The Princess Guide – PS4 Review

Genre: Action, RPG, Strategy
Developer: Nippon Ichi Software, Inc.
Publisher: NIS America, Inc.
Release Date: March 26, 2019
Edited by Thorstag

The art of a good strategy game is how well it holds up when played, as games like Starcraft have shown over the years. While this next game was close to being a contender, it has several small flaws that hold it back. The Princess Guide is an action strategy RPG developed by Nippon Ichi Software, Inc, later released by NIS America, Inc, that while it was inventive with its gameplay and story, fell flat on some fundamental elements that would have made it a real success.

Coming out of battle, the story in The Princess Guide, while inventive, was a short one and when you repeat this four times, minus some variant differences per princess, it loses its interest quickly. Our tales starts us out with a random knight, running across the battlefield as a sort of tutorial, culminating with your commander, releasing you from service with the idea of becoming a teacher. Sometimes later, our unknown knight receives a letter asking for help as a teacher to aid one of four princesses across the game’s world. The rest of the story heavily depends on which princess you choose to take on first, with the option to work with the other three later on and thus, ending my story breakdown.

The Princess Guide is far from perfect, though, as I stated earlier in the review. My first real concern stems from the different issues or lack of within this game’s story. While each princess has their missions named differently, alongside their change of ideologies, they tend to follow the same patterns. The other concern I have with this game is more of a complaint, that being the stories pacing. I found the pacing to be off, not always but just enough to warrant some concerns.

Stepping back into combat, the gameplay of The Princess Guide harbors some of the games more unique aspects, with a few problems that can hinder the player at times. As per usual, I will focus my efforts on the gameplay elements that separate the game from others in the genre, starting with the world map. The world map acts as a hud for the player, showing off-mission start markers, random spawning fights you can take on, alongside the main city of the princess of choice.

The main city is your home base, allowing you to do general things, such as sending out troops to fight other enemies, use items, etcetera but allows you as well, the ability to train and power up your princess and or other troops. Powering up your princess takes a few forms, with the main form being materia that you can teach them. These materia can be earned through acts like fighting tougher monsters and surviving, defeating a specific type of enemy over x times, using traps while in combat, just to name a few. The materia will buff certain stats on the princess, depending on the materia used. There is also virtual training, which gives you the ability to give certain bonuses to a princess.

In combat, however, you take control of the unit you sent out and fight as them against waves of enemies or to clear out an area of its enemies while hunting for a treasure chest and using traps along the way. Combat follows the flow of dodging and attacking with the interface buttons to perform a certain type of attack or build a combo, most notably being the triangle while standing near a unit on that characters team to utilize their special ability, and circle to use the special ability on the weapon of the princess or commander in question. 

These abilities can change depending on the weapon in question, which is dropped from chest dropped by fallen enemies at random. These chest though are pretty heavy rng, as a range of items can drop from them, such as healing items and attack boosters, to various pieces of equipment and are the only way to get or use items while in an area. The circle button does have one other function, which is the ability to activate traps with various abilities to themselves, ranging from healing to dealing damage or stunning an enemy monster. These can easily change the tide of battle, so usage of them becomes key as you progress.

This all being said, the combat does have a few flaws. The first and biggest flaw, in my opinion, is the pure rng that is the treasure chest. The likelihood of the player getting a new weapon to improve or use is around fifteen percent, based on my experience and this really does hurt the player, as you need stronger weapons, to fight tougher foes as the game progresses, relying on the rng gods to get something of value. Following this is the materia system, which while I will admit I liked the concept behind it, has the fatal flaw of relying on the player to make improvements. Materia requires the player to complete a certain task to unlock it or unlock its next level to give and train the princess, many of which do not give the player any explanation of the requirement without looking it up online. The last thing I wanted to bring up was the lack of a true shop system. There is a shop available in the game, but for all that sweet gold you get from completing missions, there isn’t any way to spend it unless it is on new troops for your commander’s team, upgrading weapons once certain circumstances are met, or creating items, which require certain materia.

Coming off as an odd mix of crazy psychedelic colors and designs, tossed with an cartoony animated style, The Princess Guide stands out visually as a whole. Everything from the backgrounds, which sway about back and forth while lettering changes from solid colors to stripes, to the overly boldened outlining of wording on certain menus in a fashion of the Borderlands series, stands out from the get-go. The backgrounds and character models once in combat, while they keep a certain level of this craziness, do stabilize out, though I do worry for the characters at times, as this game has an odd situation where when a character talks in the story or on a menu, they bounce around in a level that could be considered extremely fast, like they have had a lot of sugar. 

I wanted to bring attention to the combat animations on their own though, as I feel like it stands out with how fluid and animated they are. The animations themselves are fluid and feel weighted, so when you swing a sword, you are in that animation until the swing is complete, leaving the player vulnerable to attack from gathering enemies. This makes the game feel harder then it should at times, due to just some enemies having powerful moves that wait for these vulnerable states to happen, but also make the player consider when to use those moves in question.

What is a game without a soundtrack to round it out, and while I enjoyed the overall score provided in The Princess Guide, it felt more like a mixed result? The core idea of the soundtrack follows more of a mellow tone across the board, with a lot of synthesized tunes, using a singer to play up the chillness of the tracks and the occasional more traditional instrument throw-in during battles. I liked the idea behind the soundtrack being more upbeat to play off of the games nature but more traditional elements, at least in my opinion, would have been a nice pace breaker from time to time. The sound effects, when used, were given proper sound time, but this was more during battle than anything else.

As the dust of battle finally clears, I can ultimately say that The Princess Guide surprised me, leaving me under the impression that while it is not the best strategy game on the market, it does contain enough uniqueness about it that it does warrant a try, if you like strategy games with some anime-themed RPG flair to them. The short but sweet encompassed stories from each princess, level of focus on empowering the princess and her commanders, combat variation with the traps on each level, funky but effective use of visuals and the jazzy synthesized soundtrack make for a strategy game that can be a good time in small bursts.

Pros:

• Four princess stories to play through and master
• Use of the world map as a hud system
• The deep level of progression put on the princess and her abilities
• An odd but funky visual setup
• Some of the smoothest combat animations far none

Cons:

• The story can feel short, depending on the level of player experience
• Too RNG dependant when it comes to equipment drops on the battlefield
• Lack of a shop to support the player

DarkLunarDude gives The Princess Guide A Drastik Measure score of 7.5 out of 10.0 (75)

 For the price of $39.99 on the PlayStation Network, The Princess Guide is a unique enough of an experience to advice checking out, but it may not be everyone’s of tea in terms of the strategy game market.