"Believable NPC's with real emotions! A complex plot! Toto, I don't think we're in Daventry any more."

What I feel are the two strongest games in the King's Quest series both feature Alexander as the main character; King's Quest VI and King's Quest III. Both have spellcasting, travel across the sea, and dramatic endings. KQ6 was in fact within sight of becoming my favorite Sierra game of all time but fell prey to some slight inconsistencies and horrible puns that warped the beginning of the game. It comes on strong at the end, though, with multiple endings and even a clever trip into the underworld. The game itself has the same basic controls as King's Quest V, with the menu that doesn't pull down until you go to the top and the ability to right-click through the major functions of talking, walking, inspecting an item you don't have and using an item you do; the main addition is that you can choose text over speech in case you don't have a sound card. I played the game before and after and still prefer the text.

In this game, you are Alexander arrived to seek out Cassima, whom you remember and love from King's Quest VI. While sailing for her homeland, your ship crashes and you land on an unknown island which, coincidentally, is the island her castle is on. From there you learn that she is due to marry the Vizier, and her parents have both died. After Alexander holds a tense meeting with the Vizier, it's pretty obvious from the cut-scenes not involving Alexander that treachery is underfoot, as the islands in the kingdom have been cut off from communication except to be warned about a strange intruder(you,) but in the meantime you need to figure out a way to get to the other islands on the map. Along the way there's a fellow called Jollo the Jester who is still loyal to the dead king and queen, a book-seller willing to get rid of a book of spells, a broken-down ferry where you can get information, and a pawn shop owner who will let you trade certain items as you need them. But the other islands hold intrigue as well.

Isle of Wonder--Sierra's attempt at an Alice in Wonderland area. If you can get past the five dwarves(one uses each sense on you to figure what you are) you'll run into characters like the bookworm or the hole-in-the-wall hidden behind the wallflower, the bump-on-a-log, and stick-in-the-mud. Although there are some stretches with wordplay(the bookworm makes a case for being a bedbug when he starts talking about diphthongs and the like,) I still despise the dancing plants, and there aren't that many locations, it's rather inventive, and the white queen/red queen conflicts in a checkerboard land are as good as you could hope given the source. I suppose every game should be able to get away with one genuine attempt at novelty that doesn't quite come off, and this is KQ6's.

Isle of the Beast--a sort of beast is rumored to live here but a protected garden lies beyond a boiling river. What he's doing there ties in nicely with another character you'll meet in the game although if you know your basic fairy tales you can guess what needs to be done in general.

Isle of the Sacred Mountain--centaurs abide here, and it is a dangerous place, but it is necessary to go to. Despite the attempts at exotic feel, the island consists of the base of a cliff(where you pick up two important items) and stairs in the cliff as you climb. There are also puzzles that you can only solve with the help of the manual, so it doubles as copy protection that stops piraters 40% of the way through the game. However, the busy work involved in solving these puzzles is annoying; you have to click on each stair a few times so that you don't lose your balance, and you must ascend several screens of over ten steps each. Then, although alphabet codes never get old for me, the puzzles consist of finding the right paragraph in an admittedly interesting story in the manual. The game redeems itself with a Minotaur's maze to go through a the top, and fortunately if you decide to return, you will only have to climb up one screen.

Green Isles--these don't appear on the map at first, but how you react there can be critical to which ending you get. The other islands have certain puzzles you must complete to go three-fifths through the game.

There's another section of the game that goes into general mythology which is really very good and has no more than Sierra's usual melodrama. It's also quite strong, and then the castle, where the vizier's wedding with Cassima is imminent, is also quite nice as you wind up snooping around quite a bit(although you'll need to save as Alexander doesn't always go where you want him to.) You have different ways to snoop around and may possibly even be able to enlist help.

Help? From whence? Sierra saw fit to develop characters in this game, which was to their benefit. Saladin the dog is a bit heavy on the dogs-are-loyal bit but he and the variety of breeds under his command come off well, both in pictures and in dialog. The genie under the Vizier's command may be a bit too obvious after a while even though his constant check-ups on you advance the plot well. We'll let it slide that two endings show his original intents to be different, but characters like Jollo the Jester can be enlisted to help you at a later stage. There are also a bookseller, a ferryman and a pawnbroker to give you different information. Many brief interactions may prove critical later in the game, and not doing so produces surprisingly logical ends(oh, if only I'd given item X to Y, this wouldn't have happened!) You can even send Cassima a few love letters, which is not necessary but makes the whole affair more real than, say, Graham popping up at the end of King's Quest II to find Valanice, kissing her and--hey, baby, I adventure for a living, and you? I bet you need a man after all that enchanted sleep. Lemme show you my pad...

Nevertheless the details conspire to work against Sierra at points. My general complaint with the game is that there are too many cutesy or illogical moments that counteract the more serious tone. You have oddities such as all five dwarves telling one to use his sense look cute, but of course only four should be talking even if the dwarves are the sort of beings that refer to themselves in the third person. The jokes may be worse as many seem as clever and painless as a neck tourniquet. They seem on par with 50 cent allegedly-used ''jokes for kids'' books whose main merit is that, though alternately arbitrary or rehashed, they are not profane(''You never know when a rotten tomato/empty bottle might come in handy''.) Alexander waving bye-bye as he is about to drop to his death seems utterly unnecessary and happens several places, and you'll get the usual ''pun-ny'' quote in the restart/restore/quit box that pops up afterwards as a coup de grace. There is also the matter of interaction between the islands; sometimes Alexander will not be able to ask one question until he's visited somewhere else, but there is a case where one person will tell Alexander to go away if he hasn't seen someone else on another island--so, although the islands can't communicate, they DO affect each other. The genie also creates a goofy ending in one case, and I've mentioned how one of two endings must revise history--granted, not a major infraction. The worst one to me is how so many minor characters see fit to make stupid dances just when the game gets serious and interesting.

The graphics, mostly strong, do get dull at some points; if you looked at all the screens in succession, you'd see great variety, but the problem is that you are stuck on the duller scenes longer. The Minotaur's maze, where you can get stuck for a while, doesn't have much variety, and the cliffs where you walk up the stairs are consistently grey. You have plenty of animation other places, with wildlife in the bookworm's location or in the Isle of the Beast, which also has a boiling pool. The white/red chessboard scene has clunky animation that actually works, and the death scenes that exist are realistic, for instance, when Saladin runs you through. Although one important item is very tiny and a bit of a nuisance to find, overall the graphics manage to add a lot of intrigue to the game, forcing you to pay some attention to detail, without overshadowing the story. The graphics themselves aren't pushed out of the way(this would wait 'til KQ7) as you still have a full screen to view. This is good, as nothing breaks up the fairy-tale feel like a visible save-game icon.

I've never been a fan of voice-acting, as I have long felt that cartoon versions of fairy tales ruin them. The voices don't work for me but it is easy to turn them off. Overall, the sound can be ignored, as what I heard after I played the game on my new sound-enabled computer largely paralleled what I expected, and fortunately there was nothing like a cackling witch to ruin my day.

KQ6 brings some clever and radically different multiple endings to the table. It's true that many of the story-lines may have been re-used before; one of the latter parts of the maximum-points solution was much more powerful in _Trinity_. However, the dialogue is the best serious stuff you can expect to find in a game, and if you are fortified well enough against the occasional unnecessary pun you will have quite a few story-lines to play around with. The game is easy to get into and has many handy magic gadgets as well as magical creatures who project arrogance, sorrow and duty well, but there's also a good deal of sneaking around near the end and even supernatural influences, with the big final confrontation in the tower and plenty of time-sensitive puzzles to raise your adrenaline during critical moments, especially near the end. It's a fine story with many endings worth seeing, and although the occasional melodrama is not a problem, the main drawback is the flippancy. Grizzled and dedicated adventurers should be able to deal with that, though.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/18/01, Updated 11/18/01