YMMV / Kings Quest (2015)

• Adorkable:
  • Graham as a teenager is this in spades. Several times, he will excitedly release a stream of ideas, bouncing all around the scenery. He also does it again when he's much older in Chapter 4.
  • Princess Neese, who is practically a Distaff Counterpart to teenage Graham.
  • Gwendolyn really takes after Graham as well.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Graham has a few of these:
    • Given the "choices" aspect of the game, along with Graham admitting at the end of Chapter 2 that he's left out certain details or just outright altered them, this might leave some of the legitimacy of his stories in question. In-Universe, even Gwendolyn will notice inconsistencies and call Graham out for them.
    • Graham changing the law so that Gwendolyn will be queen, completely passing over both his children and Gart who had trained to be king his whole life. Him choosing who he believed to be his best possible successor with the hope that his stories would inspire her to make good choices, or his Parental Favouritsm reaching its logical extreme and simply choosing the child who showed the most amount of interest in his stories? Related to this is that he saw no reason to change the law so that Rosella could be his successor. Was he simply telling the truth that she had no interest in the throne until Gart was born and preferred adventuring with her husband, or his previously mentioned favouritsm meaning he never even saw her as a valid successor while never giving up hope that Alexander would be king?
    • Does Graham prefer Gwendolyn to Gart because she listens to his stories and seems to have more in common with him, or is it because her father was his preferred choice as a successor and Graham sees Gwendolyn as the next best thing?
  • Did Gart interrupt Graham's stories because he finds them boring and is spoiled enough to judge his grandfather's decisions, or was he genuinely trying to show interest and wanted to understand why his grandfather made the choices he made?
• Awesome Music: The music heard during the climax of Chapter 3, which is an intense remix of "Girl in the Tower."
• Broken Base: Graham’s favouritism towards Gwendolyn over Gart has gotten this response, as while the game seems to expect players to see Gart as a Spoiled Brat, he mostly comes across as a lonely kid jealous of the close bond that his cousin has with their grandfather.
• Disappointing Last Level: Discounting the Epilogue Chapter, the last part of the game is a series of logic puzzles with cryptic clues written on notes. While it's supposed to be a Call-Back with poisoned goblets, it all falls rather flat and doesn't reach an actual climactic point for the player. ^note Storywise it does though.
  • Chapter 5 on the whole has a reputation for not being as good as the previous four. And Chapter 4 was nothing but a series of block puzzles.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Achaka, Whisper, and Amaya Blackstone are usually the most talked-about characters. Mr. Fancycakes is a One-Scene Wonder.
• Fan Nickname: Yahtzee often called Graham "Gra-brush Threep-ham" (after Guybrush Threepwood) in his Zero Punctuation review of Chapter 1.
• Fanon: Based on the amount of fanfics written and playthroughs going down this storyline, it seems that Vee is largely considered to be the "canon" Queen Valanice over Neese.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: The second chapter is significantly shorter than the first one, which left some players feeling disappointed, especially considering how long it was delayed.
• Memetic Badass: In universe, the entire world seems to acknowledge Mr. Fancycakes as this.
  Graham: One does not simply meet Mr. Fancycakes. One is awed by Mr. Fancycakes.
• Mis-blamed: There are/were people who believe this game was made with money stolen from the Hiveswap Kickstarter and were very displeased with this, leading up to minor online protests, such as the comments sections of the KQ Game Grumps Youtube playthroughs being filled with demands and begging for the hosts to stop supporting the game. For years, there was no hard proof; but an independent investigation into the Hiveswap development revealed that Andrew Hussie was the one who basically screwed over The Odd Gentlemen by not only not having all the game development documents done for a year after the Kickstarter wrapped, but he had TOG do asset work for his own purposes, while letting one of his friends essentially blame TOG for "stealing the money & running" because she was explicitly not under NDA, and he never tried to explain that TOG helped create Homestuck assets because "they wanted to be uncredited".

• Nightmare Fuel: The Sphinx from Chapter 4. A giant lion's body with massive antlers on his head and a human's face? Yikes! And the facial markings make it look like it's bleeding from its eyes, too.
• Player Punch:
  • Chapter 1: The death of Achaka after spending a level watching him and Graham grow closer as friends. Made worse by how crushed Graham is afterwards.
  • Chapter 2: This chapter is built around this, as Graham has to struggle to keep his friends from starving. Doesn't help that two of them need medicine, and there's only one bottle. It's not possible to save everyone, and there's a good chance the pregnant Bramble will go while the player is still learning the rules. Mitigated in later playthroughs, as the player now knows that none of them actually die.
  • Chapter 4: The chapter opens on one, with Graham and Valanice's infant son, Alexander, being kidnapped by Manny and missing for eighteen years. Then it hits the player again near the end with the reveal that whichever princess Graham didn't choose to marry in the previous chapter has turned into Queen Icebella and become the Arc Villain of the chapter. There's even a brief Hope Spot near the end where Queen Valanice gets through to her using The Power of Friendship, only for Manny to murder Icebella out of spite.
  • Chapter 5: Graham's mind is starting to deteriorate, and several times Gwendolyn has to remind him of elements of the story - most notably, Olfie, Graham's oldest friend. At other times he starts panicking that he forgot something important. Not helped by the fact that Gwendolyn sounds heartbroken when she reminds him.
  • Arguably the entire game. King Graham dies at the end of Chapter 5. If this doesn't register, keep in mind that this is the adventure game equivalent of Mario passing away. The player has to watch Graham slowly die in bed over the course of five chapters, and unlike in KQ4, there's no last-minute rescue with magic fruit or a spell.
• Sequelitis: A variant, since the chapters are all part of the same game. There were a number of reviews which stated that the quality of the later chapters was not equal to that of the early ones; Chapters 4 and 5 seemed to receive the most flak.
• Take That, Scrappy!:
  • Not only does Rumpelstiltskin appear as a decomposed skeleton in Chapter 2, but examining it has Old Graham say, "I don't need reminders of impossible riddles from my earlier adventuring days." This is undoubtedly a jab at the infamous "Ifnkovhgroghprm" puzzle from the first game.
  • In Chapter 3, you can leave baby Cedric the Owl to get eaten by a badger. After trying to walk off and ignore the But Thou Must! messages, King Graham rants about how much he would have liked to leave Cedric to get eaten, and even wanted to drive off the badger so he could eat Cedric himself. This takes on a hilarious note when, after he finishes his rant, the player receives an achievement for triggering it.
• That One Boss: Manny, whose Duel of Wits at the end of Chapter 1 feels like a frustrating Difficulty Spike compared to the rest of the game. Especially since it's almost impossible to beat him without cheating with the mind control powder.
• Uncertain Audience: The game can’t seem to decide whether it’s for new fans, being a reboot that reimagines characters and storylines from the original games, or for the old fans, due to some Continuity Lock-Out in the last few chapters that requires knowledge of the original continuity.
• Vocal Minority: When the first chapter was released, the reaction was positive for the most part, but those who didn't like it were much louder than those who did.

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