King's Quest II: Romancing the ThroneGame Type: Abandonware/Commercial
Genre: Single Player RPG
Link: http://kingsquest.wikia.com/wiki/King's_Quest_II:_Romancing_The_Throne| Graphics rating: |  |
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Was the second game in the
King's Quest series an improvement on the first? It's an interesting question, but actually the subtle change to my ratings above tells you just about everything. Which is to say the gameplay was markedly nicer, but the weak immersion factor rather spoiled the party. Kolyma was a nice world to explore. Generally what you had to do was easier to work out than in KQ1, but still enough of a challenge to require multiple saves etc. The graphics, if primitive as with all games of this period, looked perfectly pleasant, the side quests were well thought out, and so on. The bridge gimmick wasn't the best gameplay choice in my opinion as it made it too easy to mess up your game at an early stage, but that's only a minor gripe. If anything, unusually for Sierra, the gameplay at times became TOO obvious.
The big issue I had with KQ2 was that basically, the plot sucked. A mirror shows you a random attractive woman, tells you she's locked in a tower, and you have to go find her because you need a wife. Not even because she's locked up and that's a bad thing, just because you are a king and you're not getting laid. Which seems pretty crass as a heroic motivation. We never find out why she's locked up, or by whom, in the game; she's a two-dimensional object character. Which is fine for a minor NPC, but not for the person who the game is supposed to revolve around. I'm not particularly criticising save the princess as a trope - just that it's done in an exceptionally dull way, and without any sort of wit or mockery of how ploddingly simple the plotline is. I admit this is partly that I dislike action-object relationships in stories and games - and that's a major bugbear here - but it's also just that I wasn't really doing much exciting. The culmination of the castle-in-the-lake plot part would probably have been more fulfilling than the ending, except it turned out I didn't need to do that bit at all so I just nicked the item I needed and legged it.
All in all, KQ2 is a perfectly playable game and I encourage people to have a go at it; but it fails to improve on KQ1. Not because of its technical aspects, which are noticeably improved, but because of the fact that adventure games should feel like adventures. We should invest in characters because they're loveable, or funny, or brave and heroic; Graham wasn't really any of those things and I wasn't really sure why - from a moral or story perspective, rather than a gameplay one - I was doing a bunch of the stuff in the game. The character I invested in most in this whole game was probably the magical fish, who was awesome. That guy, if not the story itself, was at least a legend.
