I’m a fan of otome games, in theory. If it exists and I can get my hands on it, I’ll try it sooner or later. If it’s in English, all the better. And if it has actual gameplay and doesn’t involve 20 hours of non-stop reading then woo-hoo, you just made my day!

But just because I’ll try most of these games once doesn’t mean I’ll like them. Some games are just not for me and sadly Princess Debut was one of them.

The story was simple enough. Sabrina, an ordinary teenage girl, switches places with a Sabrina from another world who happens to be a princess. Princess Sabrina hates dancing, but she has a ball coming up in 30 days. Somehow she manages to convince Sabrina to go to her world and learn to dance, pick a partner and take part in the ball on her behalf.

And of course it’s an otome game so there are six handsome (your mileage may vary on that) princes that you can try to woo in those 30 days. Maybe if I’d actually liked any of those guys my experience of the game would have been different. As it was I either found them annoying and/or creepy, like Vince and Cesar, or just bland and boring, i.e. the rest of them. For some reason they all look very similar as well, so there isn’t much to choose between them.

So, an otome game with a meh story and meh guys. Is the gameplay any good, then? Unfortunately not. You wake up and spend the day wandering around a few locations looking for guys to hang out with. If you find one you talk to him, hope he asks you out on a date, then hope you say the right thing to make him like you a little more. These events are all very short and very dull. For example you run into Klaus and he asks you to go shopping with him. You go shopping. You talk a bit. The end. That sort of thing. The aim of the exercise is to get one of the guys to agree to be your dance partner, then keep his love for you at 100% till the end of the game, at which point he will confess his love for you if you manage to win the ball.

Btw, once you pick a partner you can’t change him for the rest of the game so be careful. I picked Vince early and lived to regret it. He is childish, immature, selfish, inconsiderate and even downright mean from time to time. There’s nothing princely about that guy, let me tell you! Come to think of it I really should have turned him down when he gave me the diamond ring at the end. Tch, what a missed opportunity to get some revenge.

Training for the ball itself will probably take about 50% of gaming time. This is probably where I had the biggest disappointment, though. Going through dance routines is just a matter of sliding the stylus across the touchscreen while following prompts in the top screen. The trailer should give you an idea what to expect: Princess Debut Trailer. Maybe in some alternate reality, this sort of thing is considered challenging, but I’ve played this kind of game before, and I liked it better when it was called Ouendan. In fact I’ve finished all the songs in Ouendan 1, 2 and Elite Beat Agents on all difficulties and S-ranked almost all of them, so believe me when I say this stuff was child’s play to me. Slide, slide, slide. Slide some more, twirl, slide. Zzzzzzz… I wasn’t impressed by the tinny rearrangements of classical tunes they did either. Poor remix, poor sound quality, poor gameplay = poor music game.

And it’s not as if you’re dancing each tune just once and then moving on, as you do in Ouendan. Nope, at the beginning of this game you’ve only got one tune, and you have to practice it over and over again until you level up a bit and then you get another. Then another, then another. At the end of my playthrough I had 10 tunes to show for my hard work. Just ten. For all my hard work. All of which I had to play over and over again to raise my level. Raising your level, after all, raises stamina, which just means you can dance some more. Oh yay (sarcasm). It also raises your Technique and Artistry, which I presume makes you more attractive to the princes. But since they all suck, who cares whether you’re attractive to them or not?

The third thing you get from leveling up, and from winning certain dance contests, is new outfits. There are at least 20 such items to collect and you can’t get them all in one playthrough so in theory there’s some replay value in there. In practice not only are the dresses poorly drawn and animated but they’re also downright ugly and bizarre. In any case, when you’re busy dancing, you’re staring at the bottom screen so you can’t even see yourself in said ugly dress. Big whoop.

My intention wasn’t to bash this game, though. I mean, at least it got released in the Western market, which is more than I can say for most other otome games. Just by looking at the presentation I can tell it’s targeted at the pre-teen and early teen girl market, so I’m not exactly shocked that it didn’t work out for me. Most importantly, if you just want to play a game where you hang out with vaguely good-looking guys, dance to some well-known tunes and put on some rather drab clothing, you could do a lot worse than Princess Debut. It’s not for me, but it might be for you.

Btw, if for some reason you do like this game, Natsume has another one out called Cheer We Go. Check it out.