Roberta Williams' King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride

aka: KQ7, King's Quest VII: Die prinzlose Braut, King's Quest: The Prince-less Bride
Moby ID: 135
DOS Specs
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Description official descriptions

Queen Valanice of Daventry has always thought that getting married would be the best course of action for her daughter Rosella. However, the young princess seems to be more interested in adventure, recklessly following a mysterious magical creature into a whirlpool that eventually transfer herself and her mother to another world. The two end up in different parts of a land known as Eldritch, with Rosella being transformed into a troll. They must find each other and eventually defeat an evil sorceress who plots to ruin the land.

Like its predecessors, King's Quest VII is an adventure game primarily based on solving inventory puzzles. It discards the icon-based interface of the two previous installments, and instead features a simplified "smart cursor" used for general interaction with highlighted objects and characters, as well as significantly fewer text descriptions. The game is divided into chapters, alternating between the queen and the princess as protagonists. As opposed to the realistic drawing style of all the preceding game, it has brightly colored visuals reminiscent of Walt Disney cartoons.

Spellings

  • King's Quest 7: Невеста тролля - Russian spelling
  • מסע המלך VII - הכלה ללא הנסיך - Hebrew spelling
  • 國王密使 7 - Traditional Chinese spelling

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Credits (DOS version)

40 People (33 developers, 7 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 79% (based on 23 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.5 out of 5 (based on 98 ratings with 8 reviews)

king's quest jumps the shark

The Good
The King 's Quest saga continues, with cartoon-style animation, new worlds to explore, new puzzles to solve and - thankfully - this adventure has two female protagonists.

Adventure games during this area were trying to utilise the CD-ROM format with voice acting (instead of just text), and creating a world that either looked more like a Disney cartoon or Hollywood blockbuster.

I see plenty of creativity and ambition in this game, sadly the execution of this game is horrible, and marked the beginning of the end for a once great adventure game franchise.

The Bad
The cartoon-inspired look of the game and its intermission sequences are actually impressive for 1994. The big problem is that when you develop an adventure game in such a manner, you cannot overlook 'little' things in order to get the game on the shelves by Xmas.

Here the animation is often painfully choppy, with characters moving painfully slow. Had more time been given to development, the world and the characters in it would likely have connected with players more then they do with what was released.

Any emotional investment in the characters or their problems is marred by the clearly rushed nature of the animation. If you want the player to care about the fate of your two heroines, then you have to understand how animation - when done well - can create cartoon actors (actresses) who can be good actors.

The settings may look pretty, but it is supposed to be an adventure game, not an art gallery. If you want to see how cartoon type animation can work well in adventure games, check out Monkey Island 3 or even Full Throttle.

Beyond the rush job/animation problems - which make parts of the story hard to follow - the control scheme has been changed, almost 'dumbbed down' to the point where puzzles are way to easy or way to obscure to be of any fun.

The voice acting is not great, but that is probably (partly) the fault of whoever edited or wrote the script. Good script writing/editing is as key to CD adventure games as is creating animated actors.

It is hard to get too interested in a cheap "Alice In Wonderland" storyline, and many of the side stories that arise are rarely developed enough to matter.

Descriptions of items or characters are often kept to a bare minimum, and one reason why the game allows you skip chapters is because the game has a tendency to crash - at least the original version I had.

I do not object to the 'family friendly' tone of the game or even the 'homages' to legends, myths and other fictitious tales. Such things have served the series well in previous KQ adventure games.

However, the game seems to be a little too eager to ensure that both heroines stay within an uber-feminine box. As if someone looked at 1940s Disney cartoon as how women should behave in an adventure.

Heck, the princess is introduced singing a very, very, very happy tune about how great her life is. It's not a good song and comes off as a wee bit like "Stepford Wives".

True, they are royalty and that means a certain decourm and sense of proprietary. I just found the overall design of the women to be a tad sexist.

The Bottom Line
The game suffers from being rushed to the store shelves, which leaves players with bugs, confusing story, poor character development, choppy animation and cartoon characters that are hard to like or dislike. It is a shame because behind all these faults, rare moments of creativity and adventure game fun can be seen.

Windows · by ETJB (428) · 2013

What the Disney?

The Good
King's Quest VII marks a new generation of Sierra adventure games where titles were no longer being distributed on floppy disks and the games themselves were becoming completely different. Like with the last game, series creator Roberta Williams had someone on board to help her with the design. Seeing as it was Jane Jensen, you would think that would be the case here. But Jensen was getting ready to film The Beast Within, so the reigns were handed over to Lorelai Shannon, who I believe was new to Sierra at the time.

King's Quest VII was the first and only CD-ROM title by Sierra to be shipped in two versions. The initial version was rushed out in time for Christmas 1994 and was a buggy mess, to the point where gamers had to install numerous patches so that they could complete the game. I wrote a scathing review based on my experiences of this first version. A year later, Sierra released a second version that not only removes the bugs, but also added some tweaks to the gameplay.

After delivering a little musical number, Princess Rosella of Daventry is lectured by her mother, Queen Valanice, about the advantages of marriage. Not interested in the conversation, she approaches a pond and gazes into it. Having seen image of a castle caused by a seahorse-like creature, Rosella decides to jump in. Valanice goes in after her and they both end up in a portal, where the two desperately try to reach out to each other. As soon as their hands are about to connect, however, another hand appears out of nowhere, snatches Rosella's hand, and pulls her into another dimension.

The first thing that I noticed about King's Quest VII is that it moves away from hand-painted backgrounds in favor of traditional animation reminiscent to Disney films, and you get a taste of it within the game's introduction. It features some stunning backgrounds, with my favorites being the pumpkin house in Ooga-Booga Land, Dreamland, and Etheria. The animation was so complicated that Sierra got help from animation houses that were located overseas. For instance, the aforementioned intro was done by the same people who did the game animations for the CD-i Zelda games. Some of the locations are based on popular culture. Ooga-Booga Land is a reference to Tim Burton's “A Nightmare Before Christmas”, and I think that Etheria is based on either Care Bears or My Little Pony.

Unlike Roberta Williams' previous offerings, King's Quest VII is divided into six chapters, with you playing Valanice in the odd chapters and Rosella the even ones. Since the two protagonists have different tasks in the game – with Valanice trying to search for her daughter, while Rosella finding some way to stop a volcano from erupting – it would make sense to only play odd- or even-numbered chapters, especially if you can't stand either of them. Personally, I don't like Rosella now as she is a far cry from the same girl in previous KQ offerings. She was more mature back then, but she now comes across as a whiny broad who doesn't think twice about her actions.

The interface in King's Quest VII is designed in such a way that it's actually easier for the player to get used to. There are no icons to be seen, but a single mouse cursor resembling a wand that changes depending on what the player hovers over. There are a few objects that the protagonists can interact with, and hovering over these causes the wand to sparkle. Hovering the wand over a doorway and it doesn't change to a sparkling wand, but an arrow indicating the direction the protagonists can travel.

What I found neat about the interface is when you click an inventory item over the icon that resembles an eye, a 3-D representation of it appears in a window. You can then rotate it back and forth, and manipulate it as well. Next to the eye icon is the control panel. Here, the options are self-explanatory. I like how the game records your progress, so you always know how far will it be until the next chapter begins.

The puzzles in King's Quest VII are quite easy, since the solution to them is nearby. At the start of the game, you have to drain the pool so that you can grab one of the pieces from a statue's offering bowl, and the instructions on how to do this is written on a huge, gold statue next to the pool. Some characters will even point what item you need to do something critical to your progress. From my experience, no puzzle should take you more than ten minutes to complete. Finally, there are multiple to solve puzzles as well, especially in chapter one.

The Bad
I have no problem with the simplified interface, but why does it take up nearly half the screen. Why couldn't it be much smaller and restricted to the very bottom of the screen. A similar tactic is used in later Sierra games like Phantasmagoria and Torin's Passage, so we have to get used to it eventually, right?

Some of the dialogue is either weird or doesn't make sense at all. In one scene, you are supposed to bring the “Treasure” bird back to the owner of the china shop. When you do, the resulting dialogue implies that he wants to go into the back of the shop so that he can have sex with it. (Personally, I don't blame him. That bird is so hot, but I digress.)

The old edge-of-the-screen trick where, in the early KQ games, you need to leave the screen and re-enter it if you find something unexpected, makes a return in King's Quest VII. In most cases, particularly in chapter one, this is not an issue. However, it can be a problem later. You have to deal with this fucking dog that belongs to the antagonist, and you must enter her house, but you can't while that stupid mongrel is barking. The game is scripted in such a way that it can take forever for the dog to calm down.

I really hate the shitty save system where you are allowed only one save game. Sure, it's ideal if the same version of the game is played by other family members such as yourself, but it means that if you made a mistake, you can't undo that mistake unless you actually go back to the menu (choosing to “Bookmark your current game and quit” first) and restore. I would have liked to save individual games in the scenes that I enjoyed exploring.

The Bottom Line
And there we say goodbye to the royal family of Daventry as Williams decided to take the KQ series in a new direction, one that defies the “no violence” rule that she established years ago before the first game was made. In my opinion, the seventh instalment features stunning graphics and a beautiful soundtrack, and the ability to control more than one protagonist is okay, and this is the one feature carried over to The Beast Within. However, the game suffers from problems such as a poor script and a lousy save system. After King's Quest VII, Williams and Shannon went on to create both Phantasmagoria games individually.

DOS · by Katakis | カタキス (43092) · 2017

Say Goodbye to the Days of Yore

The Good
The paper-animation looked pretty, even if it moved extremely slowly. The ability to play as two characters as the story progressed was interesting; however, that alone can't carry a game.

The Bad
Where to begin...

The original release of King's Quest 7 was painfully slow. Sierra actually had to release a King's Quest 7 version 2.0 in which your character would walk faster (why they couldn't program a patch to fix this irksome flaw, I'll never know).

Robert William's introduce the chapter concept with this game. Like Phantasmagoria, the game can be started from any point. The problem is that there is little incentive to finish a chapter when you can just play the next!

The opening musical number indicates exactly how child-like the game seemed. When both KQ 5 and 6 were much darker than the rest of the series, KG 7 did seem like a Disney cartoon -- one that isn't very inventive at that.



The Bottom Line
If you've never played the King's Quest series, do not begin here. The only enjoyment I received from this game was knowing that it was a continuation of what had been my favorite series to date.

Windows 3.x · by Game22 (35) · 2004

[ View all 8 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Bugs - the game freezes at an unmentioned point Nowhere Girl (8680) Feb 19, 2017

Trivia

Bugs

In order to release Roberta Williams' King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride in time for Christmas '94, Sierra didn't spend much time on beta testing. The game was very buggy and it was literally impossible to finish it without the patches that were released a few months later. Due to the large amount of bugs and a the lousy save interface, they released version 2.0 of the game, which worked faster, was less buggy and had an enhanced save interface, in 1995.

Intro

In the Disney-inspired intro, Rosella sings a song and is depicted having only 3 fingers and a thumb on each hand. Unlike Disney movies, the opening sequence is the only song in the entire story.

King Graham

Roberta Williams' King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride is the only game in the series not to feature King Graham in any capacity, although he's listed in the voice credits. This may be indicative that the character was originally included, but cut do to time constraints in an effort to push the game out for a Christmas release. However, rhere is a line of dialog recorded by Danny Delk on the game's CD wherein King Graham says "Ladies! I was getting worried! You're 15 minutes late for lunch!"

King's Quest references

Although the packaging assures potential buyers that no previous King's Quest experience is required to play the game, Prince Edgar from King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella appears in a pivotal role, but his presence is explained during the game for those players unfamiliar with the previous game.

Title

Two other subtitles that the designers considered for the game were What's Lava Got to Do With It and Rosella Vs. The Volcano.

Information also contributed by Adam Baratz, Daniel Albu

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Related Sites +

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    Step by step, this walkthrough gives everything all at once for solving KQ7.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Andy Roark.

Windows added by Sciere. Macintosh added by Katakis | カタキス.

Additional contributors: Katakis | カタキス, Jeanne, Xoleras, Great Hierophant, Klaster_1, jTrippy, Paulus18950, Cantillon, Ingsoc.

Game added May 25, 1999. Last modified January 23, 2024.