Review for The Princess Guide. Game for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita, the video game was released on 08/03/2018
The Princess Guide it's a game whose focus is difficult to understand. A title that bases its marketing on the presence of 4 princesses to command, which performance will depend on our choices, which however does not care about the main characters and does not give any weight to the choices. A game that pretends to be strategic, complete with interchangeable formations, deployable troops and timed attack or defense missions within grid maps, and then adopt an action gameplay.
An extremely basic game that tries to pretend to be complex through confusing tutorials and poorly handled auxiliary mechanics. In short, the impression is that not even the game knows where to go.
NIS America is known for bringing video game series heavily inspired by contemporary Japanese animation. Titles like Disgaea or The Witch and the Hundred Knight, which aim at a target of anime fans, with more and less convincing results. The Princess Guide belongs to the same vein; the princesses have both designs and characters that belong to the most classic stereotypes of female characters presented in medium-low level animation.
We go from tsundere Veronica to Moe Alpana, in the course of a story that, in addition to not having really interesting characters, does not seem to have either head or tail.
The protagonist, a character created by the player, gets tired of the constant wars, and for no real reason, he finds himself mentoring all 4 princesses, one after the other; but in a different order based on your initial choice. From here the adventures of the protagonists begin, each one engaged in a different mission. Although the goals of the princesses are very different, the game does not try to differentiate particularly either their dialogues or their missions.
The Princess Guide puts the player in a continuous loop of missions, all identical, involving only combat within a flat map. However, the gameplay is also interesting on the surface, in fact you can use two assets in battle: the first "commander mode" will allow you to take possession of various traps scattered around the arenas, the second "battle mode" instead will bring the team to focus solely on the attack. Powerful attacks from enemies are handled via AOE-like mechanics, with the ground lighting up to signal the impending attack.
While the game will feature an awkward amount of tutorials, the combat is still too simple. This is because it will never evolve from the initial formula just described. Whether using knights, wizards or dragons for support, the combat will still be reduced to spamming attacks and occasionally using traps to your advantage. Adding to this repetitiveness is also an embarrassing camera, too close to the character to allow you to dodge any attack, and myriads of character optimization menus that are reduced to equipping the strongest drop.
Narratively, as already mentioned, there is nothing particularly positive to report, it is a practically nonsense plot that tries to use self-irony to lighten its weight, but it feels boring and embarrassing. The events are nothing more than an excuse to make the princesses fall in love with the "master", in a purely Japanese style of admiration, which however is quite cringe for an audience not fond of anime of the "Harem" genre.
Positivity can be found in the graphics department. The sprites of the characters are very beautiful, both during the dialogue in the visual novel style, and in the gameplay with the “chibi” models.
The settings despite being little varied use a wide color palette and are beautiful to look at thanks to the bright colors chosen by the developer. Unfortunately, there are also technical flaws. The title on Nintendo Switch suffers from frame-rate drops, which is quite serious given the lightness of the latter. Furthermore, the music sector is rather anonymous, with tracks that accompany the gameplay well, but, like everything else, they get bored quickly.
The Princess Guide is a title that has essentially the wrong target, it wanted to include many ideas without developing any, resulting in an exaggeratedly simplistic game; more suitable for a mobile market than the Switch and PlayStation 4 consoles. The good graphics sector and some good ideas within the gameplay do not save a title that has flaws in every sector.
► The Princess Guide is an RPG type game developed by and published by NIS America for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita, the video game was released on 08/03/2018
