Princess on Ice (DS)

A game like Princess on Ice isn’t likely to get even a second glance from most gamers, but it ended up on my personal radar thanks to an interesting video made by the Censored Gaming Youtube channel. While not actually a case of gaming censorship, Princess on Ice is a Japanese title that received an art style overhaul when translated for the West, removing its anime influences in favor of something a touch more realistic. While anime aesthetics can be a bit generic due to their prevalence, in this case, the anime look seems like it would have been the preferable direction. The four skaters seem to have more character and personality in their original Japanese designs, while the U.S. and Europe instead got four girls wearing a bit too much makeup and all wearing the same three large bracelets on each arm. It’s difficult to tell which of the four girls in the English version of the game are meant to match their supposed personality types, with personality traits like “bookish” and “prone to playing pranks” just assigned to them rather than having some clear design element or set of expressions to indicate that is their personality.

Regardless of which visual direction you prefer, Princess on Ice plays the same in all countries. When playing through the main story of the game, you choose a difficulty as well as one of the four girls to be your main character. Kelly is the middle ground and de facto main character, good at all three of the special tricks, but Gabrielle, Madison, and Alyssa all excel at one type of trick to the detriment of their other skills. Depending on which girl you pick, that one will be the one who has a shot as becoming the Princess on Ice, a prestigious title that all four girls are interested in achieving. As you skate around the world, the girls meet each other and develop a friendship, but no matter who you play as, the game sort of leans the plot towards Kelly. This actually does make each character’s plot almost consistent with what the other characters see on their journeys save how things turn out in the end, although strangely enough, there are bad endings to be had if you don’t skate well enough at the pivotal moment. Another unexpected direction for the game comes in where the girls are skating. Things start grounded if a bit fanciful, moving from skating at a fair to skating on T.V. and in front of royalty, but things take off into strange directions when you skate in Egypt in front of the Sphinx, down at the South Pole, and in a Mermaid Arena that might actually be meant to be underwater.

The dip into strangeness doesn’t effect the girls or how you’ll be skating though. Princess on Ice is billed as a rhythm game, but it seems to ignore the usual construction such games follow. Most rhythm games will have on-screen prompts the player needs to follow that match the beat of the music, but Princess on Ice’s prompts just seem to be doing their own thing most of the time. This might come from the fact the game uses appropriate but calm classical music for much of its skating challenges, meaning that the player wouldn’t have much to follow if they were accurate to the beat. Princess on Ice decides to blaze its own trail with its prompts, your inputs only sometimes lining up with the song or your dancer’s movements. However, you can almost say that the game develops its own rhythm, since each stage only really has one or two sequences of button presses it uses that do have a groove you can settle into. However, the fact you can do just as well with the game muted is a bit of an indicator that the music choice was perhaps not the best match for this style of play.

As for what those prompts ask of you, most of them involve a series of snowflakes numbered 1 to 9 before they loop back to repeat the sequence. The snowflakes appear on screen and have rings close in around them, the player earning the most points for tapping the snowflake right when the ring has fully wrapped around it. Your difficulty setting will determine how these are laid out on screen and how quickly they’ll disappear if you don’t tap them, the player needing to build up successful taps to earn high point combos and keep the three judges pleased. Their approval is measured in something the game calls Heat, and the Heat also plays a part in the three required tricks you execute every time you go skating. Here, your choice of skater becomes important, as the better they are at a trick, the less Heat they need to accumulate to pull it off successfully. Each of the three tricks has a different gimmick to how you as the player interact with them. The Spin is incredibly straightforward, with a little wheel appearing on the screen that you need to rotate quickly with your stylus. Steps will create a trail of symbols that fill the screen, the player needing to tap them quickly as they will disappear if left alone. Jumps might be the easiest of the bunch though, with three outlines sitting in the middle of the screen and three large symbols flying in from the left and right to fill them, the player just needing to tap them when they line up properly with their outline. Every round of skating includes one instance of each trick, breaking up the repeated snowflake tapping segments with an area where it’s pretty easy to recover lost Heat, although only the hardest difficulty really seems to risk pushing you during the snowflake tapping sections.

As the game progresses, you unlock more tricks, these all being more difficult versions of the Spin, Jump, and Steps. These all have higher Heat requirements and are a touch harder to execute, but save for Spin’s increasingly stringent rotation requirements, most of the hardest tricks aren’t really a huge step up from their basic versions. Some characters don’t have access to certain tricks, but for the most part, you can pick the highest trick variation you feel comfortable with and earn quite a lot of points that way. Points can be used to buy outfits between rounds which serve no functional purpose, but a figure skater’s appearance is often emphasized in the real sport, so it’s a fine reward for doing well, especially since the game offers outfit pieces to make your girls look cool, elegant, or silly. Outside of the main mode there isn’t much else to do, just playing the songs independent of story context to get better at them and a multiplayer mode, but nothing to really make up for the odd and repetitive design of regular play.

THE VERDICT: Princess on Ice is an imprecise translation of figure skating into a rhythm game. While tapping the symbols to skate and performing more complex touch screen antics for tricks sounds like a reasonable design angle, the rhythm at which you do it rarely lines up with the music and for the most part its easy to settle into a repetitive and risk averse level of challenge, the game not punishing your trick choice stagnation or rewarding you for going the extra mile outside of a few more points for optional outfits. Variation isn’t strong between each performance, but you can at least learn to feel the minimal rhythm of the on-screen prompts instead of that of the game’s classical music tracks, although younger players may find the detached interaction with the actual skating off-putting even on the easiest difficulties.

And so, I give Princess on Ice for the Nintendo DS…

A BAD rating. Princess on Ice’s gameplay is a bit sloppy, but once you figure out how it actually works, it is at least functional enough to get through without feeling the discrepancy between the music and prompts adversely affecting how you play. Even though the classical music choice is excellent and includes both recognizable and lesser known compositions, the developers should have prioritized syncing it up with the skating rather than just having the two happen with little connection between them. Developing a groove independent of the music isn’t difficult, but it does make the experience less cohesive and you ultimately aren’t being asked to do much during most songs, and what you are asked to do tends to repeat itself too often.

A bit lacking as both a rhythm game and figure skating simulation, Princess on Ice really did seem to need a visual appeal to draw in audiences to make up for those failures. It’s hard to say if the anime art style would have done better than the more Western look the U.S. and Europe ended up with, but the story of that art shift did at least earn it some extra attention… but only well after they could aim to make a profit from that interest.