Week of Love: Princess in Love (DS)

The fantasy of life as a princess and the pursuit of romance are two very common angles for media targeted at young girls, so a game named Princess in Love certainly sounds like its lazily mashing the two together to try and easily cover those two commons topics. Surprisingly though, Princess in Love doesn’t go for a pure wish fulfillment route with its story.

Princess Isabelle, known as Isa for short, does certainly live a privileged life though. She leaves in an enormous palace, has a butler and a chef, and even has a personal assistant named Em assigned specifically to her. However, despite these glamorous trappings, Princess in Love does not shy away from some of the less exciting realities of living as royalty. The game takes place in the fictional country of Sommerbourg, a nation that seems to have one foot in the past in regards to royalty but has the other stepping forward into the modern era, the youth embracing technology and Isa herself even dressing in fairly modern fashion. However, as Princess Isa turns 17, she is informed once she reaches age 18, her parents will be having her ascend to the throne as queen and she must get married to a prince she never met as part of this ascension. Isa not only already had intentions of going to college, but she gradually comes to fall for a mechanic named Leo, neither of these being compatible life choices for a queen. Her daily life even has to adhere to certain rules of behavior in her role as princess, but the game doesn’t completely depict such a life as unpleasant, Isa working to try and get what she wants despite what is demanded of her.

Over the course of the twelve months leading up to the wedding and coronation, Isa is asked to work on certain stats that are meant to exemplify what a princess strives to be. Appearance, helpfulness, knowledge, and an appreciation of nature are all focused on at different points, each month focused first on one specific stat and then the months starting to combine them to all be worked on in the same month. A month only ends once you’ve both completed all story events assigned to it and got the current stats you’re working towards to their maximum level, your stats resetting at the beginning of the next month. A quiz exists at the end of the month to basically serve as a way of making sure you pay attention to the story, mostly asking you simple questions if you were paying attention, although it leads to some odd moments like the quiz giver Em asking you who her secret admirer is and only accepting the correct answer but then she doesn’t know who it is in the following story moments. For the most part the plot follows a pretty obvious route but is still mildly interesting, so the quiz shouldn’t really challenge a player unless they stop playing the game for a long time or aren’t reading the story.

With these elements, Princess in Love could have been on the road to receiving a recommendation for younger audiences, but things crumble once we encounter the gameplay portions. Despite being a princess, Isa’s daily life consists of more chores than a regular girl. Story moments often involve her running about the palace to deliver messages between the servants and the royalty, cleaning up spiderwebs and other messes, and doing jobs for people as her main way of building up her stats.  The bigger gameplay moments come in the form of minigames, there being an incredibly small amount on offer to engage with. A few of these have somewhat decent designs, there being games that are logic puzzles like making seating arrangements so people are sitting next to who they like or making menus where the food being served is liked by all. The minigames last until you succeed or time runs out, the game only watching your time for the sake of it, but that’s not a bad decision decision if you intend young players to pick up your game. The dancing game seems almost too much for a kid though, the game an actually challenging rhythm game where you need to tap dots on a record table at the right moment, the dots getting pretty quick in later versions of the game despite already starting off at a fast pace. With a game where you need to place gears properly to get a machine working, properly arranging flowers to be pressed, and another where you need to move pipes around to properly guide oil, Princess in Love has a few good ideas for minigames here or there… but it essentially hides its better ones. It does hide some of its weaker ones to be fair, the clothes washing minigame, drying Isa’s tears in a rather strange game, and escaping from the palace all appearing about the same amount as the more enjoyable ones. But for most of Princess in Love, you will be doing chores and playing the same few awful minigames over and over primarily due to one completely unnecessary mechanic, that being the need to sleep.

Isa, for some reason, has an energy meter that will deplete over the course of her day when she plays minigames, talks to people, or does chores around the palace. When Isa’s bar is too low, she will be barred from doing minigames and from speaking with characters to continue the story, so she will have to go to sleep… but sleep always comes with a minigame. There are at least two sleep minigames, but neither one is interesting or challenging. The first one involves counting sheep, with three of them running across the screen and you make them jump to get over pits, puddles, and fences. Get at least nine to their destinations and the minigame is over, but its pace is set by the sheeps’ running speed, and since jumping is barely interactive even when it crops up, you’ll likely be getting drowsy yourself playing it again and again. Isa eventually gets a dream minigame, but this one isn’t much better. Spiders and images of her love interest Leo will both come drifting down to the sleeping form of the princess, the player needing to cross out the spiders and circle Leos. Again, the pace is entirely determined by the game here, as Leo needs to be circled a certain amount of times for the dream to end. Maybe if these two minigames occurred once or twice or could be optionally replayed at the player’s discretion they’d be okay like the rest, but sleep is a constant bugbear in Princess in Love. The meter depletes whenever you do something important and you must run back through the palace and to your bed to play the same minigame you’ve seen tens of times before, and this isn’t even including the worst part of sleep in the game: there are moments of mandatory sleep. The sleep meter is already a nuisance, but it’s also made pointless by the fact there are scripted moments where you need to go to bed, meaning that if they wanted you to play the sheep counting game or dream game, they could have just tied it to plot relevant moments to prevent it from growing incredibly stale and slowing down the game with constant repetition. Perhaps the worst thing that can happen though is running out of energy and needing to sleep, only to wake up and do the next story event only to find out that story event is to go to sleep!

The sleep meter already does an incredible amount to ruin any good will the nontraditional princess story and few decent minigames might have garnered, but then we have chores. Besides many plot event being about running back and forth to talk to people like your butler and chef who want you to do their work for them, Princess in Love also has Isa needing to tidy up constantly. To build up your stats to the point you can take the quiz and progress the story, you will have to do things like cleaning up dirty footprints in the house, put books back on the shelf, catch butterflies that are invading the house, and clean up spiderwebs. Many of these are little touchscreen tasks that only take a few seconds at most to complete, although the bookshelf one tends to have imprecise controls for picking the books up, but since these are necessary for filling up stats, you’ll do them often and these do drain your energy, meaning it’s time to go to sleep and play one of those two accursed games again. Some stats are much more demanding as well. While story events can sometimes fill them and there are sometimes options to play minigames to build them up, some like appearance and nature can be hard to get meaningful increases in. Appearance in particular has very few options to increase your stat, one way being changing your clothes, an option supplemented by money laying around the palace you can spend on new looks, but then your appearance stat can also be increased by… sleeping. Appearance is yet another reason you may be forced into your bed, the momentum of play screeching to a halt as we retread sheep and dream minigames once again, and if appearance is a focus of the month, expect to sleep even more than the already absurd amount you do regularly.

THE VERDICT: Princess in Love should be more accurately called “Princess Does Chores and Sleeps”. While its more ground portrayal of life as a modern princess is interesting and it has a few minigames that draw on reflex or logic, most of its efforts are devoted to making you feel like Cinderella before she met her Prince Charming. Isa’s life is filled with constant mundane chores that would make young girls wonder why they’d want to be a princess in the first place since it seems like a downgrade from their own less demanding lives. Not only that, but a child wouldn’t be repeatedly crammed into bed as often as Isa is and made to play the same two games over and over. What there is to like in Princess in Love is buried beneath and entirely unnecessary energy meter and an overdone focus on the worst aspects of its play.

And so, I give Princess in Love for Nintendo DS…

A TERRIBLE rating. Princess in Love’s narrative isn’t groundbreaking, but its portrayal of life as a princess could have been refreshing and its course at least a decent fit for a simple story. Some of its minigames even had the potential to entertain, but everything in Princess in Love is soured by the fact you must push through so much tedium to access things that are pretty much just okay. It’s not even hard to see how to fix this game immensely: remove the sleep meter. If they wanted the player to play the sleep minigames, just send her to bed like they already do at certain story moments, and then the sheep and dreaming minigame might not wear so thin so quickly.  Sure, there would be some games like the clothes cleaning game that are still pretty dull, and the cleaning and tidying up would still feel like the chores they actually are, but they are much easier to overcome than the incessant insistence that Isa needs to sleep after barely even doing anything. The logic puzzles present like the oil pipe game and the rhythm game have been done better elsewhere and in more focused manners as well, so in its current state, there’s barely any reward for pushing past the problems to try and see how those games play.

Princess in Love didn’t just coast on combining two things little girls love, and on some level, that should be appreciated. However, that effort was wasted by making the most boring parts of the game a constant feature. While life as a princess didn’t have to be portrayed as glamorous, the end product hardly even feels like it’s about a princess. You may have a sarcastic butler, a quirky personal chef, and a huge palace to run around, but you’re a slave to your need to sleep and do more work than your barely mentioned maid. Perhaps it’s best we stick to pure fantasy if this is the alternative.