While I'm not very fond of visual novels, I kind of enjoyed Long Live the Queen. Following an interesting initial premise - You are a young princess about to reach adulthood and your eventual coronation -, the game relies on a nice skill based system, where certain events and dialogue options are enabled depending on skill levels. The plot offers a good variety of characters and a complex enough scenario, and figuring out a path to survive all the threats to your coronation - and there are many - will prove challenging for a while, as you juggle which skills should be trained and which will be neglected. It's a trial and error process that can be figured out after a while. More difficult is to figure out a path to get all endings, as it requires vastly different approaches to overcome the same challenges. However, its good ideas are undermined by very low production value. For a game that relies on still images to present the plot, there's not much variety. You will spend most of the time gazing at the same still picture of the castle. Events are only described in text with the still image of the castle in the background, with very few exceptions (that simply change the background for a bit). The character portraits all seem to be derived from the same very few templates, so it's hard to differentiate among them. Also, there's no voice acting of any kind, the music is somewhat dull and repetitive, and the writing is lackluster (all character seemed to have very similar personalities). In the end it's not a bad game, but it could have been much better with a few minor improvements.
