a time, making it tempting to stay in a single place until everybody’s won over, but with the skill ceiling of some checks, it might be more viable to move somewhere else, and hope that you get the opportunity to return later, once your skills are higher and you’ve met with more electors.

As should be apparent from all of the above, there’s a multitude of different options that the player has for turning electors to their side, all of which is very engaging. You’ll constantly be considering the different options at your disposal, and how you can most efficiently bring someone over to your side. Or, to put it another way, in order to succeed at your goal you’ll need to get into the mindset of the ruler that Zorana wishes to become. It’s roleplaying within a game at its finest.

Experience

With all of the above in mind, what is the actual experience of playing Galaxy Princess Zorana like? For a start, you’re going to die a lot. The source could be anything - maybe you’ll be attempting a quest and discover mid-way through it that you don’t have all of the stats required to pass it, or you’ll be murdered by an assassin when partaking in an action to change your mood. This sounds frustrating - and to be honest, it’s more than a little - but it’s part of the experience of playing the game. You’re not supposed to ascend to the throne on your first run (and for those that do, I bow down to you).

I’d recommend taking notes as you play the game, identifying the skills checks needed to surpass obstacles and to proceed further through Zorana’s quest. There’s a lot of information to process on your first few runs, and a lot of options presented to you - it can be pretty overwhelming at times, and it’s easy to feel like you’re doing nothing but making mistakes as you see yourself failing check after check. Again, this is part of the intended experience - you can’t master everything in a single run, and you’ll inevitably be weaker in some areas than others.

If the prospect of repeated deaths, a need for note-taking, or a willingness to experiment don’t sound like your cup of tea, then there’s a good chance that Galaxy Princess Zorana isn’t the game for you. It’s a game wherein you’ll need to be prepared for failure and ready to learn from your mistakes. During a few early runs I felt a bit overwhelmed, and part of me wondered whether Long Live the Queen had been as brutal, or whether time had made me forget similar frustrations. 

Ultimately, however, I stuck with the game, and it didn’t take too long, relatively speaking, before patterns started to emerge. Names and planets became more familiar, and I started recognising who would turn against Zorana swiftly. I began to identify the checks which didn’t seem to have major consequences for failure, and which skills I would need to invest in early. I knew which electors were more trouble than they were worth, and found that some previously-neglected actions had very positive effects.

Eventually - maybe my fourth or fifth run, I wasn’t counting - things started to fall into place. My opponent was getting votes, yes, but I was outpacing them handily. Some assassins came after me, but I was able to survive them, and the electors that sent them after me were barred from voting as a result. I blackmailed one stubborn elector, earning a vote that had seemed impossible, and agreed to marry the son of another, figuring that it was a small price to pay for another precious vote.

And then…the time came to count the votes. Even with the knowledge that most of the votes were confirmed, it still felt as though things could go wrong, and I was nervous that at the eleventh hour this would turn out to be another failed run. The result was, however, victory for Zorana, earned through my prior experience and adaptability. It may have taken me a while and cost me plenty of failures along the way, but they just made the victory all the sweeter and more cathartic, and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

Frustrations

While Galaxy Princess Zorana is a great game, it would be remiss of me to not discuss some of its flaws, and the frustrations which emerged while playing it. As mentioned above, assassins will sometimes be sent after Zorana, and if you don’t have the right skills to survive them - each assassin is linked to a different event, and there’s not too much overlap in the skills required to survive each - then your game will simply end right there. 

While the assassins do add stakes to the game and do suit the story being told, they often felt like they came out of nowhere, even after I realised what the trigger for them was. Sometimes, although I had anticipated them appearing and had attempted to invest in the skills to survive them, I discovered that I had invested in the wrong skills, and thus all of my preparation was wasted. If there was a bit more transparency around them, or there was more consistency in the skills needed to survive them, they’d have made the game a bit more manageable.

Related to the above is the fact that while the game offers up a lot of choices for Zorana to make, there’s maybe a bit too many. After a while I started abusing the rollback feature to check whether I could pass any of the presented options, and even then I felt I was hardly scratching the surface of what was available to me. I’m genuinely uncertain whether the intent is for players to be constantly rolling back and reloading saves, or whether we’re supposed to simply restart a new game whenever we meet with failure. If the former, then the choices are far too many, and if the latter, it feels like your first authentic success will take weeks of playing and careful note-taking.

Either way, playing the game multiple times is definitely part of the experience, and while it works well for the most part, there are some aspects that could be refined a bit. You’re likely to be fast-forwarding through many scenes in your later runs, which works as expected, but unfortunately means you’ll be bombarded with notifications about which skill checks you’re passing and failing, which tends to cover up important parts of the UI. It would be nice if the skill checks were shown off to the side a bit and made a bit less intrusive.

Speaking of playing the game multiple times, while the skip function helps, you’ll nevertheless be seeing the same few scenes from the start of the game over and over again. Creating a save game after the first few turns’ worth of information has been doled out isn’t viable, since you might want to train in different skills on future runs. Ideally, it would be nice if there was an option to start a few turns into the game and make all of your initial decisions in one go, with no dialogue shown and the assumption that players choosing this option have seen it all before.

Another frustration in the game will, conversely, come in your first few runs. I mentioned earlier in the review that there were several actions which I initially didn’t touch - such as denouncing an elector’s opponent to make them more willing to meet with you, or investigating social networks. The reason that I initially avoided them is because these are not explained in-game, which made me hesitant to touch them. I eventually figured out how they worked after playing around with the system a bit, but it would have been nice if they were tutorialised a bit better. Maybe through some sort of side story mode, which walks players through them in a way that doesn’t impact their progress in the main game?

Conclusion

At the start of this review I posited that Galaxy Princess Zorana is a worthy successor to Long Live the Queen’s legacy, and that it manages to expand on it in multiple ways. It’s a statement that I’ll gladly stick by - the story offers more directions and plots for the players to follow, the characters all feel fleshed out and engaging, and the gameplay expands upon the original while still staying true to it. If you enjoyed Long Live the Queen, then I have no hesitation in recommending Galaxy Princess Zorana to you. 

For those of you that have never played the prequel, whether you enjoy the game or not will depend upon a few factors. You’ll need to be willing to put up with failures, and to pay attention to a richly-crafted world. You’ll need to experiment with different choices and skills, and to know when to let go of something and move on. You’ll inevitably hit a few of the game’s rough edges, and you might get a bit overwhelmed by all of the choices that the game gives you.

Once you stick with it, though, and start to understand how it all works? You’ll have one hell of an experience, and then another one, and another, as you see how all of the game’s many different paths fit together. You’ll end up ruling the galaxy, and for all that you’ll have done to get the throne, you’ll have earned it.