Princesses, monsters, kingdoms, anime and capitalism… These words pretty much sum up the whole of Penny Punching Princess – A neat little title on the Nintendo Switch about a Princess who only trusts one thing and one thing only: cold hard cash. You control her in order to exact revenge on a nasty group of loan shark dragons who put her father into debt and built a large and powerful kingdom in the process.
The story is kind-of mediocre in this game, since it really isn’t captivating enough for me to get interested. I mostly skimmed the dialogue ’cause you kinda know what you’re getting into as you play the game; big bad loan sharks need an ass whooping, our protagonist likes to deal ass whoopings and there is a lot of money involved in dishing out these said whoopings. Other than that the game does have a cute little sense of humour as well as a very nice narrator. Most of the characters are pretty lovable and inoffensive so there really isn’t anything to hate in that department.
Now gameplay is the meat of this game and I have mixed feelings about it. This game is essentially an isometric beat em’ up where you are not very strong throughout the whole game. You kinda just mash the punch button a lot and hope you don’t get locked into an animation for too long to get wrecked by a huge dragon or something. The money aspect of the gameplay is the use of a calculator. You press the left trigger to pull out your calculator and you see what every enemy and stage hazards prices are. Then you type it in like an insane person or you just use the quick buy option buy pressing the right trigger and confirming. BAM after that you now have a little power up based off of the monster or hazard you have just bought. All of them are pretty simple like the one that heals you and the ones that do big damage. My favorite is getting the most devastating stage hazards and grouping all the enemies up in a little pile and letting all hell break loose as my Switch loses it’s absolute shit and drops frame like I dropped trousers the first couple of times I played NieR: Automata.
The game surely is satisfying with all the chaos going around but it can also be fairly challenging. Whenever there is a fight the arena closes off so you have a limited space to work with. You’re always gonna be staying on your toes and more often than not you’re going to be having low health. This is the bit that kinda sucks since you can’t risk anything unless you just wanna die. All you can do is wait till your calculator recharges so you can buy off another monster and hopefully use em’ to take out the others. But you know sometimes dying is for suckers so you can just cheat death by paying some cash to get revived. You gotta do this in time otherwise you’ll just fail the mission.
Buying off monsters also makes your kingdom larger. And that basically means you’ll just see their cute little sprites hanging around town when you wanna check on em’. But it also helps in creating new equipment and Zenigami Statues – that give you skill points for overall buffs – So to craft new equipment you need certain monsters and a whole lotta cash. So either save up and go at it the hard way when on a mission so you can splooge on some powerful armor. Or just buy off all the monsters for an easy breezy monster fighting. But how far will money take you if you don’t invest?
So yea, Penny Punching Princess is a pretty neat game. I really like the aesthetic and the music is great too. It has some clunky gameplay but it’s also so crunchy and satisfying I keep coming back for more. The story is fairly boring and I kinda couldn’t care less about it but hey at least it’s there. The characters are cute, the gameplay is unique enough I’d say and overall it’s a fun time. You’ll be spending a whole lotta time with this game since it’s got a good amount of missions for you to play.
I’d give Penny Punching Princess a 7 out of 10!