Item - King's Quest

This is a pretty good book. There are a lot of paths through it, the writing is fairly good and many of the encounters are interesting. The biggest flaw is that some of the battles in the book are won a bit too easily (at least when you take into consideration how hard they'd be in an actual roleplaying session), but this problem shows up in many of the books in this series and is almost unavoidable without a combat system.

More reviews by Demian

(Review based on the Spanish translation.)

Not to be confused with a very popular computer game released the same year (which, oddly, also mostly involves trudging along in the wilderness), this is quite a good book. Like many other books in this series, your player character is a mostly helpless pre-teen, but it is possible to recruit the help of either a competent warrior or a powerful wizard to accompany you on the mission (it is also possible to undertake and complete the adventure without the help of either). The inclusion of capable companion characters gives the player the feel of playing an actual D&D game session (not unlike Pillars of Pentegarn by Rose Estes). It also doesn't hurt that the book is both quite entertaining and faithful to the D&D mythos. Setting the adventure in the wilderness is a plus given that the Endless Quest series contains a few too many dungeon-crawls. Gameplay can be quite involving since choices are more challenging than is usual in this series, and the book never gets boring after repeated plays. Overall, this is a very enjoyable adventure.

More reviews by Guillermo

A competent entry. You play a young orphan juggler who travels with your older brother from village to village. You come across a dying knight on a quest to find and bury the bones of his ancestor, a king, and you take up his quest. There's also the promise of treasure.

Like other books where you portray a young character, the choices here depend on you using your wits rather than fighting. There are a number of different paths, so lots of replay value. A set of bandits pursue you, giving you scary antagonists.

One of the optimal endings features a wizards' duel in which the mages transform into a number of beasts. It showcases an almost paper, scissors, rock competition between D&D monsters. Blue dragon gets beat by black pudding which gets beat by red dragon which gets beat by a stone golem which gets beat by an umber hulk, which gets beat by..., etc. As a kid I loved this attention to monster detail.

More reviews by Kveto

[Rating: 1/10]
[Recommended? NO]

The Endless Quest series sets separate sights from its other titles with "King's Quest". Equal parts invigorating and frustrating, it's a little hard to know precisely what to expect heading into this title due to the somewhat unusual use of interactivity/tone, coupled with the mixed impact of the choices and overall narrative. The twelve-year old self-insert protagonist, Sparrow, and his seventeen-year-old brother Jay are tasked rather ambiguously from the get-go with a task from the dying-of-thirst-and-an-arrow-wound man in the opening sequence: to bury King Silverhair's bones while watching out for Scarface and his rogues. The premise is fairly straightforward and the gameplay-friendly design, by its very nature, has to heavily rely on the scenarios and creative happenings of the author. Unfortunately, it's clear very early on that the story, unambitious as it may be, bites off more than it can chew, and as a result of the wonky, uneven dialogue and overfamiliar plot points, this gamebook didn't deliver where it needed to.

Without a gameplay system to spice things up, this is one retread after another with the most basic of logic-driven choices, amateurish dictation and a very underdeveloped expression of personality in either introducing the lives of the characters or showing them overcome the hurdles of their mission. I did not consider the basic storyline to be particularly inspired in the first place, but at least it had potential, and the subpar writing at play here does a disservice to any immersive quality one might've theoretically gained from replaying. Scenes jumped so quickly from one to the next that nothing resonated or felt personally affecting. As the story lacked lingering impact, felt unfinished and failed to resonate, I found the book to be routinely disappointing (and certainly among the most scatterbrained, juvenile works in the series, which is rather unfortunate). Despite my endless love for fantasy, this gamebook quest, considering my recommendation standards, simply shall not pass. ^^

(Mysteriously disappears into the shadows.)

More reviews by Shadeheart