The player is not invited to identify with the girl on screen as much as think of her as a very complicated Pokémon or virtual pet. You don’t actually play as the princess, but as the titular princess maker. Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the game is the fact that the player is put in the roll of the protagonist’s adoptive father. Coincidentally, had the game actually been released in North America, it would have hit the shelves at roughly the same time that US Senators were calling Night Trap, a game where the sexual content consisted of a girl in a nightgown, “sick” and “disgusting.” While the level of violence in the game is fairly tame compared to North American games ( Princess Maker 2 was released the same year as Doom), the fact that the game deals with sexuality at all was rather scandalous for the time. The game juxtaposes Catholic nuns with Roman(ish) gods and Slavic house spirits. There is a strange collision of cultural tropes and social mores that could be uncomfortable for some players. It is set in a fantasy world modeled after a Medieval European city as imagined by Japanese developers for a Japanese audience. Thus, the only thing that remains of the English version of Princess Maker 2 is a leaked version of the mostly completed game.įor most Americans encountering the game for the first time, the experience is likely to be bizarre. This hardly surprising, because while the series was quite successful in Japan, only the second game was ever translated into English and the localization project ultimately fell apart before the game was officially released. ![]() I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of the site’s first articles was on Princess Maker 2, an obscure game most people (including most developers I know) have never heard of. ![]() ![]() Last week at GDC, Leigh Alexander announced the reboot of Offworld, the videogame offshoot of Boing Boing.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |