The Emperor has disappeared, and now it’s up to you to take his place. Galaxy Princess Zorana puts you in the place of Zorana, the heir to the Imperial throne. But not everyone will want you to take the reins of power, and you’ll need to both win the support of the people and avoid an untimely death at the hands of one of your political rivals (or your own foolishness) along the way.
You have a chance. You can use a mixture of stat-raising and choices to navigate the political minefield that is the path to being crowned Empress. And perhaps you’ll uncover some truths along the way.
Allies and Enemies
Galaxy Princess Zorana is a standalone sequel to Long Live the Queen, with what appears to be quite a timeskip between the sci-fi setting of Galaxy Princess Zorana and Long Live the Queen’s medieval fantasy world. Despite only being connected by a few callbacks to shared lore, the concept is fairly similar.
After the Emperor’s disappearance, the inexperienced Zorana, who was only recently made the heir, is thrust into the position of trying to become Empress. While her position gives her a chance, earning the crown requires winning a vote of electors who represent their various planets. And rivals for the title soon appear, along with those who don’t mind getting their hands dirty to make sure their preferred candidate wins. Zorana needs to use all the tools at her disposal to achieve this. Whether it’s flattery, favors, bargaining away her hand in marriage, offering up positions in her cabinet, blackmail, or other tactics, they can help her on her way.
In terms of gameplay, this means a turn-based system of traveling to different planets, meeting electors, and choosing how to handle them. But it’s not so simple. Electors will have opinions of you based on previous actions and their own alliances. It’s difficult to convince someone to vote for you if they don’t like you. They may not even answer your calls. You can’t even blackmail someone if you can’t even get a message to them!
Improving stats each turn is how you combat this, at least to a point. Want to secure that vote? Raising your etiquette stat might let you make a good first impression. The allure stat might let you charm someone into offering you their vote. Or perhaps a shared study in Imperial History might be the key to impressing them. There are more factors than stats, but this is how you’ll handle most tasks.
Balancing Act
More than anything else, Galaxy Princess Zorana feels like a balancing act.
Stats are the most obvious example. Which ones do you increase? Can you manipulate your mood wheel in the right direction to get bonuses in increasing them?
Depending on the overall strategy you take, which stats to increase may be clear in some cases. But each elector has a quest to earn their vote. Someone might want a joyride in a spaceship, or for you to stealthily retrieve some secret information, and these are just a couple of examples that need very different skills. As well as these, more general skill checks will come up throughout, including ones where you can die. Whether it’s due to an assassin’s blade or managing to blow yourself up due to not knowing how guns work, there are plenty of hazards.
Something I really enjoyed about Galaxy Princess Zorana is just how much it changes depending on your decisions and how these can be affected by prior playthroughs. You can learn something each time you play, whether it’s the minimum stats you might need for a certain quest or a hint at how to proceed down a more hidden story path that reveals a secret. Carefully noting down information and planning out my path appeals to my love of optimization and strategy. I was even pulling spreadsheets up.
Another aspect to carefully balance is electors and cabinet positions. You can choose up to seven advisors from the electors to lend you their knowledge in a specific area (i.e. help you pass stat checks and open new options). But much like in real life, many people who are willing to take the job aren’t exactly experts in their area. So, do you bargain away the position to secure the least likely votes? Or do you find the best and the brightest to guide you? Do you get people near home or take many turns to travel the galaxy and assemble the dream team? Do you take those who will easily join or pursue the ones that require quests to join?
There is so much to discover by trying different things, and through trying out builds and choices, you can discover them. I should note that luck is a factor. Sometimes it can just be a case of choosing one event to set your mood and not having an issue, while if you choose another, it triggers an assassination attempt. Then it’s down to whether you built the skills to pass it. On the other side, you might just stumble across a secret leading you to the truth behind certain parts of the story. You can become Empress without ever seeing certain parts of the storyline. Between your interactions with the electors potentially going very differently between runs and different parts of the story to uncover, it gives you plenty of reason to replay. Plus, dying repeatedly and failing quests is part of the learning process, so there’ll be plenty of runs regardless.
That said about dying, while not entirely a visual novel, Galaxy Princess Zorana is built in Ren’Py. Scrolling back to revert to a previous moment is supported at least to a point, similar to visual novels built in the engine. You can only go back so far and your death may have been set in stone several turns ago, although doing this at all does perhaps undermine the level of danger.
Tales from Another Galaxy
I should take a moment to comment on the writing. While this is a more gameplay-focused title, there are a lot of events and variations on those events.
I found the writing to be enjoyable. The overall story is primarily Zorana handling a variety of issues on the way to the throne (or an early grave), but seeing her in some cases act akin to an exasperated teen about something she has no idea about, to later answering with confidence on topics such as science and law underlined the idea of her constantly growing and learning, if only in certain directions.
The setting and lore around it are well established. The different paths to secret information and the impact of various actions worked incredibly well.
It was quite amusing how the tone shifted at times as well. On occasion, quests were about a fight to the death or political intrigue, while others went as silly as reading fanfiction or taking part in role-playing games. Each elector is very different, and this shows it clearly.
Stars and Sounds
I quite liked the character designs in Galaxy Princess Zorana. There’s a decent variety in the types of aliens, and some of the expressions work really well (e.g. Zorana’s smug face is excellent). I’ll mention that Kxenia is adorable, too. The backgrounds work well. They do look somewhat simple in style, but it is praiseworthy that there are a lot of them, including for one-off events. This is also the case with sprites in a few cases.
The music works nicely. The opening theme stood out immediately, and the background music is all fitting to the scenes.
This game is unvoiced. I imagine the cost of voicing the many variations would’ve been far too high if it were considered.
Verdict
Galaxy Princess Zorana is a worthy successor to Long Live the Queen and a great game in its own right. The combination of stat management, tons of potential paths to explore, and secrets to find even after I was crowned kept me playing it for hours. Just be aware, the path to the throne is not a simple one, but through trial and error, you’ll soon hear those important words; All hail Zorana, Empress-Elect of the Celestial Empire.
GALAXY PRINCESS ZORANA IS RECOMMENDED
If you are looking for another title with simulation gameplay, you may enjoy Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time. We have also covered a wide variety of visual novels both original to English and localized from Japanese, which you can check out here.
Many thanks go to Hanako Games for a PC review code for Galaxy Princess Zorana!
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
