Vintage Game of the Week: Majesty Fantasy Kingdom (2000)

A true games geek is passionate about vintage PC games as much as he or she may get enthusiastic about some new gaming news. Our team at Game Guide World makes no exception and we’re sure many of our readers feel the same, at least about games they actually played many years ago and may feel nostalgic about. But there are plenty of gems waiting to be discovered on the shelf of vintage games, and some of them are so uniquely interesting, or funny, or charming, that they should be given a chance no matter how antiquated their graphics may seem. So give a game or two a shot even if you haven’t encountered it in your childhood and have no nostalgia about it whatsoever. Without further ado, last week we talked about the Black and White game, where the players gets to play god, literally, and this week we’re proudly presenting Majesty Fantasy Kingdom.

Majesty Fantasy Kingdom is a real-time strategy game developed by Cyberlore Studios and released in 2000 for Windows. A Linux version of the game was subsequently released in 2003, after two expansions of the game were launched in 2001 and 2002, respectively. In the game, you start out as the king of a magical kingdom called Ardania, where you have to keep things going for the people and also deal with external forces trying to invade you land. The game has its equally fascinating parts of battle and bureaucracy, and we’ll detail both of them below. First of all, the game’s awesome and occasionally sarcastic humor makes you realize pretty soon that nothing works smoothly, even if this is a fantasy land you’re leading. The workers aren’t doing their jobs properly, something always breaks, the warriors are bragging to do more than they’re actually capable of accomplishing and everyone is asking you for money (which you can’t really earn that easily, at least not without dramatically increasing taxes and risking a riot).

Therefore, what you learn in Majesty Fantasy Kingdom soon enough as the leader of Ardania is the fact that if you want to get anything done, you must always rely on external forces to lend a helping hand to your land. This translates to hiring mercenaries and heroes from the local tavern, since they are among the few NPCs not slacking in the game. Ok, maybe that’s a bit unfair to the rest of the population that manages to put in their fair share of work, but what’s clear is that nothing would be accomplished without sometimes enlisting foreign help (which add to the kingdom’s financial burden). That was, in a nutshell, the bureaucracy part of playing Majesty Fantasy Kingdom.

As for the battle bits of the game, these may be the most charming in all the real-time strategy video games we’ve encountered: you can’t really control what your troops do in detail, but you can set banners and rewards on the map to point them in a certain direction. Also, the humor factor is pretty strong here as well: each type of troop has a very funny way of dying or winning and the lines they produce are enough to make your day better. At least that’s how we feel whenever playing Majesty Fantasy Kingdom. The potential downside of the game is that while recent games allow you to build a more elaborate progress over time, this game doesn’t really have an overarching plotline, and only enables the player to choose between nineteen (19) single player scenarios. To some of you this may be good news or bad news: it’s all really a matter of gaming taste, really. One of the expansions of the game (The Northern Expansion) enriches your options with twelve (12) new scenarios, but that’s about it. Anyway, we strongly recommend you to give this Majesty Fantasy Kingdom an afternoon or two: it may be much more fun than you expect!