Rakunou Princess is a ranch simulation game from Inutoneko, a Japanese indie game developer whose works I’ve been following for many years (since 2010, actually). They experimented briefly with releasing some of their games in English on Steam (Dungeon Shoujo, Witch Ring Meister, etc.) but the translations were bad, the games became bug-riddled and I suppose sales weren’t very good because they stopped after a few titles.
Unfortunately Rakunou Princess (“Dairy Princess) didn’t get a localization, so unless you can read Chinese or Japanese, you’ll have to take my word for it that it’s very good and tremendous fun to play.
Story: You play as Rakumo, the cow-obsessed daughter of a local dairy farmer. Worried that his daughter is too lacking in self-confidence and too compassionate (to cows) to take rational decisions about the farm, her father sets her up with a small spin-off farm to see if she has what it takes. The family business’s biggest investor is also worried about Rakumo’s abilities, so they come up with a series of tests (goals) that she has to meet in order for investment to continue. And that’s about all the story you’re going to get.
As with other more recent Ishwald games, most characters’ stories have been shunted off to the side and are completely optional to read. I like the characters enough, but the skits are so long and developments between games are so slow that I could only bring myself to read a few here and there. This is like the 10th game in the series and Fill and Shio still aren’t together, what gives?
Gameplay
First off, what Rakunou Princess does not involve, as I found out to my disappointment: ranching. I mean in-depth animal raising gameplay, with all its attendant joys and troubles. I was expecting the animal version of Harvest Green mixed with some Shepherd’s Crossing, so that you would have to research animals, nurture them from babyhood, vaccinate them, treat diseases, guard them to prevent theft, shelter them from bad weather, keep careful notes when cross-breeding them, etc. etc.
Most of the game is just selling stuff in your store
None of that happened here, and I played a LOT of hours. All animals are either born or found fully grown, and they only have to be fed and have their friendship levels raised (even that is optional) to produce large quantities of milk, eggs, wool, and other animal products for ever and ever, world without end. They don’t even grow old! You can only breed them once a month and then wait another month for the results, and the animals will eat pretty much anything you care to throw to them as food, including slime jelly, horse oil, cake, and… carpets?
On one hand, that is much, much less stressful than Harvest Green, but on the other hand, what’s the point of making a game about a ranch and taking out all the ranching? So Rakunou Princess is fun, but it’s fun in much the same way as the other restaurant management games like Ocean Lunch Antique are. The bulk of your gameplay revolves around buying, foraging or otherwise obtaining items, selling a bunch of them until you get recipe ideas, then selling those dishses until you’ve sold enough to get more ideas, and so on and so forth.
Crafting, crafting and more crafting
Because of the way the recipe tree works, though, you can be locked out of a lot of later recipes if you don’t get particular ingredients early on. For example I had many blank spaces labeled “???” on my ingredients list and couldn’t make any recipes because I failed to get milk from certain sheep early on. Just because ranching isn’t as important as I’d expected doesn’t mean it can be ignored completely. If nothing else, you must work on getting better cows, chickens, sheep, horses and camels (…what?) ASAP. You can’t ignore foraging either for the same reason, because two types of flour can only be found that way, and flour is very important.
There are hundreds of recipes to unlock in Rakunou Princess and crafting has always been my “thing,” so I was pretty happy with that aspect of the game. No feature of the game felt useless because they all tied into getting new items, making more money, passing more of the investor tests and coming closer to filling out the recipe list completely.
Thus once you get over Rakunou Princess not being a farming/ranching game but instead a restaurant simulation, there are many, many hours of fun to be had. Let me see if there’s a way to check how long I’ve been playing it… nope, didn’t find it, but I estimate at least 60 hours easily. It’s the kind of completionist game I like, because it’s actually possible to get everything in a reasonable amount of time just by playing normally – and save scumming a lot to get better foraging results. It’s a great game, and it’s a shame it didn’t get a proper localization so more people could play it.
Other games I’m playing: Not feeling Fontaine at all in Genshin Impact. The place itself is lovely, and the underwater areas are pretty and relaxing and much nicer than I had expected. However the new characters like Lyney and Furina rub me the wrong way, so I haven’t made much progress in the main story. Just thinking about logging in stresses me out, so it’s shelved for now. Luckily, GI is a very casual-friendly so I can dip back in when I feel like it in the future.
Not really into lobbies, but I really like this one.
In the meantime I’m still playing Love Nikki, and I went back to Epic Seven for the Re:Zero collab re-run (gotta get those limited characters) and the 5th anniversary rewards. I took an advantage of the two-week free unequip bonus for returning players to reequip most of my characters just for the heck of it, and just the other day, I started farming Caides 13. General E7 wisdom is that you shouldn’t because it’s time-consuming, but I wouldn’t have stuck to the game long if I didn’t prioritize having fun over being efficient. Don’t imitate me, though.
Lastly, I started Shin Megami Tensei V just last weekend. I’m only an hour in, so I’m still in the sandy wastes of the Netherworld and it’s really boring. If it were a free gacha game, I would have dropped it already, but I’m a little more lenient towards paid games (sunken cost fallacy and all that) and seriously, it’s only been an hour, so I’ll have another update once I’m a little further in. See ya!
