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Release Date: June 2, 2012
Developers: Hanako Games And Spiky Caterpillar
Publishers: Hanako Games
Platforms: PC
Genre: Visual Novel / Role Playing Game
Players: One

Being a Princess is not an easy job. Being a Queen is even harder. Especially when you're only fourteen years old, and the reason you've inherited the throne is that your royal mother has just met an untimely end.
Now power is up for grabs. You may be the official heir, but much of the country's nobility would love to steal the throne for themselves. Aggressive neighbors will take advantage of any weakness to enlarge their borders at your expense. And that's not even mentioning the magical dangers which are lying in wait...

Can you survive long enough to reach your coronation?[/spoil]

The story of "Long live the Queen" revolves around Elodie, a 14 year old girl and Crown Princess to the Kingdom of Nova. Elodie's Mother, The Queen of Nova has died, leaving Nova without a ruler. Elodie's Father Joslyn, King Dowager and Duke of Caloris takes the role of adviser to Elodie, who is not yet old enough to become Queen. The people of Nova see this as an opportunity to try and take the throne, with some in the royal family and even people from outside of the Kingdom attempt to kill Elodie in attempts to take the throne for themselves. Throughout the weeks to her coronation, she will have to face aggressive family members, the general public wanting things from her, and even a foreign prince trying to steal her most powerful posession. There will be many assassination attempts throughout as well, and luckily for Elodie, she enjoys school, the very thing keeping her alive. After using her knowledge to survive until her coronation, Elodie becomes Queen of Nova and a Lumen, using her magical powers to defend the Kingdom once more

Long live the Queen is a game designed to be played by one person, as such there is no multiplayer. The game is a Role playing game with a lot of visual novel elements. This means the whole game is primarily focused on the storyline, and the choices you make defining the end outcome for the Kingdom. The game progresses in weeks, where each week you study two fields in lessons of a morning and evening class, and these level up your different skills. There are 42 skills, broken down in to 14 subcategories, and 4 Main categories. What you study effects what choices and story paths are available to you throughout the game.When you get at least 50 points for all skills in a subcategory, you will unlock an outfit that, along with a visual change to Elodie, will grant you a minor boost in that subcategory. At the end of each week, you can spend your weekends doing an activity, from visiting your mothers tomb to playing with childhood toys. These activities change your mood. Mood effects your skills in a huge way. There are 4 ranges of moods, with 8 actual moods. These are afraid and angry, depressed and cheerful, yielding and willful, lonely and pressured. Depending on your dominant mood, this will decide what skills you get bonuses in (allowing you to train them faster) and what skills you get decreases in (which means you will train them slower, or in some cases you wont train them at all) Because of the high number of skills, the epilogue can differ, but if you survive all 40 weeks you will always become Queen of Nova

The game's art is styled around anime (Japanese animations) While the art and backgrounds are very nice to look at, the game doesn't have very many settings in way of graphics, with only and option to change the preferred renderer between auto, software, and Opengl. While the game isn't graphically demanding as it is basically a visual picturebook, there are no ways to buff or improve quality

The controls are very simple in Long live the Queen. There are 6 buttons places on the right side of the screen (skills, mood, outfit, classes, log and menu) When pressed, these buttons will open up a seperate menu in the game window to allow you to navigate the game. As the controls are very simplistic, newer players will be able to access all features of the game with ease.

Long live the Queen runs using the Ren'Py engine, which was used to create the visual novel for the popular anime "Another"

7/10. While i loved the game and it's simplicity, as a visual novel it has no real replay reward. Apart from getting all the achievements and a few steam badges, once you've put about 10 hours into the game you know all the storylines. Still, it is a fun game to put a few hours in if you've nothing else to do. The varied storylines is what really made this game interesting for me. the way every little thing you do, from choosing to level dog handelling instead of royal demeanor, can save Elodie, or kill her. Because of this, i felt an emotional attachment toward Elodie, and wanted to see her through to her coronation. Most of the time the game makes you think ahead as well. "Should i train swordfighting incase someone challenges me at the upcommnig tournaments" This leads you to make decisions that will keep Elodie alive in that situation, but might not be necessarily helpful in the future. That is what makes this game interesting.