In retrospect, was KQ a bad series?

[Rock Knight]

Having watched a lot of Retsupurae, I have to wonder: In retrospect, were the KQ games bad games, along the lines of Space Adventures or Dark Seed--As in, guilty pleasure, nothing more than overly cheesy, half baked early '90s games? Have the KQ games aged poorly?

[ThunderChild]

That depends on how you look at it. On a technical level, it's extremely outdated in a way that it will not work out of the box on today's systems without resorting to DOSbox or ScummVM. As a game, the series has retained its entertainment value (except for number 7 and 8 ) far better then, for instance the latest Call of Duty or anything from the last three years.

For me, the height of the series are IV and VI. KQ4 because of it's fairy tale settings and references and KQ6 for its technical achievements (for that time). The later games were lesser because of the cartoon like graphics in KQ7 and the use of prehistoric 3D in KQ8. The earlier AGI games simply gave me serious headaches . . .

[Numbers]

Yeah, the first three are definitely ugly and downright unplayable by today's standards, especially the third one with its ridiculous anti-piracy system. The AGDI remakes are about as close to recreating the King's Quest spirit as you'll find these days, and I'd much rather play them over the originals.

The fourth game probably has the least wrong with it, besides some of the counter-intuitive puzzles the series is known for. The only real strikes against it are the graphics being only slightly better than before, and the music occasionally dipping into ear-piercingly melodramatic territory. The fifth game has a whole bunch of things wrong with it, but I find it's enjoyable in its badness, provided you know the solutions to the illogical puzzles ahead of time. It's probably the best-looking game in the series, as the artists really got to cut loose after getting stuck with the pixel-rendered graphics for so long. The sixth game wasn't as enjoyable for me as it was for most people. The graphics were good, but they weren't as good as they were in the fifth game. The music was okay, but it wasn't as good as the fifth game's music. The voice acting was amateurish, but not enough to make fun of. (Don't fight me on this one, people. King's Quest 6's voice acting is terrible by today's standards and you know it.)

We all know about the seventh game's "so bad it's horrible" status, so no need to talk about that here. We also know about Mask of Eternity's "dark and gritty reboot" status, so no need to go into that either.

In the end, yeah, the games have aged pretty poorly. I'd say the current fanmade games are more likely to attract newcomers than the originals. As far as cheesiness goes, that was the standard back then; why else would Wolfenstein 3D end with you fighting Hitler in a mech-suit?

I definitely wouldn't place the games in the same class as Cobra: Space Adventures or Darkseed, though. Cobra is literally only good for a few unintentional laughs ("Are you really that hungry? THEN EAT LASER, LOSER!"), with the gameplay being some of the most slow-paced and repetitive I've ever seen. Darkseed suffers from an insane difficulty that will turn off all but the most hardcore adventure gamers. Darkseed 2, like King's Quest 5, is objectively a very bad game, but there are at least a few laughs to be had along the way.

Retsupurae had a ball making fun of King's Quest, but it was done all in good fun. They even got the Graham voice actor to say "F*ck you, Cedric" in one of their podcasts. Now that is pretty damn awesome.

[GrahamRocks!]

We all know about the seventh game's "so bad it's horrible" status, so no need to talk about that here.

That's your opinion, Numbers. Not everyone considers KQ7 "So Bad It's Horrible", myself included, though I will agree with you on MOE.

[Numbers]

I'd say Retsupurae's entire fanbase considers KQ7 a pretty horrible game. That's thousands and thousands of people who think it's crap right there on the table. I find it amusing that of all the games Slowbeef and Diabeetus have riffed over, KQ7 is literally the one game that was so bad they couldn't finish it. These are the people who did a 7-1/2 hour long walkthrough of Darkseed 2, a similarly lengthy longplay of Deep Fear that consisted mostly of cutscenes of elevators moving from one floor to another, a longplay of Urban Runner which is made up entirely of poorly dubbed-over dialogue, hammy acting, and disjointed plot points, and all ten chapters of Ambition, the absolute worst that online flash gaming has to offer...and when it came to KQ7, they literally couldn't make it past chapter 3. It broke them.

[GrahamRocks!]

  I. Like. KQ7. You are NOT going to change that, no matter how many times you bring it up! "Thousands and thousands" may hate it, but there are several people who DON'T.

Same goes for QFG5.

[Numbers]

We all have our guilty pleasures. I like Mask of Eternity and KQ5, remember. But I don't try to defend them as good games, because they aren't. And you can like KQ7 all you want, but you shouldn't try to defend it as a good game either. A good KQ7 would have had well-written protagonists along the lines of Rosella's KQ4 characterization. Instead, what we got was...well, to say the portrayal of Rosella and Valanice is misogynistic is putting it nicely. Two emotional wrecks who are constantly whining, constantly crying, constantly on their periods. Did nobody at Sierra stop and think about the unfortunate implications of this? This was after they had done a very solid effort on a game with mostly female main characters in KQ4. They did it right the first time, but screwed up the second time. Guess they were abducted by aliens and mind-controlled during the interim or something.

Please don't bring Quest for Glory into this.

[GrahamRocks!]

Your opinion, Numbers. You may consider it a bad game, but I don't. Perhaps it has been awhile since I watched Enchantermon's LP, but I don't remember "constantly whining, constantly crying, constantly on their periods" enc. If anything, Valanice crying at least is the solution to a puzzle (makes me wonder why you have to do it twice but whatever) As for Rosella in 4, to be honest, as much as I like 4, I didn't see all that much in terms of personality in Rosella here aside from the intro. She doesn't get much in terms of dialogue.

Everytime you bash into the ground, Numbers, I will defend it. Mark my words, I will.

I'll tell ya what, Numbers. The next time I watch a playthrough of 7, I'll look for stuff I don't really care for and analyze why I like it. The game isn't perfect by any stretch (no game is as far as I can tell), but surely it's not as bad as you claim.

Heck, if I may confess something, I'm having a hard time getting into Torin's Passage.

[Numbers]

The whining I'm referring to is mostly how Rosella went from being one of those heroines in KQ4 whose actions speak louder than words and only ever despairs once at the beginning of the game (because her dad is dying, which to be honest, is a pretty valid reason)...and then in KQ7 we cut to "I CAN'T BELIEVE I'M A TROLL!" over and over again for almost an entire chapter.

Also, Rosella cries when Mathilde yells at her. I repeat, she cries after being yelled at by a complete stranger. She's been inside a whale, hidden inside a hostile ogre's house, avoided a much scarier troll through pitch-blackness, nearly come into direct physical contact with the walking dead, and held captive inside Lolotte's castle to be wed to her son--one of, if not the darkest hours for any King's Quest protagonist. And then when somebody calls her a usurper--an outlandish claim, at best--instead of just laughing it off and walking away, Rosella bursts into tears. Man up Rosie, you've got stuff to do.

And why should crying be a puzzle solution? That reminds me of a Spongebob episode that had Spongebob in a miserable situation the entire time with nobody helping until finally crying fixed everything. The moral? Spongebob says directly to the camera, "I guess crying does solve your problems after all." No it doesn't. Whoever wrote that episode should be ashamed of themselves. And whoever decided that making Valanice into a pathetic individual whose weakness could result in puzzle solutions should similarly be ashamed of themselves.

KQ7 is one massive study in character derailment, similar in many ways to Metroid: Other M. The company decides to take what worked before and mess around with it. In Other M, this meant a different gameplay style and a heavier focus on cutscenes. KQ7's gameplay is still mostly true to the series, although the simplified cursor was not a welcome change, and the 3D rotations of inventory items weren't used often enough. However, where KQ7 and Other M converge is with the character derailment of the female protagonists. In earlier Metroid games, Samus basically kicked ass and chewed bubblegum and people were okay with it. Her personality was never established, because she didn't really need one. Come Other M, however, she had to have some sort of personality because the game had more of a story...and boy, was it a let-down. She whined and pined, and broke down into tears. They literally derailed the character of someone who had no character to begin with. She wasn't the badass people had grown up with. She was a stereotypical, misogynistic portrayal of a woman.

KQ7 Rosella is not the same Rosella as KQ4. She's not the badass who can threaten evil trees with an axe and outwit cyclops witches. She's not the badass who tamed a unicorn, befriended a dolphin and hypnotized a cobra. She's not the badass who, when all hope seemed lost, escaped from her room (with a man's help, mind you, but we can forgive that), got all her possessions back, marched all the way to the other side of the castle past all the sleeping goons and shot Lolotte in her bed where she lay. KQ7 Rosella daintily tiptoes across the screen. KQ7 Rosella can get scared to death by a jack-in-the-box. KQ7 Rosella screams like a little girl whenever any enemy shows up, no matter how non-threatening. KQ4 Rosella is a badass. KQ7 Rosella is a stereotypical woman.

And let's not forget the two troll women who start sobbing upon hearing news that there is a wedding.

Do you see what I'm getting at here? Through all the obnoxious, painful voice acting, the poor, choppy animation,  the ridiculous sound effects, and overall childishness of the whole game, Rosella's portrayal is the main reason I will never like KQ7.

I believe I've made my point here. I don't expect to change your mind; I think you have too much enthusiasm to budge from your current position. But know this: you're not changing my mind, either. Nothing you say will ever make up for how betrayed I felt when I first saw the opening cutscene.

P.S.

"Prince FROCKMORTON?! Mu-THER, he's so BORING!"

[ThunderChild]

I cannot say that I don't agree with what's been said above . . .

[Numbers]

Everytime you bash into the ground, Numbers, I will defend it. Mark my words, I will.

I must confess, I'm a little disappointed that defending KQ7 for the last few days has amounted to stony silence. Did you rage quit this thread or something?

Heck, if I may confess something, I'm having a hard time getting into Torin's Passage.

...and again, stop bringing up other games that have nothing to do with King's Quest.

[Lambonius]

In response to the OP:

No.

[JDHJANUS]

Hi! So I'm fairly new here, but this topic is something that I've been thinking about for some time now, actually. I grew up on the King's Quest games, and LOVED them. King's Quest has and always will be my all-time favorite Sierra series (followed *very* closely by the Laura Bow games). As I have had the chance to play more of Sierra's library, and indeed adventure games from other companies, as well as meeting people outside of the King's Quest online community that I first grew  up with on the Internet, I've been surprised by how many people considered KQ a BAD series. It's challenging for me to separate nostalgia from excellence, although there are some games that make it significantly easier. Judging from similar games like Kyrandia that I've played as an adult, I think I would still like the KQ games even if I hadn't played them as a child; however, I don't know if they would maintain the same level of awesomeness in my heart as they do at the moment.

I will say, as a writer, the early King's Quest games do not seem to really flow well as a story. They're really more or less fetch quests or treasure hunts, with a pretty simple background story to set the stage, but with the focus being on exploration and puzzle solving, with the story taking a back seat. This changed with KQIV, but while the story is more integrated into the plot, it still is in the background. King's Quest VI really took up the game in story-telling, but that was mainly due to the influence of Jane Jensen, who wrote most of the script and who is a masterful storyteller in her own right. Nevertheless, having played all of Roberta's games (completed them all except MOE), characterization and storyline generally seem to take a backseat to exploration and puzzle solving.

As far as characterization in KQVII, I think Sierra tried to something very interesting with a lot of their later games. Before the development of the SCI-1 graphics system and the switch to point-and-click adventures, there was very little characterization put into Sierra's various characters. Roger Wilco had some personality, but the full extent of his personality was not completely fleshed out really until SQIV. Larry Laffer definitely had the most personality out of them all, but even still, it wasn't until LSL3 (one of the last games on the SCI-0 system) that he really stepped into the depths of the character that he was in LSL5-7. Even Sonny Bonds took a deeper personality switch between PQ2 and 3.

Yet ESPECIALLY with Roberta's earlier games (pre-1990), there is very little characterization done at all, as I mentioned above. I mean, Graham, Alexander, and Rosella faced all sorts of crazy things in the first four games, but Roberta never really focused on them. She developed the other characters in the world around them, but since they were supposed to represent the player, they are similar to a blank slate character from an early RPG: No personality except what the player gives them. This changed in KQ5-7, where the characters actually have dialog, and where the narration moves from 2nd to 3rd person. Now it's not so much you portraying this character, but rather you controlling this character. As a result, the characters became more fleshed out and were characterized differently.

Also, keep in mind that KQVII was co-developed by Lorelei Shannon, who wrote a lot of the script as Roberta was completely focused on Phantasmagoria. That could also explain the difference in characterization between KQIV and VII. Personally, considering Roberta's struggle with storytelling, I'm not sure what KQVII would look like if she had written the story (I mean, look at Phantasmagoria's script.... O_o).

I'll be honest: I actually liked King's Quest VII overall. Not as much as VI or IV, but I do still think it's a worthwhile game, and while the storyline is not has deep or involved as its predecessor, it's engaging enough to keep me involved, and considering the series' history of absurdly illogical puzzles, actually has a fairly logical puzzle solving behind it. And, at least back in my day, it had some pretty vocal fans as well. In fact, most of the old school KQ friends that I had, while agreeing that it wasn't their favorite, liked KQVII quite a bit.

So, is King's Quest a bad series? In my opinion, no, it is not, but I do understand that there are much better and more logical adventure games series out there, and I think it ultimately comes down to what you enjoy. I have some adventure community friends who would never touch the KQ series with a 30 foot pole. Others who have played it since they were 3 and love every aspect of it. For me, it will always hold a special place in my heart.

Talk to you later!

JDHJANUS
Josh

[Numbers]

Considering Phantasmagoria's script, I think if Roberta had directed KQ7 with that mindset, Rosella would still be a blank slate like her KQ4 counterpart, except she would preen her hair more often.

[JDHJANUS]

I just laughed so hard out loud I got some strange looks from some of my co-workers! Hilarious, Numbers!!!!

[Big C from Cauney island]

No, the KQ series was NOT a bad series. It was an AWESOME series. Not that I play them anymore because I beat them many times. I might load them up here and again though.  Back then, they were pretty cutting edge technology wise. They were a big deal.  And they were fun as hell to play and lasted a long time, especially without a hint book. Part of the fun was asking other people "How did you get past....." I don't remember doing that too much with recent games, as many I have played recently are more action related. 

Have they aged well? Thats a very subjective question. I understand that this type of game is not in its popular phase as it was back then. But I still enjoy a good adventure game. Not quite as much as I did back then when they were new, but still fun. For exeample, figuring out how to beat KQ3 got me TONS more pumped up then getting to the end of Grand Theft Auto or even the new wolfenstein. Not even comparable.  Assassins creed 2 got me pretty pumped story wise, that about as close as Ive gotten nowadays.  Although I will say the first Crysis and the original doom got me pretty damn pumped, but the original doom was in 94 anyways.

But no, KQ was a good series. There was certain aspects of the games or jokes I didnt understand till I was older.  And I dont think they were cheesy. They were games with a sense of humor mixed in well with other elements. Not overly done, but just right. Just enough to be light hearted, then scare you with the cave troll in KQ4. Still a bit scary even now.  Still good games, just not at there peek and not popular. Remember, these were THE games of the time.

[Bludshot]

You don't have to say they were bad but Lucasarts was doing MUCH better work around the same time.

And honestly even within the company I feel like Quest for Glory and Gabriel Knight were far better than the KQ games.

[Rock Knight]

You don't have to say they were bad but Lucasarts was doing MUCH better work around the same time.

And honestly even within the company I feel like Quest for Glory and Gabriel Knight were far better than the KQ games.

The difference is, where LucasArts would put out one or two games a year, Sierra would put out ten.
LucasArts didn't really need to pump out games to survive--They were simply another arm of George Lucas' massive Empire, with all the resources and cash flow they could ever need. They weren't purely a game company that lived or died by it's products.

Sierra, on the other hand, until 1996, was an independent game company that needed to put out 10, 12 games a year to stay alive. As such, of ten games released, you might get two or three great games, five decent games, and 3 horrible games.

I think if LucasArts was in the same position as Sierra was, and needed to pump out several years a year to stay afloat, you'd see the same quality issues.

[beernutts]

You don't have to say they were bad but Lucasarts was doing MUCH better work around the same time.

And honestly even within the company I feel like Quest for Glory and Gabriel Knight were far better than the KQ games.

That's not true for KG1, 2, and 3, as they were released before any Lucas arts games.  KQ1 and 2 were the 1st of their kind, and I LOVED them.  The graphics were a marvel for the standards of the day.  Controlling a character to walk around in a "pseudo" 3d environment, and interacting with objects, people and performing quests was a thing I could only imagine having played only text adventure games before then.

As Roberta Williams said, "My previous games, from Mystery House to King's Quest II, were all great. But they were essentially glorified treasure hunts...your object being to win the game by finding and collecting items. It was not possible to have bigger and more complex plots than that thanks to technical limitations."

It's true though that the games, based on today's standards, aren't very good, but it's not a very fair comparison either.  No-one had ever done anything like it, and it was new for everyone.  The games got better as they went, as I really liked 3 compared to 1 and 2, and 4 was good as well as 6.

It'd be like asking "Is the steam engine really a good engine?"  For it's time, it was revolutionary, but, it's somewhat worthless today.

[stika]

In the end, I think it all depends on one's subjective opinion and what people look for in a game. Many people love Telltale's approach to adventure gaming, others feel it's to easy and barely meets the criteria for the genre (personally I love their games.)

I know I've seen similar criticisms for Lucasarts. To me there's room for everyone. Sometimes I feel like playing Monkey Island, other times I want to have a good pie throwing romp on King's Quest.


EDIT: Now that I think about it, I think I remember seeing a Ron Gillbert interview where he said Monkey Island 1 and 2 sold a fraction of what King's Quest V and VI sold. That and that the Monkey Island games were not as well received by the critics.