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Is King’s Quest 6 overrated?
I was reading through old comments on this site, two came to my attention and helped to inspire this thread:
“In KQ6 Jane Jensen brought melodrama and too much seriousness to the script. Didn’t feel right. I also disliked much of the dialogue Jensen gave Alexander. Made him sound like a goofus.
Give me KQ4 lightness and “not in that dress, Rosella!” any day over the serious, stiff KQ6 script.”
“KQ6 does have a pretty odd script. At places it’s far too childish, at places far too serious and grim. I do like it as a game, but the script does feel like it’s two different stories, meant for entirely different games, meshed up together, which leads into some issues with the tone of the game.”
Do you feel that perhaps KQ6 is a bit overrated? I mean, it has some epic moments, but on the whole, it tries to be many different things at once, a fun zany game on one hand, a dark, serious, mature game on the other; The tone is utterly inconsistent and the humorous moments seem a tad forced. Tonally speaking, the game is very much different from any other game in the series, and Alexander isn’t really a likeable protagonist.
As that second quote is from me I guess I should say something.
As I said, I do like it as a game. It has some decent puzzles and the artwork and animation still look very nice. It’s the writing however that falls flat IMO, as the game does feel tonally very off. The two faces the game has would work far better if they’d be in two different games, as the way the different elements are put together doesn’t feel right. On the one hand you have stuff that would be right at home in something like “Mixed Up Mother Goose” and on the other you have things that would be more at home in some gothic fantasy tale. For me that’s like mixing oil and water.
KQ6 Alexander also is, I wouldn’t call him unlikeable, but more of a bland character to the extent that even his voice actor is bland and uninteresting.
All flaws aside though, I still think it’s 3 stars out of 5 game. Not the best one in the series, but not that bad either. At the same time though it’s not a KQ game I replay that often despite it has some pretty clever design ideas running through it.
I loved KQ6 even more because of this tonal contrast. The KQ games were at their best when they really understood that fairy tales and myths can be whimsical, but they’re not necessarily pleasant, especially not in their origins. The charming gnome who saves you with his magic spinning wheel is going to eat your firstborn child. The vain stepsisters will try to cut their feet to fit the glass slipper, the evil queen may be forced to dance to death in red hot shoes, and the boy who cried wolf may be messily devoured.
There’s a scene in KQ6 that is more like a fairytale in spirit than anything else in the series. Alexander is faced by the goofy, rhyming gnomes of the Five Senses, and must fool each in turn with some clever thinking. If he fails, they seize him and fling him gleefully into the ocean, where he drowns and is at last seen entering the underworld as a shade. Without that last bit, the danger wouldn’t be quite so real. With it? Good. Even as a child, I knew this shift was 100% plausible in its own way. “Rhyming cutesy gnomes that murder unwary travelers” was much more compelling than “randomized monsters that pop up and can be evaded by walking off the edge of the screen.”
The only scenes in the entire series to match the gnome scene for perfection of tone and logic are the cat cookie and MAYBE the duel with Mordack (ignoring the horrible wand puzzle). We might throw in one or two ghost bits from KQ4 if we’re generous, but KQ4’s mishmash of myths and the Wizard of Oz never holds together as well as KQ6.
Alexander is a less boring hero in KQ3, which has a great overarching push until you cattify the villain, then runs out of steam. KQ2 is terrible and is basically all the worst of KQ in one game - disconnected, clunky, badly designed. KQ1 is an innovative, ambitious freshman effort. KQ5 is horrendously unfair and shaky at points, even though it came closest to catching the right kind of spookiness next to KQ6. KQ7 is unfinished. And KQ8 is KQ8.
The menace in KQ6 is always there, even at its most whimsical, and always semed more credible to me than the jokey stuff in most of the other KQ games.
Do you feel that perhaps KQ6 is a bit overrated? I mean, it has some epic moments, but on the whole, it tries to be many different things at once, a fun zany game on one hand, a dark, serious, mature game on the other…
Aren’t fairy tales always like that?
Oh, great, a ‘thread’ where i can express how i feel about KQVI that i didnt make 
This game and to start clearly is overrated, and these forums have a way of posters jumping over a soft spot, until it breaks under their feet, revealing an abyss, where no one can see clearly any more from below, and only the fantasist memories become the most relying facts.
KQVI is the only adventure of the six Classical-Old-School Sierra’s King’s Quest parts of the series, that is still playable with today minimum required appealing standards, even if the game still holds the Sierra famous frustrating elements!; deaths and dead ends, which were more under control, and eventually, as it was released at the 12th year of Sierra’s history, one can find this is really nothing but an eventual evolution.
I still remember how i felt after playing this game on release, i was shocked; “is this game really finished?”, i thought this was the easiest KQ game i ever played, something was odd, and at the time i didn’t know anything about Jane Jensen, i really had no idea that KQVI had someone new collaborating at its development, but what was new, anyways?, it was the way of Sierra; everyone was collaborating and helping at/with each other games, we like to think that Al is the one behind LSL, The Two Guys behind SQ, Jim Walls behind PQ…etc, but that is not true, they all (almost) had worked together in every series, Sierra was family in every meaning.
But as i said before about how these forums work, i found that people are cherishing Jane Jensen like i never ever understood; “KQ6 was great because of Jane” , “Gabriel Knight is the best of Sierra”, seriously those phrases never made any sense, even more than that, sometimes i see people talking about Jane Jensen like there was nobody else deserve mentioning of the greatest designers at Sierra, and let me say it for the first time, with 70+ AGs of Sierra i played, i never finished any of Jane Jensen Games but three; Ecos Quest, KQ6 and Gray Matter, even when i replayed the GK remake i went a bit far than the original, but i left it somewhere at 70-80% of the game.
And sadly what makes KQ6 overrated, is all those faint memories of Sierra, make Jane comes forward, and the impact of GK on gamers, made KQ6 more popular, when its nothing comparing to KQIV (the best of KQs), absolutely, KQVI is like any good AG, but how people cherishing it, is just way overrated.
when its nothing comparing to KQIV (the best of KQs),
Invisible bridle island.
Whale tongue.
Disconnected elements that never gel.
Unsatisfying endgame.
I’m… having trouble seeing it as a superior game to KQ6 by pretty much any measure. The day/night passage was interesting and some night scenes were atmospheric, but that’s about it. The intro of KQ4 falls, like KQ6, into the trap of “telling your story with a big non-interactive movie,” but at least KQ6 gave us some fun intrigue as it went on.
Growing up, I loved KQ6 even before I had any idea that Jane Jensen was involved - or who she was. It’s a flawed game in a few ways, but the flaws were manageable. KQ4 is flawed and full of tedium, and the puzzles in it aren’t harder or more interesting than the ones in KQ6, they’re just generally somewhat less fair. Both KQ4 and KQ6 sometimes force you to have picked up some little chance object to use in a disconnected setting, but in KQ4, this is pretty much the entire game. There’s nothing like the spell puzzles in KQ4, nothing like the Land of the Dead confrontation, nothing like the endgame or the hole-in-the-wall or the magic painted door.
I… barely remember ANY puzzles from KQ4, in fact, and the ones I do remember were not really very clever at all.
KQ4 is more fun. Yes, it’s supposed to be hard at times. But I figured out most of it on my own.
The writing in KQ6 is sometimes too flowery and overwrought. The game feels self-important in a way that KQ5 does not.
The writing in King’s Quest 1 remake struck the right tone, thanks to Josh Mandel. I hope that a tone (including the humor and free, adventurous, fun feel) similar that of the KQ1 remake, as well as that of KQ4, is reflected in the new 2015 King’s Quest.
it is the best of the KQ’s to me. But admitably i am not a huge KQ fan. (5 still leaves a bitter taste). But yeah i think people go a little overboard with the 6 hype, regardless that it is a good game.
I think King’s Quest 6 is underrated. It was a perfect balance of everything that made Sierra adventures so adorable - interaction, experimentation, beautiful pixel art, humour mixed with seriousness, quick riddles mixed with multistep puzzles, alternative solutions, plot branches… The only thing missing was a huge open world, but there was still plenty of exploration.
And then a horrible King’s Quest VII came out that started a new standard for all Sierra games, followed by the absolute best-seller Phantasmagoria. Now that was a straight insult to KQ6 and all Sierra memories.
PC means personal computer
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