Great moments in PC gaming: Strange marriages in King's Bounty: The Legend

Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.

King's Bounty: The Legend

Developer: Katauri Interactive
Year: 2012

King's Bounty: The Legend is a Russian fantasy strategy game where most of your decisions are pretty normal for the genre. Focus on ranged units or melee? Recruit more elves or giant snakes for your army? March back home to replenish before fighting that big kraken? Standard stuff, except for one decision: Who do you make your wife?

King's Bounty: The Legend has a dedication to following through on the implications of marriage in a magical fantasy setting that is unmatched except by Divinity: Dragon Commander and maybe some Japanese games I'll gloss over here. You can marry an elf or a dwarf, sure, but you can also marry a demon, a pirate, a zombie, or a frog.

Each comes with their own complications. You need permission from a tree to marry the elf. You have to defeat a kraken to impress the pirate. The zombie lady has to be freed from the curse of undeath and also purchased from her current boyfriend (he is not a great guy).

Then there's Feanora, the frog. She's part of a quest given by an earl who sends you to the swamp to rescue a princess who has been cursed. Turns out that actually the swamp is full of talking frogs who can be transformed into princesses with a kiss, not because they're cursed but just because that's their whole deal. The Earl's been "rescuing" princesses from the swamp for years, but when love runs its course they transform back into frogs and he dumps them in his dungeon. You can just play along with this weird saga, collect your reward, and move on. Or you can liberate the frogs, at the end of which the swamp princess the Earl hired you to kidnap in the first place reveals she's fallen in love with you.

Anyway, that's how I ended up married to a shapeshifting frog who kept referring to our children as "tadpoles". The internet tells me I should have married the demon instead because she can carry two weapons instead of just one. The internet has its own priorities.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.