I spent over a week playing Princess Maker 5 and took several screenshots in the process. I’m going to post a few of them today, along with some comments.

First, unlike PMs 1-4, Princess Maker 5 is set in modern Japan. Your adopted daughter is a princess candidate from another world, brought over to Japan by demon butler Cube after surviving an assassination attempt. She starts out with amnesia but regains her memory around age 14 IIRC. As usual you play a retired hero. For the first time in the series you can choose to play as a female instead of a male, but I chose to stick to tradition.

There you have my daughter’s starting stats. Physical strength 33, mental strength 35, stress 0. My first point of order was to raise the first two stats so she can work harder and longer without passing out from the strain. Since she’s only 10, I set her curfew at 5pm and went easy on the part time jobs so she could get lots of rest.

This is the scheduling screen. It lets you set up to 3 after-school activities every day. Since the game is set in modern Japan, not sending your child to school is not an option (alas). The 41,329 yen in the upper corner represents the money I currently have. 80,000 yen is my monthly salary as a freelancer, which can dip as low as 20,000 yen depending on the year. 24,000 yen is what the drama class I have scheduled for the week is going to cost. I can also go into debt to sustain my lifestyle, to the tune of ~200,000 yen. Cube hints darkly at severe consequences for this, but I never experienced any.

And so I set her weekly schedule and Momoka obediently goes out and does it. The corresponding increase in her stats/stress is dependent on how well she carries out her tasks. Failing at karate like she did her gives her a smaller increase in fighting and strength and a larger increase in stress. It also decreases an invisible stat called Pride.

Through school and various activities, Momoka can make friends like clingy, codependent Hiroko here.

Walking to and from school with these friends raises friendship points. However if you hang out with certain people at the expense of others, some of your friends will get madly jealous and break off their relationship with you entirely. It’s a lot like the bombing system in the Tokimeki Memorial games.

If you manage to suffer through the arguments and petty jealousies and raise a character’s (hidden) friendship stat to a certain level, you get a special CG. You also get to become best friends forever with that person, and they give you a special item. While this means they won’t get jealous if you hang out with others, they will still get upset if you blank them in public or refuse too many requests to hang out.

Cube can give you the rundown on how your relationships are progressing. Purple orbs represent friendship. That pink orb in the upper right stands for romantic feelings. Since the guy in question is a 36 year old talent scout macking on my 18 year old daughter, we can and will ignore him. The brightly shining orbs belong to bosom buddies. Dull orbs belong to mere acquaintances. The grey orb in the upper left means Momoka is on bad terms with Asakura Kenichi, who is mad because Momoka spends too much time with Kuroda Hitoshi right below him. I spent quite a lot of time trying to get Kuroda to view my daughter romantically, but to no avail. ;_;

Back to the stat-raising business, I get to check how Momoka is growing every weekend. Above are some of her stats at ages 12, 14 and 17 (early and late) Because I focused so much on her strength and mentality, by the end of the game she could take up to 700 stress without batting an eye. Those little icons at the bottom show proficiency in skills like singing, drawing, fighting and swordsmanship. IIRC I maxed out singing, dancing, hand-to-hand combat, acting and trade.

I also get to check battle stats like HP, MP, ATK, DEF as well as what Momoka currently has equipped. Cyberfront and Gainax brought back the battles they took out of Princess Maker 3 and 4, but in simplified form compared to what I know of PM2. You have to send your daughter to a special dimension on weekends to get any adventuring done.

Adventuring means Momoka walks along until she encounters either a treasure chest or an enemy. Battling means she fights an enemy with weapons and skills. That stat below MP is “the will to fight,” and reducing it to zero wins the battle as surely as depleting the enemy’s HP does. Since 1) Will to Fight never goes above 100 and 2) you can knock it down by 20 every turn just by singing and 3) Singing is always accurate whereas attacking misses like crazy, you can guess which strategy I favored. Going adventuring is a good way to make money, though it wreaks havoc on your Morality stat. Unfortunately I stopped triggering new dungeons after the first three, so I never gave the battle system a proper workout.

Back home, I also get to chat with Momoka on weekends to find out how she’s doing. Talking to her may also raise stats and increase the bond between us. You might notice that she’s looking a little more… robust in the first picture compared to the second one. Alas, I fed her a few too many shortcakes to reduce her stress and she swelled up like a frog. Nothing a few yoga classes in a few weeks couldn’t fix, though.

The dress she’s wearing may look familiar to PM2 players. Before her weight gain she was wearing a “sexy outfit”, but according to Japan you can’t be sexy if you’re not a size 0, so the game forced her to take it off. =___= Also while you can wear the sexy outfit when you’re slim, you can’t get the “sexy” effect unless your bust size is D or higher, because according to Japan only busty women are sexy. I never knew.

The M.O.E. system allows me to watch her in her room doing things like dancing, training, playing with her dolls and playfighting with Cube, as depicted above. The activities she engages in depend on her current hobbies. If she likes to be active she’ll be training, fighting and doing press ups. If she likes to talk, she’ll be on her cell phone, in an internet chatroom or talking to Cube. It’s very cute to watch.

In March, June, September and December, one of the characters publishes the “Emirin News” newsletter. This tells me about sales and events going on around town. Cube can even mark certain events on the calendar so we don’t miss them. On weekends I get to take Momoka out to these events or to the amusement park, the cinema, the beach, or even the doctor’s or the dentist’s. I can also send her to visit her friends at home.

I forgot  to get a shot of the town or of any events. Here’s the contents of the anime store, though. Yes, I can choose to dress my daughter up in Asuka or Rei’s plug suit from Neon Genesis Evangelion. It’s a Gainax game, after all. Look at that price-tag, though… At the cinema I can watch thinly-disguised movies like “The Lord of the Necklace” and “Star Trekking,” and I can go see “CR Succession” and “T.M. Recreation” and “The Yellow Mickey” perform at the concert hall. I loved those silly little parody events.

End of the month. Here’s faithful Cube with a rundown of how my daughter’s stats have changed as a result of my masterful leadership. The last shot shows the beginning of the month. I get to make decisions once a month about my daughter’s diet, curfew, pocket money, attitude towards schoolwork, attitude towards others, etc. These mostly affect invisible stats like Pride, Mindset, Independence and Sociability. I hate hidden stats.

Yearly vacation time! Foreign trips like this one take off a lot of stress and build up a lot of stats. They also cost a minor fortune, but that’s what my daughter is there for. Just have her slave away at a couple of jobs for the next month and presto, debt paid back in full. The security guard job pays the most at 9,000 yen a day. The sleaziest job you can get is in a cabaret, which… isn’t that sleazy at all, really. But I guess sending your daughter to work in a soapland or “delivery health” center would be too real, even for Japan.

After 8 long years, I finally got an ending. I played PM5 blind, so I had no idea what was coming up. Momoka graduates from high school and decides to be a singer. After 6 years of training she finally makes her debut. Her debut single is a smash hit, but she gets tired of being told what to do and what to wear. She also feels the fans are too focused on her appearance and not enough on her music, so she quits her agency and hits the indie scene. Eventually she finds minor success as an indie rock star. Not a word is said on the fates of her friends, so I’m sorry I wasted all that time on relationships. And on study. And on pretty much anything that wasn’t music. So much for my 999 strength and 999 knowledge. Ah well, if she’s happy, I’m happy.

And that was that for Princess Maker 5. Because scheduling is done weekly instead of monthly, this one playthrough took well over a week of real time to play. I estimate I spent at least 20 hours on it. It was slow going in places, but lots of fun in other ways. It was certainly a much more enjoyable ride than the lackluster Princess Maker 4. Given the length of a single playthrough and the meh-ness of the ending I got for all my trouble, however, I don’t have the energy left to play any more. I’ll see if I can find other endings on youtube and call it a day. Very good game, though.