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)

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

A game that has many a flaw, KQ7 will not leave you in awe

The Good
King's Quest VII is a game that is suitable for all ages, and as the box says, it is a magical adventure that will touch your heart. Well, for some people anyway. Valanice is talking to Rosella about marriage. After telling her that she's not interested, Rosella sees something in the pool, and thoughtlessly dives into it. Noticing that she does so, Valanice dives in after her, but the two of them get separated.

The game is divided into six chapters. KQ7 is the first game that lets you play as two different characters. You see, the odd chapters have you playing as Valanice, while the even ones have you playing Rosella. Each character has their own quest. For instance, Valanice must search for her daughter, while Rosella must stop a witch named Malicia from destroying Etheria, and the lands below it. Eventually, the two of them will reunite if they play their cards right

The game has you entering your name and then selecting the chapter in which you wish to begin. Gamers are free to start at any chapter they like, which is very useful if they don't like playing as one or the other. They can just play one, three, and five for Valanice; or two, four, and six for Rosella. But most people like me would rather play each chapter in order. The game does not have you play as both characters in the same chapter. In order to accomplish your mission, you have to go through a series of environments, which include the desert, forest, Falderal, Ooga-Booga Land, the Land of the Trolls, and Etheria. Most of the creatures belong to the environment to which they are suited.

I like the fact that KQ7 continues the KQ tradition of being a non-violent adventure game. There are hardly any puzzles in the game, and the sound is very good. There are a few bits of humor in the game that I can get quite a laugh at, most notably Arch Duke Fifi Le Yip-Yap in Falderal and the three talking plants in Ooga-Booga Land.

The Bad
KQ7 is not a good game. Some of the environments have misplaced pixels, and this ruins it. In Etheria, the land of the clouds, you see shades of different colors here and there when there are not supposed to. Some of the characters are poorly drawn and are blurry as they move closer to you.

The introduction and ending are basically FMV sequences, which is restricted to playing in a small rectangle on the screen. I just felt that they could have been bigger in size. Speaking of the introduction, The Land Beyond Dreams, sung by Rosella, is inappropriate, and there was no reason why Sierra would want to waste resources on this when they could have included a better introduction like they did in the CD version of KQ6, but with much, improved graphics. The song didn't even make any sense to me. I love where I am as well, but that doesn't make me burst out into song.

The game suffers from a poor script that is delivered by many of its actors. An example is the kangaroo rat in Chapter 1. (“No time to chat, the day is fading. Come, Valanice, let's do some trading.”) As you can see, it is quite obvious that Sierra wasted a lot of their project time trying to think of rhyming words for the kangaroo rat.. Further examples include Valanice going “Hmm...” all the time and Rosella making a poor effort to scream. Even the death messages from the two of them are lame, and cannot be compared with those from other Sierra games.

The game's interface is changed since King's Quest VI. No longer do you see the usual point-and-click interface that consist of the WALK, HAND, EYE, etc. Instead, you perform all your actions throughout the entire game by clicking a magic wand over objects. This is a disadvantage because by just having the magic wand, both characters cannot comment on your actions like they could have if the point-and-click interface was still there. (There is still an EYE icon, but it doesn't work the same way.)

It was 1994, and the head honcho made the project team rush development to get the game in time for Christmas. As a result, the game is full of flaws. One flaw is that the game crashes, which makes the game impossible to complete. I own a copy of the game, but I didn't have crashes, but that's probably because I got the latest version (version 1.51).

Before you start a new game, you are asked to enter a name for yourself, and that name is used to save your progress in the game to the one and only save slot, and if you want to save your game, you have to quit your current game first. What the hell was wrong with the old system, where you click on the Save button and type in a descriptive name. I do not like it if I have to repeatedly start a new chapter under different names, wait for an event to occur, then save in that point of time.

I stressed many times on MobyGames that the same actors should play the same characters. This is not the case with KQ7. Rosella and Valanice are played by two different people. You don't see the T-800 from Terminator 1 & 2 being played by different actors. It was always the same actors.

This is a minor thing, but when it comes to installing the game, it persists on saving it to a directory that has \SIERRA in it, and it warns you about this whenever you change the default directory, so if you want to install to C:\GAMES\KQ7, you would have to install to C:\GAMES\SIERRA\KQ7. In many Sierra versions don't have this problem..

The Bottom Line
The box claims that over 2.5 million copies were sold. Imagine how disappointed those 2.5 million people were after paying money for a flawed game. Another version of KQ7 (dubbed “Version 2.0”) was released that had new features such as a better save system, as well as various changes to the interface. But it was too late. If you want to buy KQ7 from somewhere, then try to find Version 2.0. And if you think that KQ7 was bad, wait until you see the final game in the series that violates KQ policy.

Windows 3.x · by Katakis | カタキス (43092) · 2005

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

[ 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 +

  • Hints for KQ7
    The puzzles in King's Quest 7 can be tough. These hints will help you solve them!
  • Walkthrough on Gamezilla
    Step by step, this walkthrough gives everything all at once for solving KQ7.

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  • MobyGames ID: 135
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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.