The Princess Blog

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...

Tsioque (pronounced "chalk") was an unexpected treat buried within a video game bundle on Steam. It's a point-and-click adventure game where you play as a (very) young princess trying to liberate her castle after she is imprisoned by a powerful shadow lord. The game is created entirely with hand-drawn animation. It opens with a lovely storybook narration about how Tsioque's mother, the brave queen, left the kingdom to fight a phoenix, leaving Tsioque vulnerable to the shadow lord. The gameplay begins after she is captured and placed inside a prison cell in the dungeon. Once she figures out how to escape, has free rein to explore the mysterious and often dangerous areas of the castle. Each room is full of fun and surprises just waiting to be discovered. Despite its child protagonist, Tsioque is not what I would consider an easy game. If you enter the wrong place at the wrong time or react too slowly, you can easily get caught by one of the many villainous castle guard...

While trying to distract myself from my addiction to Dress up! Time Princess , I was encouraged to browse through the Steam catalog  for other princess-related games I might enjoy. Sadly, there is no "princess" tag on Steam, and searching for such a thing can yield some questionable content . I decided to skip past the mainstream generic anime and Disney Princess games at the top and found some surprisingly unique indie games. Both of the ones I decided to buy happened to be inspired by the fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty." However, the games themselves could not have been more different. One is a visual novel called Once Upon an Electric Dream  that tells a sci-fi reimagining of "Sleeping Beauty" in space (you read that right), and the other is a point and click adventure game called Little Briar Rose that allows you to play as the prince(s) from the fairy tale. More on that later. The first thing that caught my eye about Little Briar Rose was the art sty...

Due to my obsessive personality, I try my hardest to avoid gimmicky smartphone apps that try to suck up all my time and money, but one slips through the cracks every so often. I downloaded Dress Up! Time Princess  on a whim, expecting to get tired of it after a few days and uninstall it, but then, it blew all of my expectations out of the water. This game  is the most perfect combination of visual novels , dress up dolls , and gacha apps that I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing. It has all of the best types of princess games rolled up into one. I've played other apps that offer individual facets of this one and got tired of them over time, but Dress Up! Time Princess contains so many different activities that it is impossible to get bored. It combines the best of technology with the best of femininity, something that Disney has been rigorously attempting to weed out of their own princess branding. Similar to the Choices and Lovestruck apps, Dress Up! Time Princes...

I have a weakness for visual novels. It took way too long for them to become popular in western society, which made me learn about them later in life than I would have liked. Visual novels are a mix of video games and books. You read all the dialogue at the bottom of the screen while watching an image of the character who's speaking over a background illustration set to music. The thing makes them unique is the ability to make decisions for the main character and choose how they react to the situation, which may change the outcome of their story. It's a technologically advanced version of a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book. Since visual novels tend to cost closer to the price of a video game than a book, I usually stick to free smartphone ones such as Lovestruck: Choose Your Romance . However, since I'm going to be locked in my tower indefinitely, I decided it might be worth dishing out some extra money to play Cinders , a visual novel that lets you enter the fai...