What did you love best about KQ?

[Sir Perceval of Daventry]

What did you love best about KQ, what drew you in the most? Why do you think you fell in love with the series?

[GrahamRocks!]

Hmmm... the music and story mostly.

[MusicallyInspired]

The journey and soundtrack.




And deaths and dead ends.

[Blackthorne]

The fact that we could talk about it forever, with zero variance in the conversation!


Bt

[inm8#2]

The blend of all sorts of fables into one story.

[Bludshot]

The strange pulling sensations.

[crayauchtin]

Definitely the puzzles and the "who's who" of fairy tales.

Also, the fact that the name of the main character is Graham. An excellent choice for a name.

[Lambonius]

The prospect of one day covertly sabotaging licensed KQ revivals so that the license could be mine, all mine!

[crayauchtin]

The prospect of one day covertly sabotaging licensed KQ revivals so that the license could be mine, all mine!

Oh nononono, you have to fight me for it.

Mano a mano! To the death!

[Haids1987]

The strange pulling sensations.

I think for me, it was a nostalgia thing at first, since I've been playing since I was a wee Quester. It just made logical sense to move on from Quest for the Crown to the next few.

If I had to point out a few specifics, though, I guess I would say that I choose to play it as an adult not just for nostalgia, but also for the storylines, the meshed-up fairy tales and myths, and the characters. I mean seriously, the characters are what keep the stories alive and consistent, so I think we all have a soft spot for them.

[Damar]

For me it's the nostalgia mainly.  Nothing compares to playing KQ2 for me.  It reminds me of being a young child and playing the game with my parents and helping them figure things out.  Even now KQ2 is one of my favorite King's Quests for that very reason.

Outside of that, when playing the games originally, my favorite thing about them is my favorite thing about adventure games in general.  It's the puzzles.  Interacting with your surroundings, figuring out what's there, and using logic to trade and create tools to unlock new areas to explore.  That is what I love about adventure games and why I don't like RPGs or FPS all that much.  The interaction isn't there.  The puzzles aren't there.  And when they are, they're common sense like, "use the key to unlock the door."  That's not a puzzle and it's not true exploration.  All the adventure games had the puzzles, but King's Quest really had a lot of them.

[Bludshot]

The problem with King's Quest having a lot of puzzles is that most of them were absolute garbage, the series really set the bar for moon logic.

Actually now that I think about it how on Earth did you and your parents get through KQ2? That one is a pretty bad offender if I recall.  The sugar cube nonsense comes to mind.

[Damar]

I believe it is possible to make it through the brambles without the sugar cube.  It's just very, very difficult.  I'm pretty sure we made it through that way (I was very young.)  But I also remember them eventually getting the sugar cube.  They managed that when I was out of the room.  For all I know they coughed up the money for the hint line to figure it out.

To be perfectly honest I don't clearly remember them beating the game, though I'm pretty sure they did.  The thing about adventure games is that it's supposed to take a while to figure out.  It's a whole journey to immerse yourself in this new land and new forms of logic that are native to this place.  I think that's something that's missing now a days with the internet having walkthroughs available the moment a game drops.  Kids today (I sound so old) just don't have the patience for a game that will take forever to play and figure out.  Doing a speed run of adventure games was only something I started doing after I'd beaten it a dozen times.  It's all about taking your time.  So really my parents and I beating the game never stood out to me.  It was all about just playing the game.  You invested your time, and lots of it, and if you didn't keep investing it there was a chance you'd never beat that game.  And that was ok.  It's the experience that mattered.

[Bludshot]

Okay I am going to take this dangerously close to an argument about the genre, just a heads up, and an advanced apology.

There is a difference between a challenging puzzle, and a puzzle that is so impossibly contrived for the purpose of padding out the game.  If your parents didn't use the hotline, they probably went for the last ditch tactic of using every item in their inventory on everything in the game.  If players have to resort to this then the puzzle is bad, it basically just wastes your time.  New forms of logic doens't come into play if you have to put a bridle on a snake or throw a pie at a yeti.  Because more often than not we solved those puzzles by dying a lot and using the process of elimination to find the right random item to use.

[Damar]

I agree, actually.  Sometimes they did ask for a bit too much in the "new logic" department.  The snake bridal thing is a key example.  However I think that with the older games it fit slightly better because, again, it was a different experience.  Time had no meaning because you played these games for months, in some cases years, before beating them.  So trial and error was less arduous than now where you expect the plot to clip along and the action to happen.

Also, and I could be completely off on this, I think that the later games like KQ5 suffered more from the moon logic because the games were becoming more realistic.  Instead of a pixelated yellow guy, you were playing a realistic King Graham, so now bizarre puzzles like yeti pies and honey emerald traps seemed even more out of place.  The snake bridal is ridiculous, admittedly, but to me I always was just prone to shrug it off whereas I still shake my head over some of KQ5's ridiculousness.

So yeah, some of those puzzles were ridiculous, but I think they're more a relic from another time where they were still infuriating and stupid, but fit in slightly better.

[Bludshot]

Snake bridles aside I do cut the first two games a little slack since there weren't really any design rules in place, and even the third game had a lot less moon puzzles. 

I remember IV having a hidden bridle on a deserted island (again with the bridles) and an ogre that was impossible to avoid sometimes, but all in all there was enough improvement for me to feel safe in calling BS on some of the puzzles in late adventure games.

[Lambonius]

I'm sorry, but the hidden bridle in KQ4 is WAY worse than any puzzle in KQ5, except for the stand-in-the-library-doing-nothing-and-just-wait "puzzle" in KQ5, which is possibly the worst puzzle in KQ history.  The only true moon logic puzzle in KQ5 is the cheese in the wand machine, because it's pure process of elimination.

Pie-in-the-face is a classic trope, not illogical at all--the problem with that puzzle is that you have numerous opportunities to get rid of the pie (even using it to "solve" a previous puzzle) and the pie is the ONLY solution to get past the yeti.  It's not the logic that's at fault, it's the nearly unavoidable dead-end situation for first time players who probably gave the pie to the eagle.  The honey emeralds is a bit worse, but still has its own internal logic that fits into the fairy tale setting.

The reason the hidden bridle is so bad is because there is absolutely no indication it even exists unless you type a specific phrase while standing in a specific spot of the screen.  There literally is no way to know to do that, because there are no previous instances in any KQ game where you have to so specifically position yourself and then type the phrase.

The waiting puzzle in KQ5 is terrible for similar reasons, in that it's a completely unprecedented non-gameplay solution.  You literally can't be doing anything, or he won't appear--it went against everything that adventure gamers had conditioned themselves to do when playing an adventure game, let alone King's Quest.

[KatieHal]

Honey & emeralds/cheese-machine/snake-bridle are the top three worst puzzles as far as moon logic. Hidden bridle comes in very close to those three--it's saved because, while there's no indication that it exists, digging for buried treasure on a deserted island is at least something of a trope. It's at least on the same level as pieing a yeti--the IDEA of doing that exists in the world. Neither is a GOOD puzzle, but there's some kind of idea of it in there.

The honey & emeralds fails because I have NO idea where that idea has its basis (and if there is one, let me know because I'm really curious!), AND there's no indication that the gnomes exist at all, much less that they are in the forest and can help. Likewise the cheese & the snake-bridle, no indications, no tropes to build off of, just process of elimination.

The waiting in the library is also really bad because usually in an adventure game, things aren't happening because you've not yet done something, and that one is the exact opposite--a thing that only happens if you're not doing anything.

Also, man, the royal family is really lucky that Mordack & Mannanan grew up in a household that emphasized the importance of regularly scheduled naptiime, aren't they?

[Bludshot]

Now that this has become the worst puzzle in KQ thread.  I feel the need to love/hate on KQ5 some more.

The cheese and the waiting are most definitely not the only nonsensical puzzles, although they are easily the worst offenders.

1. Using the genie on the witch.  I know you could technically figure this one out logically if you had used the genie on yourself and died, but that is a really moronic way to give a player a clue, as it basically means Graham is using divine intuition to just know that giving a genie to a witch will trap her, especially since Graham's prior genie experience was of the benevolent wish granting variety. (In all fairness, KQ6 also makes Alexander pick the correct lamp to swap with the real one, when only the player actually knows what it looks like.)

2. Tambourine on the snake.  Maybe this is some common snake trick, but I somehow doubt it.  If the goal was to scare away the snake, couldn't we just throw inventory at it? It could have even been another chance to lose the pie!

3. Honey/emerald trap. Err...because elves like shiny things?

4. Playing the harp for the Ice lady.  Because all of us were thinking "Oh, we have to warm her icy heart with music," not "I died, okay lets try the next item."

5. Playing the harp for the harpies.  Err...because harpies like shiny things? Or is it because "harp" is in the word harpies? I really hope it is the first one.

Honorable mention: Getting captured by thugs in order to get some rope and ham.  Since Graham would probably have gone there with the best of intentions and just sort of escapes a bad situation I can't really call this completely nonsensical, but man is it silly.

[Numbers]

I actually think Paw's Let's Play of KQ5 on TGWTG.com covered a lot of what was wrong with the game; one thing that hasn't been mentioned in this thread is the fact that the game punishes your wanderlust. Trying to leave the desert? If you're just one screen south of where Serenia proper ends, you're scorpion bait. Trying to explore while you're in the ocean? Hope you enjoy getting up close and personal with sea serpents. And there's no indication that you'll get killed before it actually happens in either situation. That's what I disliked most--the trial and error gameplay.

However, I would be remiss not to mention the one puzzle in the entire KQ franchise that REALLY pissed me off--guessing that stupid gnome's name in KQ1.