The Princess Blog

Princess parenting simulators have been a niche genre even since they were popularized in the early '90s by Princess Maker . It's a unique concept that combines the decision-making format of visual novels  with the stat grinding of classic JRPGs . The player typically takes on the role of a father who is tasked with raising a daughter in a magical world to lead a happy and successful life. The daughter is often gifted with mysterious powers that can be unlocked by making certain choices throughout the game. Successful playthroughs result in her inheriting a throne or saving the fantasy world, and unsuccessful ones result in her becoming a recluse or degenerate. I usually find the stat grinding of these games to be pretty tedious, but the latest release,  Magical Princess , successfully modernizes the format with beautiful visuals and voice acting to make it an overall rewarding experience. With a full Japanese voice cast, beautiful animation and graphics, and secret endin...

To coincide with the recent Winx Club reboot, Winx Club: The Magic Is Back ,  a multi-platform video game developed by  Iron Frog , was launched  under the same title . The studio used a grassroots marketing campaign for this game by reaching out to influencers to help promote it, including me, but did not respond to my request for a review copy, so this is my honest review. They also released the game at a discounted rate, which is usually not a good sign. It seemed they needed all the help they could get because Winx Club: The Magic Is Back feels more like a '90s PC game than a modern-day console release. The controls are simple, the world is limited, and the plot is practically non-existent. For me, the primary appeal of playing a video game inspired by the Winx Club franchise is the ability to transform into a fairy and use the girls' unique powers in battle or to perform various tasks. Did it satisfy this expectation? Technically, yes, but only at the bare mini...

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie  is a direct sequel to 2023's The Super Mario Bros. Movie  and the first cinematic introduction of Princess Rosalina, a lesser iconic character than Princess Peach , but just as beloved by fans. This movie inspired many cosplayers  to create their own versions of Rosalina's famous blue dress, and all the ones I've seen so far are stunning! Though the cosmic princess is absent for much of the film due to her capture early on, not a second of her screen time is wasted. She delivers a beautiful maternal presence that exudes both power and femininity, and her personality shines through her story. Although I have not played Super Mario Galaxy, I found this movie to be a thoroughly enjoyable and fantastically whimsical experience that follows the spirit of its predecessor without feeling like a carbon copy. It mirrors the original by having a character rescue a sibling from an evil spiky turtle. Although Mario and Luigi are still present in this fil...

The holiday season  is upon us, which means it's almost time to start a new year filled with new princess content. Within the past few weeks, there has been a slew of announcements regarding upcoming princess properties, and very few of these came from Disney. Netflix is currently the best place for original animated content . They have at least two new animated princess movies coming out in 2026. On the gamer front, a trailer was recently released for a tie-in video game of the new Winx Club reboot . The upcoming Super Mario Bros. movie has also been confirmed to introduce a popular princess from the franchise who has yet to make her theatrical debut. Let's dive into a new year of princesses. Last week, Netflix released the first screenshot from Steps , a fractured retelling of "Cinderella" focusing on one of the ugly stepsisters . Although a similar made-for-TV movie came out in 2002 based on the Gregory Maguire novel, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister , this ada...

Bye Sweet Carole  is a horror adventure game  that is entirely hand-drawn  in the style of classic Disney movies. It has been in the works for about four years, which seems reasonable, considering how time-consuming it is to draw every frame by hand in the style of Dragon's Lair . The gameplay is inspired by an old Super Nintendo game called Clock Tower , but its plot, themes, and overall vibe resemble a more obscure point-and-click adventure game called Tsioque . Although Bye Sweet Carole is classified as horror, it is not particularly scary and is made to appeal to the Disney Princess crowd, which has a tepid relationship with horror . A better description of the game's genre would be "psychological thriller," which tends to be reserved for movies and books, even though many games fit this genre as well. Bye Sweet Carole tells the story of Lana, who lives in a Gothic-inspired orphanage called Bunny Hall in Victorian England. She spends the majority of the game chas...

When I decided to play a fan translation  of an old 1997 Sega Saturn RPG called Princess Crown , I was expecting something cute and simple along the lines of Disney Princess Enchanted Journey  or maybe even Rhapsody . What I was not expecting was an unforgiving full-length fighter RPG with story elements like demon possession taking place in a Barbie movie-like world  of fairies, mermaids, and unicorns. This game simply does not care about pinning down a target audience, and I both love and hate it for that at the same time. Developed by Atlus , the game never received an official Western release, and, having played it, I can completely understand why. It suffers from a massive identity crisis that even some of the darker princess games I've played are more straightforward about. Truly, this game would have no market in the West. The fact that it exists at all is amazing. It all begins so innocently. A little girl asks her grandmother to read her a story, and she pulls ...

The first time I saw preview footage from Bye Sweet Carole , I thought it had been rotoscoped from Disney's Beauty and the Beast . It wasn't, but this perception was a result of the game's distinct look that is reminiscent of hand-drawn films from Disney's Renaissance and Golden Age eras. The nostalgic aesthetic  is a huge selling point for the game. It is difficult to find anything in the modern era  that recreates this style so perfectly. The game's protagonist, Lana, bears features that are similar to the character models for both Belle and Snow White. It is not unheard of for a video game to use hand-drawn animation. Dragon's Lair  and Cuphead are some examples of this. However, it is an exceptionally rare medium for interactive storytelling due to the amount of time it takes to animate every possible player scenario. Few people are willing to put this amount of time and effort into modern games because of how much easier it is to take advantage of new tec...

Four years ago, I shared a review of a cozy strategy game called Yes, Your Grace , in which players take on the role of a king who must wisely distribute resources to protect his family and his kingdom. Now, the game has released a sequel called Yes, Your Grace: Snowfall, in which the stakes have been raised exponentially. Snowfall features similar graphics and gameplay to the original, albeit with some small updates, along with a significantly darker tone. Players begin as King Eryk, the protagonist from the first game, but things quickly take a turn for the worse with his circumstances and health, and Queen Aurelea must step in to protect what's most dear to them. The game begins by allowing players to input over their story decisions from the first Yes, Your Grace. For those of us who played it almost five years ago, it might be hard to remember what those decisions were. This task can be bypassed by asking the advisor to make the best decisions, or just give it your best guess....

If you think princesses are meant to be rescued , you might just be the perfect victim  hero for Slay the Princess , a horror visual novel available on Steam . Although it's classified as a horror game, the endlessly branching story arcs make the game whatever you want it to be. It is a psychological thriller based on player perspectives. If you want the princess to be a damsel in distress , she will be. If you start second-guessing her integrity based on the slanderous claims of the narrator, she will turn into something just terrifying enough to validate your fears. At the end of the day, this visual novel is a complicated web of time travel and existential symbolism where nothing is what it seems. No matter how confused you are while playing, it's impossible not to appreciate the ever-expanding number of routes that are available as well as the detailed pencil drawings, multi-faceted voice acting, and haunting score. Every chapter starts the same way. You're on a path i...

Around the year 2000, I was browsing the video game section of a department store and discovered a PlayStation RPG with a beautiful angel on the cover. The back of the box described it as a fairy tale musical adventure, which sounded like it was right up my alley! Little did I know that would be the only time I would ever see a physical copy of Rhapsody in a store. When I asked about it at a Game Stop shortly after, the salesperson gave me a perplexed look and thought I was saying "Rap City." The game had a few quiet releases many years later for the DS and some other platforms but was widely considered rare in the West. It wasn't until very recently that I learned that not only were there  two sequels  but also that they were localized for English-speaking countries just last summer under the name Rhapsody: Marl Kingdom Chronicles ! After nearly 20 years, the opportunity had finally arisen for me to play the complete series and learn about all three generations of magic...

I was late to the party with my review of Super Princess Peach , so I decided to be more timely with her latest installment, Princess Peach™: Showtime!  for the Nintendo Switch that launched last Friday. The game is a mix between the dress-up elements of Time Princess  and the gameplay elements of Disney Princess Enchanted Journey / My Fairytale Adventure . Although it provides more of a challenge than the Disney Princess games of the past as one might expect of a Super Mario Bros.  title, it can easily be completed in a full day, which makes the steep price tag questionable. Still, Princess Peach's newest title is visually pleasing, entertaining, and fun to play. The game begins with Princess Peach entering a large theater run by the Sparklas, generic muppet-like creatures  that populate the Showtime! worlds. As soon as she arrives, a magic tornado blasts her tiara off her head. A talking star named Stella appears and replaces it with a magic hair ribbon that a...

Some of you might be wondering why I'm reviewing a DS game that came out 17 years ago. I had some recommendations to play Super Princess Peach on my old video game post , and I've always been a little curious about it. After all, there hasn't been a good handheld princess game since the Disney Princess Game Boy Advance game that came out almost 20 years ago. Disney makes great movies, but they don't make very good games outside of the Kingdom Hearts series , which has also been questionable of late . On the other hand, Nintendo is built entirely on its history of great games, and the Super Mario series is one of the most popular. Though Super Princess Peach does little to develop Peach's personality or backstory, it is a fun game that reverses that standard story structure where Mario must rescue Peach from Bowser. This time, Peach is the one who has to save Mario. If I had to describe Super Princess Peach in one word, it would be "cute." Like most inca...

This is a sort of follow-up to my post about "How Princesses Represent Hope."  Being a princess in a fantasy world often means having a neon target on your head. I do not want to use the word "victim" because that is separate from being a target. Modern princesses are more capable than ever of defending themselves , something that has changed over time  as a direct response to the "Damsel in Distress" stigma . Yet, the fact that princesses can defend themselves from threats has not changed the fact that they are constantly being threatened. Even in stories with male leads, it is usually the princess or female love interest who is threatened, not the hero himself. Take for example Megara's binding servitude to Hades in Hercules  or Frollo's relentless obsession with Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame . There is a reason that princesses are coveted by heroes and villains alike.   I was inspired to write this post after being introduced to yet a...

Yes, Your Grace  is a charming video game with strategy and visual novel elements in which the player takes on the role of a king who has daily meetings with his subjects in order to maintain the well-being of his kingdom. Though you cannot play as a princess, the king has three daughters, who each have unique personalities and quirks. The decisions that the player makes throughout the story directly affects their fates. Though it is possible to give two of the princesses a happy ending, one of them is a victim of circumstance, and there is nothing you can do to save her, which diminishes some of the replay value. Yes, Your Grace can be completed in about half a day and has a surprisingly engaging story filled with fun characters and challenging situations that simulate what it might be like to run an actual kingdom. The story kicks off when soldiers from an enemy kingdom show up to claim Lorsulia, the eldest daughter of King Eryk and Queen Aurelea, who was promised to them as an ...

I learned about  Throne of Elves  through a recommendation from a friend. It is a Chinese animated film inspired by a video game called Dragon Nest  that takes place in a Dungeons and Dragons-inspired world with humans, elves, and other fantasy races. This movie is a sequel to  Dragon Nest: Warriors Dawn , which introduces the world of Alterra. I watched that movie as well, but I found the plot too convoluted along with gratuitous action sequences that took me out of the story. It reminded me of Bayala: A Magical Adventure , which also introduces a vast world of fantasy characters and kingdoms that are packed into a single story. I think Throne of Elves i s easier to enjoy than Warriors Dawn  because it focuses on a central couple instead of jumping around between different characters and lore all at once. The girl from the central couple is an elf princess, which makes it a perfect contender for my blog. At the beginning of the movie, Princess Liya is exci...