I’m done with Tokimeki Memorial 4, but I haven’t had enough of stat-raising sims yet, so I dived straight into this one, Princess Maker 4
At present, I’ve finished this five times with Endings No. 19, 22, 31, 33 and 35. That’s the Soldier, Magician, Marriage to a Minor Noble, Prime Minister and Ordinary Marriage endings, if I recall correctly. I may have the numbers mixed up a bit. This is my first time playing a Princess Maker game and I didn’t use a FAQ, so I haven’t done too badly for myself.
It’s not my first exposure to the Princess Maker series though. My first exposure came in the form of a Princess Maker 2 Let’s Play I read last year. It was and still is one of the funniest game-related things I have ever read in my life, and it made me really, really, really want to play the game. I tried to download the English PM2 and run it, but my computer wouldn’t play along, so it’s taken me this long for me to find a version and a format I can easily handle.
Unfortunately Princess Maker 4 is a real disappointment compared to PM2. It’s essentially a severely dumbed-down remake with all the humorous content, fighting and adventuring removed. A lot of the elements I saw in the PM2 walkthrough are present in this game, but the parts I really got excited about – the battles, the special events, fairies, mermaids, adventuring, etc, have been almost entirely eliminated. PM2 also had a dizzying array of stats to raise and classes to take, many of which have been combined or removed completely in Princess Maker 4.
It makes some of the festivals a little meaningless. For example I won the festival battle for two years, but that was the only use I ever got out of my battle stats and equipment. It’s an insult to any gamer, working to raise your stats like crazy then only getting to fight once a year. But this is a 100% raising sim, not a hybrid RPG, so once I readjusted my frame of mind, I was okay. Well, obviously not okay since I’m still complaining.
Anyway, let’s back up a bit: if anyone hasn’t played a Princess Maker game before, the story usually goes that you’re an ex-hero of some sort who somehow finds yourself raising a little girl. This time she’s the daughter of your ex-partner Isabel and you have to raise her from age 10 to 18. Depending on how you go about it, you can get all kinds of marriage and job-related endings, ranging from positive (Queen, Princess, etc) to meh (barmaid, freeter) to not so positive (sleazy barmaid, etc).
So every month you select a number of activities for her to participate in and she carries them out. Classes raise some stats and lower others, but cost money. Jobs give you money and stats, but make her tired quickly. If she gets too tired she falls sick and misses a whole month of the game, so you need to balance her health, her stats and her finances in order to raise her effectively. Other activities you can take part in include going on vacation, sending her out into town to meet people and having her take part in festivals to earn some money. It sounds complicated at first, but it’s pretty simple once you get the hang of it.
I did a first full playthrough to get the hang of things, then a second playthrough where I made a few extra saves in year 6 and used them to get two more endings, then I started afresh and got two final endings before putting the game to rest. If I hadn’t seen what the Princess Maker series was capable of achieving with PM2 (a game that’s 18 years old now), I might even have been content with what I got.
Unfortunately my expectations had already been raised to high heaven. The game is fairly entertaining in the beginning because of all the new classes and jobs to do and people to meet, but within a year or two it falls into a stale, repetitive routine. Sure you get an occasional new job, meet an occasional new guy and take part in the occasional festival, but apart from that it’s the same old grind. Raise stat, lower stress, raise stat, lower stress. The endings are very abrupt as well. One second your daughter is all over you, the next moment she’s the Prime Minister, two frames later “The End”. W-wait, what, how, w-when? Huh? T-that’s it?
I mean yeah, it was clearly addictive enough for me to finish it five times, partial playthroughs or not, but I know for a fact that could have been waaaaay better. I even thought it might be the “Special Edition” that had dumbed things down for the DS so I checked out several FAQs about the PC original, but nope. Maybe Princess Maker 5 might hold out a little more hope for me. This time I’ll do some proper research before giving it a try.
It’s actually possible to play the game. You can use a program called DOSBox to do so. I’ve tried it and it saves perfectly and everything 🙂 you might want to download the uncensor patch to replace missing files in the PM2 you downloaded. Err DOSBox requires some directory input so tell me if you want to know how.
DOSBox, huh? I’ll look into it. I’m a bit Princess-Makered-out right now, but I’d love to try the “real” thing somewhere along the line.
OK I get what you mean. ZZZ I just tried out PM4 and all I have to say, although the graphics are waaaay better (duh), it’s absolutely nothing compared to PM2. Your daughter in PM2 is really sassy but in PM4 she’s like…zzzz
I couldn’t really tell from the Let’s Play how much personality the PM2 girl naturally had and how much was added in by the writer. But it’s a fact that the PM4 girl is bland and colorless. Not just her but also her love interests, her rivals, the NPCs, the demons, everyone is so wholesome and goody-goody it’s boring.
Heads up: If you still want to play Princess Maker 2, it recently got a Steam-release that should be playable on modern systems just fine o.ob
Thanks. I plan to try either PM3 or PM1 next, but it’s good to know PM2 got a newer release for when I’m ready to play it.