Sierra King's Quest series

[Aeschylus]

So, I'm completely new to the King's Quest series, but I'd like to get to know them better. Should I start with the first one and finish the whole series, or (like my friend recommended) only play the sixth one?

3, 4, 5, and 6 are all good in different ways if you have a degree of tolerance for some purposefully unfair game design. 1 and 2 I would save for last, as they are pretty bad games, and more of historical interest than for entertainment.

 

[Astral Rag]

 

[Boleskine]

 

[Boleskine]

 

[OndrejSc]

 

[Boleskine]

 

[Boleskine]

And here's Part 2:

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

some people (I believe MRY is one of them) even prefer it to VI.

Regarding the remakes:

The AGDI (formerly Tierra) remakes are uniformly excellent, with the particular standout being King's Quest 2+: Romancing the Stones.

I emphatically disagree! KQII remake is, to me, exactly indicative of why I like KQV more than KQVI. Despite the ridiculous musculature of Graham's arms in closeups, KQV -- like the preceding games -- is not about a fantasy hero; it is much more about a fairy tale hero. KQVI feels much more like a fantasy story. It's not a black-and-white difference, but everything from Alexander's appearance to LOOK HOW EPIC I AM sequences like the trip into the underworld seems like a move away from the homier, homelier adventures in the first five games. I'm quite confident it is Jane Jensen's influence, story-wise, but also probably market forces, as Sierra was trying to appeal to a somewhat broader demographic by then. I honestly have no views on which is the better designed game. As a kid, I was largely indifferent to design decisions -- Sierra puzzles often felt unfair, but I just kind of put up with it. It's just about feel. KQV feels like the perfect capstone to a series of fairytales. KQVI feels different, and wrong. The goofiness of adventure game puzzles just didn't fit, for me, with the protagonist or with some of the epic themes. Even as a kid I felt that way!

Which brings me to KQII. KQII in its original form is a very old school adventure -- much more like a text adventure (and not a particularly good one) that just throws different goofball areas together with somewhat arbitrary puzzles and fairly low thematic coherence. It is goofy and random. The single thing that stands out as worst in this regard is Dracula, because Dracula isn't a fairy tale figure, nor are vampires fairy tale antagonists. (Obviously the Batmobile is even stupider, but the Batmobile is an Easter egg.) Yet the KQII remake basically takes Dracula as its cornerstone and then tries to make some kind of serious, coherent psychodrama around him, with werewolves and an evil monk or something, I can't even remember all the details, only that it was just like a 13-year-old's attempt to make a "cool" fan fiction out of KQII (and I say this as someone who, at 13, tried to make a "cool" fan fiction out of Final Fantasy III!). It utterly misses that the origins of the KQ series were not, actually, adventure stories (let alone fantasy stories), but fairy tales. Fairy tales are not really about coherent psychodramas with robust dialogue and rich characterization. They are about archetypes, magical artifacts and companions, a few outsized monsters, arbitrary rules to obey, etc. KQII is utterly lacking in that feel. If anything, it's closer to a QFG game than a KQ game IMO. It feels like a game made by someone who hasn't ever read a fairy tale, and after having them read to him as a kid quickly realized that paperback fantasy novels were "cooler" and never looked back. Again -- at 13, maybe even at 18, that would be a fair description of me, so these barbs are somewhat self-directed, but I just don't think that someone coming in with that attitude is equipped to make a KQ game.

I'm taking this conversation over here because I feel guilty for completely derailing the base thread with it.

I suppose this is just a matter of semantics, but I find your definition of fairy tales kind of weirdly narrow; it's not just the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen out there. Talking about KGVI I would say the Isle of the Crown (Arabian Nights) and the Isle of the Beast (Beauty and the Beast) are pretty inarguably fairy tale adaptations, and, while I wouldn't make the argument, I can conceive of why someone would label the Isle of Wonder one as well. The segments that I would say wholesale belong to the realm of "fantasy" are the Isle of the Sacred Mountain, the Isle of Mists, and the Land of the Dead, (most of the content for which you will miss if you take the short path btw), but pedantically I would argue that "mythology" would be more accurate than "fantasy". I don't think I need to go full Joseph Campbell, but suffice to say fairy/folk tales have always been adjacent/tangential to mythology, so in a franchise devoted to exploring fairy tales an entry in which the protagonist explores a far-off land with mythological overtones never really struck me as tremendously out of place (same reason I never minded the harpies in V). I do think that there was a more conscious decision by the dev team of VI to take the franchise in a more "mature" direction, so I think I partially understand what you're getting at and why it might feel tonally off to you, and I agree that the nature of gameplay in point-and-clicks doesn't particularly mesh well with epic and action-packed plots (although I think you could make the same complaints about KQIII & especially VII).

Regarding KQ2+: I will admit that I am perhaps willing to regard it more highly than I would otherwise just for the fact that it takes something awful (KQ2) and turns it into something actually playable and enjoyable, and it does so purely out of the developers' good-will and free-time. I think that is to be commended, and I can concede that I am less critical of what I would agree is fairly juvenile writing due to that.
I think you're misremembering some things about it though:
Firstly, Dracula's presence in the story is actually fairly minimal; he only shows up in near the end of the last act, and while I agree the sequence plays out less than stellar (I think it's the weakest part of the game), I always assumed that the developers were trying to make an implicit reference to/subversion of the Lolotte/Edgar scene in IV.
Secondly, KQ2+ actually adds some explicitly fairy-tale inspired content (admittedly it also adds a lot more fantasy content).


Anyways I respect your opinion, and since you're responsible for one of the greatest point and clicks of all time I assume that you understand the genre far better than I do and there's likely something I'm missing. Perhaps it's just a matter of taste though.

BTW have you played A Tale of Two Kingdoms? Definitely a fairy-tale adventure, but a much more scholarly one than the King's Quests.

 

[MRY]

I admit that it's been a long time since I played either, and my vehemence (which is somewhat feigned or at least exaggerated) flows partly from the fact that I hold a contrarian view on these two games and thus feel like I need to express it more emphatically. Without having a comprehensive memory of them, it's hard to support my argument against your points.

Overall, what I'm talking about is primarily a "feeling," and it's hard to articulate the basis for that feeling after all these years. I stipulate that the King's Quest series includes fairy tales beyond Hans Christian Andersen and Grimms -- KQII has Neptune and Dracula, KQV has Arabian Nights sequences, so that alone would support your point, and I'm sure there are others. Maybe my views are all wrong here. But still, I don't think so. I'm convinced that the exact same things that cause me to back off from KQVI are what caused so many people to get so into it back in the day -- I know that for a fact on the "single tear" scene because I've seen it praised everywhere, but I also think it's true of the protagonist. There's an endearingly humble quality to KQI and KQII Graham (who looks like a goofball in game), KQII Gwydion/Alexander (who is emptying chamber pots!), KQIV Rosella, and KQV Graham (who's now a middle aged family man getting hectored by a supercilious owl) that is not as present in KQVI's teenage Alexander on his quest to get the attractive Cassima.

(This is the same reason why I think some of the closeups in KQV are ridiculous, particularly the ending slides.)

I'm not sure whether "fairytale vs. non-fairytale" is the right rubric to put this under. Certainly there are myths with heroes more like Alexander, and some fairytales (depending on how broadly you construe the term) where the protagonist is not a goofball. But Alexander does not strike me as fitting the main fairytale protagonist.

Anyway, it's probably not worth belaboring the point. The more I think about it, the less convinced I am that it holds up.

 

[Blackthorne]

No, I agree with you about the KQ2 remake. It's a good game, but the feel is all wrong. Absolutely, tonally all wrong. You nailed it when you said "This is a 13 year old's version of what is cool". I actually like the original KQ2, it dovetails well with KQ1 and was a fun game to play when I played it as a kid.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

No, I agree with you about the KQ2 remake. It's a good game, but the feel is all wrong. Absolutely, tonally all wrong. You nailed it when you said "This is a 13 year old's version of what is cool". I actually like the original KQ2, it dovetails well with KQ1 and was a fun game to play when I played it as a kid.

As I mentioned in the thread I split this discussion off from, KQ2 may have been my first video game ever (can't say with 100% certainty - there are a few other memories of nebulous games floating around in my brain from that era, but KQ2 is the only one I could name today, and I'm not sure of what the genuine play-order was), and as a 5 year old, I thought it was amazing. But it doesn't hold up. It frankly sucks compared even to its predecessor when it comes to background art, plotting, and especially puzzle design.

I will admit that I may have a personal grudge against KQ2, because I can remember having an intense 5-year old feeling that this game was amazing and when I got frustrated it was just my fault for playing it wrong and not being smart enough to truly understand it. Part of this was undoubtedly the difficulty of being a 5 year old and trying to navigate a text parser (although I suppose it probably made me a better speller overall), but after coming back to KQ2 a decade later having played a multitude of adventure games I came to the conclusion that I had never been the one truly at fault; the game just has a lot of bullshit design decisions, "gotcha" deaths, and the text-parser equivalent of pixel-hunting "puzzles".

But having said that, the fact that both you and MRY are united about KQ2+ does make me question my own memories of it. It's been a few years since I last played, so DalekFlay consider this a caveat on my previously whole-hearted recommendation.

 

[DalekFlay]

I get that some have a deep fondness for the early KQ "fairy tale feel" but as someone who didn't really get into the series until 5 and 6 I don't think that would really be a factor for my enjoyment of a remake.

 

[AndyS]

What irked me about the KQ remakes is that they took games that were charmingly random and open-ended and imposed a stifling sort of internal consistency on everything. It's no longer an open world you're dropped into and expected to explore it to find puzzles in need of solving. Now everything ties together so very neatly. It's like the gaming equivalent of movie producers insisting that the central conflict in every movie come down to something personal. "Waitaminute...no one ever said exactly why Superman's planet blew up. What if it was because IT WAS LUTHOR ALL ALONG?"

 

[MRY]

That puts the point extremely well. But it's also like, a strained effort to maintain as canonical all the "charmingly random" stuff even while making it "internally consistent."

That said, my beloved KQV sort of suffers from this itself with the silly Mordack/Manannan connection. Better just to just have a variety of mischief makers.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

Why can't I put one of the the diamonds from the pouch into the slingshot to kill the giant? Fucking gay game

 

[Boleskine]

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I've been thinking about getting the entire series on gog but I wonder if the fan remakes are better. So i watched a vid.

So there is more than 1 remake and also lots of versions of the original (which emus can help with)




And many more for me to look through.(or not because of spoilers).

Kings Quest Omnipedia
Infamous Adventures
Adinteractive
Interesting News from Cygnus

I haven't tracked down all the ports and projects but given time I will.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

What was the reason for two remakes of King's Quest III anyway? I thought there was some sort of rivalry there but I don't see that mentioned anywhere, so I think I must have imagined that...

 

[LarryTyphoid]

I've been thinking about getting the entire series on gog but I wonder if the fan remakes are better.

For me, I dislike the VGA fan-remakes but can't tolerate the first 2 games. I played the SCI remake of the original game and then skipped to KQ3.
Someone's making a fan-remake of KQ2 with SCI graphics and a text parser, so I'll probably play that when it comes out.

 

[catfood]

The remakes are great. Some of the best in the business. Very profesionally made. The one for the second game adds a lot of extra content too because the original was very short.

Normally I prefer parser to point and click, but the parser in the early Sierra games suck dick, so I'd say play the remakes if only for that reason alone. Later Sierra games improved the parser a ton, which is why I didn't play the QFG2 remake and instead I stuck to the original which is flawless.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

OG KQ1 and especially 2 are trash. 1 is at least notable for its historical value and context, but 2 is just awful. I strongly prefer the VGA remakes of both, although many people believe the fan remake of 2 is tonally inconsistent with the rest of the series.

3 is the game where, a few niggling issues aside (the mountain path) the series actually starts to be fun to play. The original is just fine there.

 

[Blackthorne]

What was the reason for two remakes of King's Quest III anyway? I thought there was some sort of rivalry there but I don't see that mentioned anywhere, so I think I must have imagined that...

Well, as the guy who did one of the KQIII remakes.... in late 2003, we got together to makes games.... we'd played Tierra/AGDI's remakes of KQ1 & 2, and thought doing a remake of III would be fun. We sent some messages and emails to them to ask if they were doing it, so we wouldn't overlap, you know? They didn't answer us (probably didn't take us seriously at the time, there were lots of fan groups that claimed to be doing remakes they never finished) but lo and behold, we (Infamous Adventures) released a KQIII remake in 2006. Towards the end of production, someone sent me an email tell me that, indeed, AGDI was making their own KQIII remake, and didn't tell us. Oh well. It was our first game, it was fun, we learned a lot. We remade Space Quest II after that one, honing our craft. They released their KQIII many years later, with a bit more polish on it than our first attempt. We were going to go back and do a "gold version" of our KQIII, but we decided to put our time and effort into making our own game, so we formed Infamous Quests and made "Quest for Infamy". That's the story of why we have two remakes of KQIII.

 

[Korgoth of Barbaria]

KQIV please

 

[Blackthorne]

Maybe.

 

[OndrejSc]