The Princess Guide

The Princess Guide is a game I enjoy less and less the more I play it. There is a sound structure here and some really clever ideas, but the weight of all its small issues really burden what should a fun and frivolous experience.

When it's firing on all cylinders, The Princess Guide is a somewhat deep, satisfying action game with vibrant visuals and humorous, whimsical storytelling. Unfortunately, it's bogged down by trying to shove overengineered combat through a thick UX fog. After yet another "mission" that consists of moving on the map to intercept three enemy skirmishes to completion, a reasonable player might wonder: Is it worth $40 to praise-or-scold each Princess through a couple of hours of sword-swinging? This quirky game may meet the particular sensibilities of some, but others should probably pass on this one.

Inconceivably bland.

The Princess Guide fails to execute on its good ideas, and the result is a game that feels like it was released before it had time to be raised properly.

So at the end of it all, this is really only a game I can recommend if you don’t mind a typical action romp with a bit of strategy to it, and if you don’t mind the very, very repetitive nature you’ll be dealing with along the way. Some aspects of the management portions definitely remind me a bit of some older games such as the Princess Maker series, but otherwise Princess Guide ended up being rather uninteresting.

For fans of NISA/NIS games in general, this is a complete let-down. None of the systems work well or are even that interesting. The story is bland, the combat unnecessarily complex and unfulfilling, and the lack of conventional progression against scaling difficulty results in an experience infuriating all the way around. Nearly everything is far more complex than it needs to be, from issuing battle commands, to simply trying to know what is being equipped or what effect is has. If one had to choose between one word to describe the whole experience this would be a battle between 'frustrating' and 'disappointing.'

The Princess Guide feels like a mishmash of ideas that involves some creative concepts, characters with a good deal of personality and visually appealing, but the game mechanics are not properly explained, there's several examples of incoherence in the plot development and the combat is rather repetitive. Overall, this experience ends up becoming disappointing.

The Princess Guide could be considered a diamond in the rough... although there's a lot of rough and not many diamonds

The Princess Guide is an uninspired dungeon crawler with a strategic twist, that sorely miss a good loot system and a clever level design. Still, can be entertaining in short bursts for fanatics of the genre.

The role as a teacher that ties the stories together held some promise, but the messy mechanics made me feel distanced from my pupils and in the end my actions were completely inconsequential.