King of Texas (PC)

While I wasn’t born in Texas, I was raised there and spent most of my life living there as well. Even though I live elsewhere now, I definitely miss Texas, so when I saw a game called King of Texas, it seemed like a nice way to reconnect with what I consider my home state. I knew it probably wouldn’t have too much of a connection to the reality of Texan life, but even with that allowance, I can’t say I expected what I ended up playing.

King of Texas is a visual novel game, and that much I did know going in. Immediately, a title like King of Texas sounds like its going to be a tongue-in-cheek parody of Texas life, and the set-up certainly seems to suggest this as well. You play as a new player on the legally safe analogue to the Dallas Cowboys known as the Dallas Sheriffs, but this story of a football player in Texas is told with a decidedly Japanese style, the illustrated characters having a rounded anime appearance and the visual novel format being an odd fit for an American sports story since the genre is more often embraced by Eastern audiences. The concept of combining two elements of cultures that seem set to clash makes the existence of the game an effective joke, but when you’re playing the game, there really isn’t much humor to be found. Most of the game really does seem to be telling the tale of a football player playing his games and meeting some girls along the way, with the few moments that jokes were clearly attempted being things like exaggerated caricatures of Republicans that don’t even really remain consistent. For example, a conservative character could be calling liberals complete idiots one moment but when they ask you which candidate they supported for the 2018 electoral race, they’re suddenly expecting you to figure out they’re actually a moderate conservative. Even when these characters say something deliberately absurd though, its not done with much creativity, making its difficult to be amused by their behavior.

The story itself isn’t too much of an improvement from the humor, but it is at least competently constructed. While training for the upcoming football season, a rich man arranges a short tournament to be played in Texas that all the teams will attend. While the football side of things is important to the progression of the story, more important is the romantic prospects of our main character Jon Bega, the player choosing whether to pursue the team’s head cheerleader Molly or the more metropolitan team manager Ashley. The two girls slip into “country girl” and “city girl” archetypes pretty cleanly and even dress the parts, Molly preferring the expected Texan staples like rodeo while Ashley has more urban tastes, but that’s pretty much the extent of their characters. When your character speaks with them, they don’t really have well-defined personalities that influence the conversations. They certainly have plenty of character history that ends up being most of what they talk about, but not really many notable character traits outside the ones needed to fill their archetypes, Molly being Republican because she’s the country girl and Ashley a Democrat because she’s the city girl, with other expected stereotypes being the norm. Jon Bega isn’t really much better though, his history and personality changing with how you choose to respond when courting the girls and the only really solid points being his football career and having a famous relative. For a game that mostly focuses on the romantic angles, it feels more like you’re talking to a dossier on a character’s past rather than a person who might charm you with their behavior.

There are other characters featured in the plot, the team’s coach being a girl named Georgia who also happens to be one of the lucky characters to get some art. Besides her and a random female character, you’ll mostly be looking at decently drawn backgrounds while Molly and Ashley stand in front of them, but the dates you go on with characters don’t really include many interesting situations for the characters. In fact, the game outright avoids a few of them, skipping past your trip to the rodeo so you can be at the more generic restaurant after where you can talk at each other for a bit. When things do get steamy though, the characters either talk in such blunt terms its hard to view it as realistic conversation or they suddenly start talking in childish innuendos that would make it hard to enjoy things legitimately. The bluntness just seems like poor writing meant to inject some energy into talks that are mostly about characters’ pasts otherwise, but the innuendos could almost be seen as humor if the game wasn’t hoping to rope in players with the sensual element if a prominently displayed adult patch on the Steam page is any indication. Perhaps the strangest thing about King of Texas’s story structure though is that despite being set up as a romance game that seems to exist mostly for the enjoyment of the ladies on offer, the game tends to push you towards its more negative endings. Without the proper responses, you can end up getting transferred away from the team or only ending up just friends with your romantic interests, and as mentioned earlier with the voting example, not every necessary answer for the better endings seems obvious until you’ve failed at them. There are multiple save slots to allow for a careful player to get through easily, but it seems the option to advance past previously seen text doesn’t work properly, making replaying the game for alternate endings a bit hard unless you have a pretty good idea where to stop the rapidly advancing text.

Despite the issue with the skip function, most of King of Texas does at least handle the mechanical side of its visual novel identity competently. You click to advance the text when you’re done reading it, click on the choices that will determine your specific story path, and most of the options like quick save and quick load work to allow you to quickly go back and try a different choice so long as you did the saving before the choices popped up on screen. However, there is one oddity to playing this visual novel, and that there’s actually a little bit of football to play as part of the plot. During training and as part of the tournament, a minigame will appear where Jon Bega will run down the field without any defense as the opposing team throws their players at him. The player only needs to control his right and left movement as well as a jump to avoid being sacked by incoming attackers, the football players appearing in the distance to give you time to adjust your position. Despite being able to see them in advance though, Jon Bega’s movement is rather slow and doesn’t really make for an interesting minigame, the action going from too easy to worry about to not really having the time to adequately reposition yourself to avoid being tackled, a problem that can be caused by the fact Jon’s large sprite can obscure your view of other players. You might think moving to make sure no one is hiding in front of him would help, but the movement issues could mean moving like that leads to you being unable to dodge another player properly. Once you get to the end zone you’ve won the minigame, but if you aren’t interested in playing it, it is, for the most part, optional. You can skip it any time it appears, only really needing to win it at a certain point late in the story to get an alternate ending, but otherwise the story continues on without issue if you chose not to play it. While this is an appreciated feature and one that makes replaying the game for other endings much more bearable, but having something players will want to skip feels like a failure in design. I understand the desire to make a visual novel have more interactive play, but including a shoddily constructed diversion isn’t the way to make it more engaging.

THE VERDICT: The fact that a game like King of Texas exists is essentially the whole substance of the joke the game tells. The anime art style being a strange fit for a tale of a Texas footballer is a funny idea, but the game itself doesn’t go anywhere with it. The football minigame featured is a weak attempt at adding play to a visual novel, but even if you choose to skip it, the story here isn’t really that interesting. The few jokes present are weak, the romances mostly just involve characters listing off their personal histories, and Molly and Ashley are pretty much stock characters who are meant to carry the experience on their looks alone. King of Texas wants your attention for its silly concept, but once you’ve sat down to actually play it, it makes very little attempt to make its story, humor, or romance quite as interesting as the ideas you could have cooked up in your head.

And so, I give King of Texas for PC…

A TERRIBLE rating. King of Texas just doesn’t construct its story well, and for a game that only has a very weak minigame to break away from telling that tale, there’s not really anything else to support the experience. So much of the game is spent learning unnecessary details about the characters you meet that mostly just reinforce the basic personality traits you immediately gleaned from the character by knowing which archetype they represent. The romances involve characters bluntly talking about intimate matters and then when things do start to get sensual, suddenly they are using ridiculous euphemisms. A lot of the game is spent discussing the life histories of characters and the football tournament without really establishing any interesting personalities to get attached to, and since the plot is secondary to the romances with flat characters, all you’re left with to enjoy are the very rare attempts at humor that hardly try to be original.

I didn’t expect this to be an accurate portrayal of Texas, and I could have accepted if the game wasn’t trying to be funny with its concept.  Something had to work though, be it the humor, plot, characters, or brief bit of gameplay, but when things weren’t going through the motions, they were failing at giving the game something worthy of one’s interest. Stay! Stay! Democratic People’s Republic of Korea showed that a visual novel can mix humor, characters, and plot pretty well even with a silly concept, but King of Texas is sadly a fun idea that was hurt by its weak execution.