King’s Quest VII - Won!

Written by Michael

Unfortunately, the game fizzles out along with the volcano at the end.

We’ve reached the end, and there’s not much to it.  So, this will be a rather short entry.

When the scene begins, we return to the underground lair where the two troll kings are fighting each other.  While I can’t tell which is which from the animation, the voice of the real one tells me to turn the imposter back into his true self.

Which witch is which?

Unfortunately, the animation is so fast, I can’t tell who to click the wand on, but I manage to get off a shot and hit the one on the right.  He turns into something resembling the scarab of the past posts, and hops away.

Oops.  It seems I turned the real King Otar into a creature, instead of the imposter.

Doing the electric slide.

Malicia shows up and does some kind of spell on me, and I am no longer.

I try again, trying to hit the other Otar, but no luck.  And if I take too long, Malicia comes and spellbounds me anyway.

I struggled with this for a while, and realized that I had never examined the wand.  Doing so shows a letter on it.

It seems to be stuck on the pumpkin setting.

The wand, when rotated, shows a letter “T” emblazoned on the tip.  If you click a specific pixel on the shaft, it will change to a letter “F”.

I’m undecided as to the meaning of the letters.  At first, I thought, “True” and “False”, but now I’m thinking “Troll” and “Frog”, but I’m sure I’m wrong, because what’s a frog got to do with this?  Especially because “F” is the setting I need.

Changing the dial, I’m able to shoot the troll on the left, and he changes into... Edgar?

A lot less of a sniveling brat than the last time we met.

Yes, we are reunited with Edgar, son of Lolotte, from 1988’s King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella.  Also known as the last game where we were able to control Rosella, although we saw glances of her afterwards in Larry 3 as well as brief appearances with the family in King’s Quest V.

The shocking reunion is short-lived.  Malicia shows up soon afterwards, and sends him away magically in the wind, and sending bolts of magic towards the King, knocking him unconscious.  “My dear princess, I have something so special in store for you.  I hope you enjoy hot weather.”

Truthfully, I don’t.  I prefer 65ºF and partly cloudy, although I know this is a minority opinion.

The cliffs of insanity.

She sends us off to a cliff inside the volcano, as the lava level rises higher and higher.

Meanwhile...

While all this is happening, Edgar whisks Valanice away on a horse to the cemetery, where they presumably hop down a freshly dug hole to get below ground and (eventually) join us later in this post.

Charlotte is good.

The rest of the Justice League gathers at the top of the volcano and use their Spidey-sense to weave a web over the top of the volcano, because that will definitely hold in a few thousand gallons of holt molten lava.

So, what are we to do?

Can you dig it?

All we can do is click the shovel on the rock wall, because really, it should be obvious we can dig through volcanic rock to make a hole, right?

We end up in the long cave hallway, and only one thing we can do is walk to the next screen, bringing us back to the face of a vault.

You’ve got something drooping from your eyes.

Remembering the sequence of how the door was opened by the troll king earlier (although I suspect trial and error would work as well), I open the door and go back into the control room.

The troll king is still unconscious, but maybe I can save the day.  I look through my inventory, and the first thing I think to try is plugging the “device” into the outlet on the rear computer.  The lights on it pulsate until it reaches a peak, and does nothing else.  I click on it again, and the game picks it back up and returns it to my inventory, making a nice “you’ve got points” sound in the process.  So, I guess I did something right for another puzzle.

I remember that I still have a smelly flower, which I used on the dog, and click that on the troll as a form of smelling salts.  It does the trick, and he rushes to the workstation to disable the volcano.

What’s more confusing, a spider web holding in lava, or the lava being the color of Fanta?

Meanwhile, the lava is almost about to blow...

Maniacal laugh.

...but King Otar disables the volcano computer program in time and he joins Rosella in a bout of anxious laughter.

Stop, in the name of love.

Just then, Valanice and Edgar arrive, and after a few seconds of relief, in strolls Malicia again.  Edgar tries to protect us, but she uses magic to strike Edgar dead.  There’s a few seconds here where we can respond, and it turns out that the fully-charged device is the key.  Clicking it on Malicia transforms her into a darling little baby girl.  Her little puppy comes and joins her, and they are a match made in heaven.

So, in my first playthrough of the endgame, this is the last thing I was able to do, and I got the less-happy ending.  For a little while after, I was still able to control the pointer, so I tried different things to no avail, including clicking the “extra life” I got from the cat on Edgar.  I didn’t even know I did anything wrong.  More on why that failed, but first, the bad ending:

Oberon and Titania show up, and while they grieve over their dead son, they thank us and tell us about how Rosella saved their son from Lolotte so many years ago, when he was previously kidnapped and was made to believe he was her child.  They don’t want to take action against Malicia now, though, because look, it’s just an innocent child.

And then the game crashed on me.  It seems my version of the game, and perhaps DOSBox, can’t handle the next video right.  So, I watched a YouTube video to see what came next.

This is when I found out that you had to click the extra life specifically on his head (a very small portion available to the right of the baby sitting in front of him).  There haven’t been a whole lot of pixel hunts in this game, but this was unpleasant.  So, I restarted the game, and it hadn’t saved my progress, so I had to redo the entire chapter.  This time, I made a save point before this scene, just in case.

This time, I got the good ending, where the parents are shocked that Rosella recognizes Edgar.  How? Edgar tells everyone about how he was enslaved by Lolotte and then rescued by Rosella back in the day.

Edgar (paraphrased): Sorry for kidnapping you to this god-awful place.

Rosella: So, take me out and show me the sights around here.  That’s why I’m here, darn it.

Then it goes to a video that won’t play on my computer, but I saw online.  It involves them flying around the kingdom in the swan boat.  They land and walk around a beautiful scene, when Edgar asks the question, so to speak.

“Rosella, you've been in my heart since the first moment I saw you.  Rosella, may I... may I have the honor of courting you?”

“Yes.  You may.”

And a movie-style kiss, and fireworks in the sky, and they fly off in the swan again, into the sunset.

Time for me to make sense of this for a scoring post next time.

Session Time: 30 minutes

Total Time: 9 hours 30 minutes