First of all, I’d like to say that this game was quite a pleasant surprise! I got to know about it because some random friend posted about it on Facebook, saying that it was probably the best visual novel she has ever played, so I decided to give it a try.
Truth be told, at first I wasn’t thinking much of the game, because it didn’t look very professional (fonts, overall design). But silly me, I was thinking of judging a book by its cover. I’m a writer myself, and I really appreciate when someone comes up with innovative ways of presenting a story and doesn’t fail in execution, and I have to say this is one of those cases.
The overall descriptions are surprisingly well written, which I really didn’t expect from a visual novel. Considering it’s quite easy to overextend descriptions to the point of dullness or redundancy, they came off as charming, even gratifying. That also goes for the dialogue, which is exquisitely entertaining and kept me with a constant smirk on the face. I will have to say that, even though spelling-wise this game is practically flawless, I found a good amount of typos, repeated words and punctuation errors that kind of ruin the pace of such a pleasant read, but I’m pretty sure those will get fixed in the final version.
Characters are, without a doubt, the best part of this game. They are pretty complex for a visual novel game and most come off as delightfully charming. I even found those who we are supposed to hate quite hilarious (such as Jarrod or Blain), especially enjoying the fact that we had the option to (even slightly) influence Jarrod’s bad attitude for the good. I’m hoping we can also do that with Blain at some point.
Characters like Penelope, Lisle and Emmett were extremely likeable and adorable to me. For God’s sake, I’m a guy and I must confess that Emmett’s adorability made me a little gay at times! Also, dat flower story he tells during his first week event is so… powerful. My mind was thinking: “man, I’m not supposed to be feeling these feels”. That goes as well for most of the other characters, who have at least one or two memorable, powerful moments in store for you.
Actually, one of the only things I didn’t like about the story (or, better said, the different possible stories) is, perhaps, how “quickly” your MC or other characters seem to fall for each other without actually interacting that much. I don’t know, it came to me as unsatisfyingly odd when you have to tell the Matchmaker that you truly “loved” a certain character in order to unlock their romance path, even though you only substantially interact with them for about three times throughout the whole three-week run (counting the introduction on the first day, the character’s first week event and the optional date in week 3). Maybe I’m just weird, but I think we should really have more optional events with the romanceable characters with whom we did well during the introduction before the last Matchmaker’s event.
I have to point out, also, that the menu buttons are infuriating to use, as their clickable areas are exactly inside the letters, and when trying ot use them, you usually end up advancing the text instead of going to, say, the save or load menu. I hope that gets fixed, because it would really make everyone’s lives easier at managing the save/load screen. Adding hotkeys for the different menus (especially the My Page menu) would be ideal and would enhance gameplay experience.
Another detail that still bugs me is that, although it’s supposed to be a game with multi-dimensional relationships, I failed to see how certain relationship stats affected gameplay or your bond with the different characters. For example, as far as I could tell, I could get the same exact events and conclusions for a certain character path if I got a huge amount of Friendship and no Respect and viceversa. The only obvious thing is that high Rivalry means that you won’t be getting along very well with that characters and, thus, you’ll be unable to get most of their events and get them to assist to the events you host, but I don’t see how different degrees of Respect/Friendship affect the outcome of a relationship. Maybe we’ll have to wait for the full game to actually see the difference those stats make.
Despite the minor flaws I found in the game, playing it is an overall enjoyable (and addicting!) experience. I have recommended it to several friends and even though most are skeptical at the beginning, saying stuff like “I don’t like the design”, “it looks amateurish”, they end up liking it a lot and saying stuff like: “Omg, can I marry Ana right now?”, “wow, Penelope sooo cute!” or “I’m in love with Prince Zarad already!”. Only one male friend told me that he got bored really fast, but it’s probably because we aren’t native English speakers, and considering this is a text-heavy game, well, yeah…
Overall, this is a good visual novel. A very good one. Maybe even a godsend for the visual novel genre, since, despite it’s not being produced by a large, well-funded Japanese company with years of visual-novel-making experience, at its core, it’s far superior than most of the stuff those companies bring us, really. It has far more content, interactivity and depth than most games that come from “profesional” studios, which have, yes, pretty visuals and original soundtracks, but have predictable, dull and dumb stories that rely on ecchiness to attract attention, about the typical Japanese school days, loser high-school student protagonists that have the personality of a rock but have suddenly put together a whole harem of pretty girls and have no regards for the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief, or overall visual novels that basically play themselves because they only give you 3 or 4 story-changing options throughout the whole game. In comparison to Seven Kingdoms, those games seem garbage. Also, the creator of the game opted for making politics one of the main themes of the story, being a risky topic to base a story on as not many people are interested in such serious things, but it played extremely well at the end, which I applaud. This seemed to me like Long Live The Queen (another politics-based visual novel game available in Steam) on steroids.
Anyways, sorry for the long post, but I really wanted to sort of review this game and hope it becomes, at least, decent feedback for the creators/developers (I think her name is @Aly ?), because Seven Kingdoms has a lot of potential for the visual novel genre of videogames. I, for sure, think this makes a far better read and experience than reading one of those cliche juvenile Hunger Games/Harry Potter/Twilight ripoffs that infest bookstores nowadays.
Keep up the good work!