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You’ll be playing the part of a veteran warrior whose job is to take a Princess under his wing. Your initial choice of 4 Princesses will lead to variations in play style and aesthetics but as you journey on you’ll get the opportunity to try working with the others to keep things fresh. Combat in principle isn’t very complicated but you wouldn’t know that when trying to get the hang of everything. Though the tutorial attempts to help you make sense of everything I’ll admit I played quite a bit of the game feeling like most of the time I was merely remembering which combinations of buttons would give me attacks of what relative power and I’d keep working them though wondering if I was doing something wrong. To make the game a bit more strategic, and not merely about button-mashing, there’s an overworld map view of the area and you’ll need to plan and execute your missions there. Whether simply eliminating enemy units, getting to a spot in a certain amount of time, or escorting another unit to keep them safe these provide some variations but generally will always go back to roughly the same combat situations, just with new enemies and getting harder as you go. I suppose there are opportunities to move specific units and deal with threats in different ways potentially but I didn’t find it added much to the game in the end, or at least could have been simplified. There are more elements to the game that allow you to customize and improve your characters but honestly the menus and all of the options began to blur together for me. You can praise or scold your protege when she does certain things, and there will sometimes be associated bonuses, but the idea overall seems half-baked and more often than not just feels weird. An option to somehow be Pervy in the opening menu and the tendency for the princesses to jiggle around almost constantly as they talk contributes to the “Huh?” factor further, overall I suppose you could just chalk it up to a “Japanese thing” but it still continued to find new little ways to leave me perplexed. On the whole The Princess Guide isn’t a bad game, it just feels like a bunch of ideas thrown at a wall in the hopes some will stick, and some do. The balance of everything that slowly slides down the wall, which includes some elements of the game’s combat, is unfortunately a bummer though. Perhaps with a bit more time and an attempt to streamline the experience a bit the game could improve, as is stands I’d say it is more of a novelty than anything, and your enjoyment would more likely be in spite of the game’s issues rather than specifically because of what it does right.
Justin Nation, Score:Fair [6.0]