Bliss Brain has returned with another revamped edition of one of their popular franchises, Princess Maker. Princess Maker 2 Regeneration is a remake of the classic and acclaimed life simulator. The game is drawn by the famous Takami Akai, from Gainax—the studio behind the iconic anime series Evangelion. This game captured the essence of the original 1993 PC-9801 experience while adding some modern high-resolution flavour. This undertaking was meant to honour the game’s 30th anniversary.
Akai commented on this reworked version of Princess Maker 2: “I am so grateful that Princess Maker 2, which was created 30 years ago, is still loved by many people and that a new version is being released. This time, I was finally able to achieve the graphic renewal that I had always wanted! Please enjoy the newly drawn vacation and ending.”
As a refresher, Princess Maker 2 is a unique simulation RPG in which players take on the role of a father raising his daughter from the age of 10 to 18. While the player takes on the father role, they must manage their virtual daughter’s personality, skills, and future. The game has been praised for its deep gameplay and emotional story. Unfortunately, Princess Maker 2 Regeneration should have never regenerated like this.
“Unfortunately, Princess Maker 2 Regeneration should have never regenerated like this.”
Even with the efforts to have the original artist and team make the updates to this game, I did not feel like this remake lived up to something that can be classified as a remake or a remaster. Rather, this was a barely-improved-upon-master. I was still disappointed with so many mechanics of the game.
One of the easiest fixes was using a different highlight/choice picker colour. The white on white looked so ridiculous to begin with, so many questions on why this could not be improved upon. The dialogue needs to be updated to the modern world! There was a line when my daughter improved on her cooking skills, and the best the head chef could say was something along the lines of ‘oh, you’re going to make a great wife with those cooking skills’. Maybe there is a cultural difference but come on, we do not need these misogynistic comments anymore!
In comparison to countless turn-based strategy games and other simulation games, the overall feeling of progression was very slow—any of The Sims games come to mind. My poor daughter barely scraped enough money for studies each year. I understand the difficulties the game was trying to overcome, but it felt like 5 hours of gameplay was only 5 minutes of progress compared to other games.
“By the time I finished Princess Maker 2 Regeneration, I was so disappointed with my progress.”
The coolest part about this child-rearing simulator was its ability to have meaningful random encounters. This added a nice change of pace to the monotonous scheduling of this young girl’s life, and provided some slight boosts to my virtual daughter’s stats, sometimes in skills I was working to improve and other times just random skills like cleaning.
By the time I finished Princess Maker 2 Regeneration, I was so disappointed with my progress. Yes, there is replayability to do better at a faster rate. But I genuinely felt like my first playthrough accomplished close to nothing of what the game holds. Covering human feces with shiny glitter, expensive paint, and aromatic perfumes does not hide the fact that it is still fecal matter.
I am a great supporter of remakes and remasters; the Resident Evil remakes have gone crazy in the past few years. Even a game like System Shock had success with its remake, getting some graphics improvements while maintaining fun gameplay. Sure, these are different genres and different companies but I know fans will be disappointed with the minimal additions in this iteration of Princess Maker 2.
There were fragments of the vision of going back and adding in some newer graphics here and there, but at least they could have gone back and made adjustments to make the gameplay better too. Take your $40 dollars and play something similar like Volcano Princess, Harvest Moon Animal Parade, or just invest in The Sims games if you do not care for the Japanese art style.
