The Stack

I’ve made a certain amount of progress with my new Thief character in Quest for Glory V. I haven’t yet started the Rite of Rulership, but I’ve joined the Thieves’ Guild, practiced my skills there, stocked up on equipment, and done a little housebreaking.

From the beginning, QfG‘s take on the Thief has been characterized by:

• A greater emphasis on adventure-game puzzlery, with lots of use of inventory items against obstacles that the Wizard overpowers with spells and the Fighter charges through with significant but sustainable loss of hit points
• Extra content, including houses that can be burglarized and assignments from the Thieves’ Guild. In QfG5, there’s a subplot about a contest to become Chief Thief, paralleling the contest for kingship in the main plot. (I wonder if it’s possible to hold both titles?)
• Additional opportunities to be a jerk.

My favorite example of the Thief being a jerk occurs in QfG3. There’s a musician in the open-air marketplace of the city where the game starts, with a bowl set out for coins from passers-by. Any character class can put a coin in the bowl, and earn a few points in the process. But the Thief has the option of stealing coins from the bowl instead, pretending to put a coin in to cover his movements. You get the same number of points for this.

Now, in that example, the consequences of being true to your profession are that you have slightly more cash, somewhat less Honor (making it basically impossible to become a Paladin), and the same score as you would otherwise. But other acts of theft in the games tend to just give you points that you can’t earn without antisocial behavior. The score in an adventure game is a non-diegetic reward mechanism. It’s a way for the author to reward the player for doing things the way the author wants them done, even in cases where there’s no benefit to it within the game. In particular, the QfG games use it as a way of rewarding you for staying in character. I’ve commented before on how the Fighter in QfG5 gets points for winning the Rites, while the Wizard does not. This tells me that the Fighter is more ambitious, more driven to win.

The thing is, I haven’t really seen this happening in QfG5. I’ve stolen some petty valuables from an empty house, but didn’t earn points for it. The game provides even greater opportunities for antisocial behavior than the previous games, mainly by adding the Pickpocket skill to your repertoire. You can try to rob everyone you meet, if you’re so inclined. You can even steal things that people would gladly give you for free if you asked them. But I have yet to see my score go up for such an action.

It’s seemed to me that the series toned down the crime over its run, which isn’t at all unusual for the morally questionable aspects of a series that’s supposed to be about a Hero. The Thieves’ Guild was a significant part of QfG1, a very minor part of QfG2, nonexistent in QfG3, and present but abandoned in QfG4. Opportunities for crime, while still present and rewarded in 1-4, lessened in number. In QfG5, we suddenly have a fully-functional Thieves’ Guild again, and there’s more opportunity for crime than ever before, but very little explicit motivation for it. Mind, this was a few years before GTA3 made it clear that crime for crime’s sake was viable in games. The original GTA had been released, though, so who knows, maybe there was some influence there.

Not a lot to report here. In my last session, I made no progress whatever. I’m supposed to be stopping the bad guy, but he isn’t making a move that I can stop. Elsa believes that her sponsor, Minos, is the mastermind behind everything, which wouldn’t be at all surprising, as he’s got villain speech patterns and a villain wardrobe. But his island is surrounded by a mysterious barrier that I can’t breach. It’s the only remaining unvisitable spot on the overland map, so obviously I need to get there somehow.

There’s one other obvious way to go at this point: the last remaining dragon pillar. The dragon pillars bear the enchantment used to bind the anticipated dragon underground; there used to be seven, but one has been destroyed during each Rite. The last pillar is in a cave, near an underground temple that I can’t reach because it’s surrounded by lava. I have a potion that will allow me to survive the lava’s heat, but no way to actually cross it. You might think I’d be able to levitate to the cave ceiling and push my way across against it, but that hasn’t worked.

I’ve started a new game as a Thief, but haven’t played enough to get to any Thief-specific content. Expect a report on that in the next post.

I keep thinking of the courtship material in Quest for Glory V as a mini-Dating Sim, but any resemblance to actual dating sim games is almost certainly coincidental. The genre was pretty much unknown outside Japan in 1998 — heck, it’s almost unknown outside Japan today. The closest thing to a mainstream American version of the genre would probably be Leisure Suit Larry ¹Notably, a Sierra game, like the QfG series and its progeny: “adult” adventure games where the primary goal is seduction. But there are major differences, and to my mind, the biggest difference is this: In the American version, the player encounters a series of women, and must (or at least can) have “successful encounters” with them all. In the Japanese version, there are also a number of available women, but the whole idea is to choose one, and, provided you’ve made the right decisions in your interactions with her throughout the game, to have her choose you as well. You might pursue multiple possible lovers over the course of the game, but in the end, you have to pair off with one and one only.

So it’s interesting to me that the authors of QfG5 invented a simplified form of the Japanese model without any likely direct influence. There are several available female NPCs. There is a wedding ring, the “Ring of Hera”, a unique item ²Apparently there was a bug in the initial release that allowed the player to purchase multiple wedding rings. Since I patched before playing, I don’t know how badly this messes things up. that you can present to whoever you like as a proposal of marriage. Towards the end of the game, it’s possible that someone will even accept, depending on how you’ve treated her, and since this is definitely the final chapter of the story, the two of you presumably live happily ever after.

There seem to be three components to the proposee’s decision. First, you have to talk to her about a bunch of different things, or she’ll object that she hardly knows you. Every NPC’s conversation menu changes as the story goes on, so this is basically a limit on how early in the game you can propose. Secondly, you have to give her stuff. Not specific items, just a sufficient total value of acceptable items (you can tell when you’ve given enough from her reaction). This probably sounds degrading, as if you’re buying her affections, but the in-game dialogue makes it clear that the authors thought of it as confirming that you know the woman well enough to know what sort of thing she’d like. Everyone seems to appreciate flowers, but Nawar (a bellydancer at the bar) is fond of jewelry, while Elsa von Spielburg rejects such frippery in favor of combat-enhancing magic items. Thirdly, there seems to be some consideration of indirect behavior. The first time I tried proposing to Elsa, she told me that I had given her no reason to believe that I respect her fighting skills, which I take to mean that she wants a man who would go to cheer her on in the arena when she fought there, and possibly bet on her.

I have managed to convince four women in the game to accept my proposals of marriage. (Not all in the same game, obviously.) I’ve mentioned two: Elsa and Nawar. The other two are the dead chicks. See, in the fifth Rite, you go to hell. There are two spirits there who you know from previous games, one Good Girl and one Bad Girl. The Good Girl is Erana, the half-faerie archmage who spent her life wandering the globe and planting enchanted gardens so that heroes would have a place to sleep outdoors without being et by wandering monsters, and who ultimately sacrificed her life to prevent QfG4‘s “Dark One” from awakening. The Bad Girl is Katrina, who began QfG4 as an apparent damsel in distress, became more like a woman of mystery, and finally turned out to be an obsessed vampire sorceress bent on awakening the Dark One from His eternal slumber. By the end, she was starting to find redemption through her love for the hero, but she got killed anyway, and it was all quite tragic. You can free one of these two from death, and there aren’t even any stupid rules about it like with Eurydice. But whichever you choose, the other is consigned to oblivion, which just doesn’t seem fair. If you’re really heartless, you can just leave them both there, but you cheat yourself out of some content that way. ³There’s actually some motivation to do this: as the price of raising the dead, your Stamina goes down 50%. But this isn’t as bad as it sounds. Stamina is probably the easiest stat to raise, thanks to the exercise equipment in the Adventurers’ Guild. Anyway, either one will marry you with minimal prompting.

There are a couple of other NPC women who may or may not be marriagable: the flirtatious but punning gnome who runs the inn, the overweight bartender who talks like Mae West. But then again, the authors might have intended the four potential wives that I know about to correspond to the four character classes: materialistic Nawar is the obvious match for the Thief, bellicose Elsa is the Fighter’s mate, Erana has been called “a paladin in all but name” within the game, and that leaves the goth in the tower for the Wizard. This is exactly the kind of fourfold symmetry that was originally supposed to be in the architecture of the series as a whole.

Just one thing: not all wives are equal. As with any difficult task, proposing marriage earns you points. And yes, even talking about this seems demeaning to the characters again. The game is giving me a choice of my alter-ego’s life-partner. Do I really want to base that decision on who has the highest point value? Yes. Yes, I do. I’m sorry. I want my full 1000 points no matter what it takes, and that puts limits on who I can marry. I do still get some choice: both of the dead chicks are worth 20 points. Elsa comes in third at 15 points, and Nawar — who, let’s face it, has no great appeal beyond the theoretical hotness of her profession — clocks in at 10. But I’ll still probably want to check out how it ends with every possible wife. And, for that matter, with no wife at all. This whole aspect of the game seems to be optional.

Romantic elements in games are peculiar. I’ve spent so much of this post describing the courtship in this game in reductionistic terms because that’s the approach that the level of simulation invites: we know full well that this is a machine following simple rules and spitting out canned text. But for all that, I have to admit that I felt a little thrill when Erana said yes (the first yes I received), and that it wasn’t just the thrill of solving a difficult puzzle. The poignancy of Erana’s position helped: even as one of the most accomplished mages in the world, and one of the most compassionate, she felt herself such an outsider that the idea of being loved humbled and amazed her. All this emotional revelation was provoked by the game engine processing a couple of flowers and a box of chocolates. But even with such a crude emotional model, the game provides us with the emotive power of fiction, amplified by player involvement. This can work very effectively for fear as well.

I have been really dragging my heels on this game — it’s not that big, but I’ve been taking about a week between sessions. I’m not sure why. It’s enjoyable when I’m playing it, but somehow I find myself more willing to waste my leisure hours on other pursuits lately. Maybe this whole computer game thing was just a phase for me and I’m finally outgrowing it. Ha ha. Seriously now, let’s talk about the game.

I made a lot of progress last night: by the time I stopped, I had 920 out of 1000 possible points and had completed six out of the seven Rites. The seventh one is to actually identify and stop the villain who’s trying to free the Dragon of Doom, bane of Atlantis. I assume that I’ll have to confront the dragon itself, and that this will be the ultimate encounter for the entire series. Which is kind of weird. QfG3 had you battling demons, and QfG4 put you up against a Lovecraftian Great Old One. Going from that to a dragon seems like a step or two down.

It really all comes down to QfG1. There manual for that game talked about dragons, even though there were none in the game. Dragons were the thing you’re not tough enough to beat yet, which is quite reasonable for the first episode, when you’re just starting to learn heroing. QfG1 generally kept things small — instead of battling to save the world from destruction, as is the fantasy-game cliché, you battled to rescue a baronry (not even a kingdom!) from a curse. The biggest menace was a band of brigands. At the time, I thought that starting small and leaving the story with room to grow in scale was a good move. I more or less changed my mind about that when I played Final Fantasy VII, which starts big and manages to keep escalating in scale anyway, but good or bad, QfG1‘s scale was sub-dragon. However, its outro pretty heavily implied that there would be a dragon in QfG2, which was suggestively subtitled Trial by Fire. There wasn’t. For all I know, there may have been a dragon in some draft spec, but the game we got used elementals and djinni as its big monsters. So perhaps the authors had painted themselves into a corner here: having made a big deal about dragons, they had to produce a payoff, and the longer they put it off, the more epic it had to be. The disappointing part of this is that it means I probably won’t get a chance to actually fight it. I saw the skeleton of a dragon during the pseudo-Grecian-hero’s mandatory jaunt through Hades, and it was large enough to seem architectural rather than biological. I can’t imagine something like that working in this game’s combat engine. (In Final Fantasy VII, sure, but not here.) But I suppose that if you really want to go toe-to-toe with a dragon, you get your chance with the Hydra back in Rite 3.

Anyway, assuming I figure out how to even get started on the seventh Rite, one more session should be enough to reach the end of the story as a Wizard. But I’ll still have a way to go before I’m really finished with the game. Not only are there the other character classes, there’s a bit of plot branching that seems worth exploring, particularly where it concerns the game’s courtship mechanism. I’ll talk about that in detail in the next post.

So, I need to build a hot air balloon. That much is abundantly clear. It’s not a stated requirement of the next Rite, which just asks me to reach Delos Island somehow, but I’ve received so many conversational nudges from NPCs that it’s pretty obvious how I have to get there.

This is the point where I got stuck when I was playing as a Fighter, and the reason I started over as a Wizard. Over the course of that second play-through (actually third, because I started over as a Fighter first), I found some more objects that are probably balloon components, but I’m still stymied as to putting it all together. So I may start playing a Thief soon, hoping that the new NPCs — such as the local Thieves’ Guild representative — will give me better hints.

There’s actually one other option I’m considering. I’ve established that some of the tests, at least, are skippable. If I just go to the inn and sleep for a few days, maybe Elsa will make her way to Delos and win this portion of the Rite, and I won’t have to. Then I can finish the game, and then go back and look at what resources I didn’t use. Those will be the ones I need for the puzzle I didn’t solve.

This approach has served me well in other adventure games with similar structures. Spellcasting 301, for example, which also consists of a series of time-limited competitive tests. Or, more notably, one of the harder parts of Beyond Zork — not a competitive-test-based game, but similar to QfG5 in that it’s an Adventure/RPG hybrid — was a series of puzzles to find the Pheehelm, an artifact that boosts its wearer’s intelligence. I was unable to figure that part out, but I knew that the only reason you really needed the Pheehelm was that you needed that intelligence boost to use a certain other item. So I started over with a new character, putting as many points into Intelligence as I could from the start, hoping that I wouldn’t need the Pheehelm as a result. It worked, and after I had won the game that way, I knew exactly what items I needed to solve the bits I skipped, which made it all much easier.

I think there’s a general principle to be gleaned here: being able to skip puzzles and come back to them later is a good thing. If I can solve something that I formerly found unsolvable, I feel very clever. By contrast, if I can’t skip a puzzle and have to resort to a walkthrough to see the rest of the game, I feel stupid, and, being unwilling to admit that I am stupid, I blame the author. This is really just the old argument in favor of nonlinearity, but what we have in this game is a peculiar sort of semilinearity that works just as well, and perhaps better.

OK, I’ve noticed something interesting. I mentioned how there’s this tension between the player’s two goals in Quest for Glory V, those goals being on the one hand winning the contests that comprise the Rite of Rulership and becoming king, and on the other hand finding out who had the king assassinated and hired the mercenaries and apparently is trying to release this ancient ur-dragon from its prison under the vesuvian mountain in the middle of the main island. These goals aren’t in direct conflict with each other: the Rite’s tests are generally tests of how effectively you can solve the kingdom’s problems, which is a pretty sensible way of choosing a king. And of course there’s not much point in becoming a king if the kingdom gets destroyed. But there’s the question of priority, and the game seemed to be rewarding ambition by awarding points for winning the contests — not just completing them, but returning to the palace with proof of completion before anyone else does.

I also mentioned that some actions only give points to certain character classes. Well, it turns out that winning the tests is such an action. The Fighter is rewarded for ambition, but the Wizard is not. It’s possible that the Wizard can get a full score without becoming king.

I’ve seen mention of multiple endings in this game. But this makes it seem like becoming king is in some sense the correct ending for the Fighter and not for the Wizard. So is there a Wizard-specific ideal ending? We’ll see.

I think it was Gardner Fox, famous golden-and-silver-age comics writer, who illustrated the varying narrative challenges of the different titles he worked on by hypothetically putting Johnny Quest and The Flash in the same situation: they’re told that there’s a time bomb somewhere in the city and there’s only so much time to find it and do something about it. For Johnny Quest, the challenge for the writer is coming up with a plausible way for the hero to overcome the natural obstacles presented by the situation. After all, Johnny can’t search the entire city by himself; he needs some kind of clue about where to start, and probably the help of the police, and why would they believe some kid with a crazy story? The author has to invent details that help the hero along.

The Flash, on the other hand, can search the entire city by himself, and once he finds the bomb, can carry it off to the middle of the desert so it doesn’t hurt anyone. The time limit is irrelevant to him. Things in general are easy for The Flash. The writer’s challenge is coming up with reasons why the task isn’t trivial.

This is more or less the difference between the Fighter and Wizard classes in Quest for Glory V. Back in QfG1, things were more or less balanced. But as you play through the series, the player character has to become more powerful. And, while the Figher becomes more powerful by becoming more effective at the one thing he does, the Wizard becomes more powerful by learning more spells, which is to say, gaining more options. After four games of expanding repertoire, I find it difficult to even keep track of all the spells I start with, let alone the new ones. So how do you make situations that are challenging to someone who can levitate, turn invisible, and manipulate objects at a distance?

One way that QfG5 does it is through the profound cheapness we call anti-magic fields. But that seems to only be in effect in certain places within city limits. Another way is by impeding travel: one spell you don’t have is Teleport. This is a major part of the game’s overall structure: Silmaria is a group of islands, much too far apart to levitate between. You can hire a boat, but the boats won’t go where it’s unsafe. As you beat back the baddies, the safe area expands, but sometimes you have to find your own way to places the boats won’t go yet.

There’s one other way one might call the Wizard class overpowered: the stats. I said earlier that the player character becomes more powerful over the course of the series. Unlike most CRPGs, the Quest for Glory games don’t reset you to a low level at the beginning of every game. Instead, they scale everything else up. In QfG1, the maximum value for every stat and skill was 100; in QfG2 it was 200, and so on. So if you max out your skills every game, the events of QfG2 make you twice as able as you were, but those of QfG5 only increase your skills by a quarter — or is the scale logarithmic? At any rate, if you start QfG5 as a Wizard, your minimum Strength is already 200, in theory making you twice as strong as the ablest fighters in QfG1 and probably capable of punching out the minotaur there, the game’s toughest monster, without breaking a sweat. This, however, is demonstably false, because that very same minotaur is a major NPC in QfG5, having accompanied Elsa von Spielburg to Silmaria. (After all, how could she leave him behind? Pseudo-Greece is his homeland. He’s guildmaster at the Silmaria Adventurer’s Guild now.) You can duel him in the arena, and while he isn’t the toughest monster in the game this time, he’s no slouch. Persumably he’s been working out as much as the hero since their last encounter. Or, to rationalize less, the numbers are as arbitrary as power levels in Dragonball Z, and only meaningful within a very local context.

Anyway, it’s fun playing an overpowered character now and then. Heck, there are entire genres of game based on it. And the QfG system gives the player a good deal of latitude about how to apply that power: you can practice Flame Dart and Lightning Ball to become a combat mage, or you can practice Calm and Dazzle and Hide to become an avoiding-combat mage. Some players like to create their Thief characters with skill in magic for the advantages it gives to stealth, but I’ve been a purist about that.

However you play it, since this is the last game of the series, the hero is by now a master of the craft. There’s one small point that I really liked as a way of illustrating this. In every game, you get to learn new spells from other, more powerful mages; in the first two games, there were magic shops selling spells to anyone with cash, but in the third and fourth episodes you had to seek out special teachers, including the legendary Baba Yaga (last seen as the prime antagonist in QfG1). Well, in QfG5 there’s a magic shop again, and for the first time, there are spells that you know that the shop proprietor doesn’t. And he’s willing to pay you for them.

One of my oldest and dearest memories of concerted completism is getting a complete score with all three character classes in Quest for Glory I (or Hero’s Quest, as it was called at the time). The maximum score was 500 points, and through careful note-taking, I noticed that 450 of those points could be earned by any class. 50 being a nice round number, I reasoned that the last few points had to be earned through class-specific actions. Anyone could beat up a goblin, but only the fighter earned points by doing so. In addition, I noticed that for two of the classes, I had earned a large portion of the 50 class-specific points by besting a master of that class at some challenge, and realized that the third should be looking out for a similar challenge.

Quest for Glory 5 aids such analysis by tracking your “deeds”, a list of everything you’ve done that earned points. In other words, it’s like the “fullscore” command in Inform games, except that it doesn’t say how many points things earned. (And in some cases I can’t tell even from observing how much my score went up; sometimes two deeds happen together.) Anyway, it’s always nice to see graphic adventures catching up to features that are commonplace in text games. The deeds list is a little sloppily put-together, with some things recorded incorrectly — monsters have different names and the like. Well, scoring is usually an afterthought in adventures. This list is pretty definitely more important to me than it was to the game’s designers.

The games in the series have certain common practices in scoring. Wherever in the world you are, there’s always a few points to be earned by signing the logbook in the Adventurer’s Guild. Getting an item that’s necessary for solving a non-optional puzzle always gives you points, which is handy for winnowing out the really important stuff in shops. If you play as a fighter — which I still am, despite starting over and thus having a clear opportunity to pick a new class — you get a few points for each distinct type of monster you slay — gotta kill ’em all! And that last part is affecting how I’m playing this game in a way that the authors didn’t intend.

This relates to what I was saying before about timing. I’ve done some experiments by staying in my room and sleeping for weeks at a time ¹In the game, I mean., and it looks like I was right: there are no negative consequences for starting the Rites of Rulership later. Since I know there are negative consequences for not being able to complete the tests quickly enough, I want to get as much of the game done as I can before I start the clock ticking. Obviously this includes getting the Fighter’s class-specific points for big game hunting. Some of the monsters are tough, but no match for my ability to pop healing pills during battle. (The world will be doomed once the monsters figure out that trick). Some are rare and hard to find. All would be easier to kill if I had access to the magical weapons that you can only buy after you enter the Rites. But I think I’ve klled everything that’s available to be killed before the Rites open up new areas. And I really wasn’t supposed to.

I think of my experiences with QfG1. There was no compulsion on the player to complete events within a certain timeframe, so I basically just tried to kill things as I encountered them over the course of traipsing around and trying to solve puzzles. It was an unstructured melange of puzzles and combat. Whereas QfG5 gave me just enough motivation to segregate the two realms. Part of the strength of QfG1 was the way that the two aspects of the game complemented each other — that you could go grinding when you were stuck on puzzles, and puzzling when you were tired of grinding. In some cases, if you couldn’t solve a puzzle the clever way, you could exercise your stats to the point where you could overwhelm it. But I’m going to miss all that in this playthrough. I’ll just have to save the clever stuff for when I play as a Thief.

In an adventure game, the player’s focus is on figuring things out. Once you’ve solved a puzzle, it’s effectively solved, not just for that session, but for any session thereafter, even if you have to start over from scratch: you may have to go through the motions in the game again, but the figuring-out only has to be done once. (And sometimes you don’t even have to go through the motions, if the only reward for solving a puzzle is information useful elsewhere in the game. Myst took this to an extreme, letting players with the right knowledge skip most of the game’s content.)

In a CRPG, the player’s focus is on going through the motions. There may be puzzles to solve and tactics to figure out, but these are usually stuck into a context of grinding. Progress in one of these games doesn’t necessarily present any challenge at all to the player beyond investment of time. You lose that investment if you start over, or even just go back to an earlier save.

So it says something about which aspect of Quest for Glory V is dominant that I started over without really needing to. I had managed to reach the point in the plot where Magnum Opus gets murdered a couple of days before I was scheduled to duel him in the arena, thus cheating myself out of the five points (out of a maximum 1000) that I would have gotten for trouncing him. I’ve been saving the game at the start of every in-game day, and thus could have figured out what the last point was that I could have salvaged this, but nah, that’s too much effort. Better to start over.

And, having started over, I’m doing things much more efficiently. A lot of the puzzle content can be taken care of on day 1 if you know what you’re doing, freeing up the rest of your time for maxing your stats — and, in fact, maxing your stats doesn’t take all that long either, so at this point I’m basically just marking time until I fight Magnum Opus. Eventually I’ll have to start the Rite of Rulership, and with it, the rest of the plot. But until I pull that trigger, the game seems to be in a plot-development-free zone. Whether this lasts forever or not, I don’t yet know. I was told at the beginning that my associates had paid my rent at the inn for a month, so that may be the point at which things come crashing down. On the other hand, the looming threat — the gradual destruction of the anti-dragon wards — seems to be dependent on plot events that only occur during the Rite, so I don’t know how the doom of the city would occur before then. Maybe it’s those invading mercenaries; maybe if I go and sleep at the inn for another couple of weeks without driving them off as part of the Rite, they’ll finally storm the city. But I doubt it.

If I were any kind of real hero, I wouldn’t enter the Rite at all. Let the city stay in its starting state indefinitely, with the defenses intact and no additional murders. So what if they don’t have a king? These guys are pseudo-ancient-Greeks; they should be capable of inventing democracy.

If I had to describe the overall style of the Quest for Glory series in one word, that word would be “goofy”. It’s got a mixture of heavy-handed drama and a twelve-year-old’s idea of what’s cool, topped off with a love of puns. Ye gods, the puns. There are a few characters who seem to exist mainly as agents of pun delivery, and even if you avoid those characters, the narrator sometimes indulges in them (chiefly in descriptions of scenery objects).

But the puns are just surface goofiness — Xanth it ain’t. The chief goofiness is the world itself, populated by caricatures and anachronisms. I said that each game is based on folklore from a different part of the world, but that’s only true on a very rough scale. QfG1 put a centaur and a minotaur in a fantasy-pseudo-medieval setting, as well as small dinosaurs and flying manta rays. And consider the four NPCs vying for the throne of QfG5‘s pseudo-Greece:

• Kokeeno Pookameeso, member of the city guard, always seen wearing one of those Grecian helmets with the brush-like crest. The only local in the running.
• Elsa von Spielburg, a baron’s daughter from QfG1. When last we saw her, she was a damsel under a curse. Now, she’s a duelist in thigh-high boots and revealing armor. ¹Actually, it’s not any more revealing than the getup worn by Kokeeno Pookameeso or Magnum Opus. But, y’know, double standard.
• Magnum Opus, a Roman gladiator with a very high opinion of himself. Roman? Well, he mentions “Nova Roma” at one point, so maybe it’s fantasy-pseudo-Rome. But we’ve had intrusion of real history into the fantasy world before, as when Haroun al Rashid showed up in QfG2. Anyway, Magnum Opus is an exaggeratedly one dimensional character, prone to saying things like “I, Magnum Opus, the valiant, peerless spearman of the Roman Empire, shall prove the superiority of my skills” regardless of the topic of discussion.
• Gort, a Frankenstein-like construct created by mad-scientists (in 19th-century attire) on an artificial island. Although Gort is probably the strongest fighter, it’s questionable how effective a king he’d be, seeing how he can’t talk.

So, not something you can take too seriously, despite aforementioned ham-fisted drama. But while I call the style goofy, I will not call it cheesy. The difference? It’s really all down to the authorial voice. When the author gives the impression of being stupid or incompetent, we naturally make a mockery of both the author and the work. But however goofy QfG gets, I get the impression that the author is just having fun with it. Things like Gort are so extremely out-of-place that they pull you out of the fiction for a moment, like Tezuka’s gourd. And it isn’t ironic detachment, either: once the author and player have acknowledged the absurdity, the characters in the world have to take Gort seriously. It’s their world, after all. And since the player is controlling one of the characters, it is to some degree your world too.