This weekend I’ve been trying to get to grips with a game that’s coming out toward the end of this month on Nintendo Switch and PS4: The Princess Guide.
The Princess Guide is an angled top down view action RPG / strategy game. You play as a retired Knight who has chosen to lend your hand to tutoring. It’s got to be said now, although I love RPGs… I am absolutely terrible at strategy based games!
The very first thing you do in the game is play through the tutorial, naturally, but the way they’ve incorporated back story and interwoven it into the tutorial is really nice and something I appreciated. It made the tutorial feel relevant to the game. It’s important to pay attention in the tutorial because you basically get everything then and there If you’re rubbish with remembering things like this, don’t worry you have options to revise it. My only complaint with giving you everything at once is for me, it didn’t allow me enough time to get to grips with all the new commands, and I’d been taught like 9 new things in the space of a couple minutes… And I’m still working out what does what exactly.
So far one of my favourite bits has been the character customization options. You can pick a Man or a Woman and there’s plenty of different looks for each one. You can then pick a personality type and a voice type! I was delighted to find that Perverted was a personality type you could pick. Apparently your personality type can have an effect on the game. I have yet to come across a bit where this is apparent, but I’m guessing it may be more obvious when you play through with different personality types.
Finally you get to pick a Princess to guide! There are four Princesses: Veronica, Lilartie, Monomaria and Alpana. They all have different personalities and goals. Don’t panic too much about your choice because you will get the opportunity to train all four Princesses if you so choose.
I went with Veronica, she’s the vengeful witch princess… I’ll be honest, I picked her because I liked her eyepatch and her fishnets.
So far my adventure with Veronica has been mildly amusing, in between gameplay you get little story bits and they have been cute and entertaining. I’ve had one or two giggles along the way, the game isn’t English dubbed, which I don’t mind at all, I quite enjoy it. As part of the game you have the option to scold or praise your princess, you have this option during battle and throughout some story scenes. This is supposed to gain points when used correctly that result in you being able to teach your princess different skills, I haven’t yet quite worked out how this works… But I’m sure it’s useful…
The battles are pretty simple if you can use and remember all the skills you were taught in the tutorial… Which I can’t as it’s not all that intuitive. There are also things within the landscape called relics that do different things, but these seem to be very short ranged and hard to use I have yet to use one successfully. You have a little squad of soldiers you can command and you can switch up your formations for defence or healing. I can see how they might be useful to the more tactical and skilled gamer. You have different battle squads to manage and each have cooldowns, in game time can be fast forwarded so this isn’t too much of a problem until you’re up against a timed mission, but even these give you plenty of time.
Overall this game would be absolutely perfect for those who have a good mind for strategy as there is loads and loads to play around with here! The battles so far have been pretty repetitive for me but I think this is because I’m finding it hard to utilise all the strategies and relics and formations. It goes right over my head. I wish that the different skills had been introduced a bit slower so that I could get used to them that would have made the game better for me. I am really enjoying the storyline though and that’s a welcome joy in between my furious button mashing I am looking forward to seeing the difference between training all the Princesses and getting to know their different characters and goals. For me the best thing about this game is the cute anime girls.
I have to give this game a 7/10