Magical Princess is the latest game to get big in the Princess Maker / stat-raiser genre. Like all of these games, it has you playing through a few years of life and making choices about which classes to take and what to do in your free time. Different choices lead to different events triggering during the game, and then you get an ending based on your accumulated stats and some of those choices. Most new entrants into this genre and their own twist somewhere like Galaxy Princess Zorana being more of a political sim or Volcano Princess really leaning into repeated playthroughs, Magical Princess is mostly getting by on ridiculous production value. Mostly. It does have one twist.
Magical Princess is actually based on a series of exceptionally obscure Japanese board games that seem to feature basically all of the characters from the game and also seem to be the source of a lot of the art. Splitting the costs across those games and this one might be why, in a genre that usually has limited assets and rarely any voiceovers, Magical Princess is filled to the brim with unique art, animated character portraits, and even has full Japanese voice acting for every character other than the obligatory dad. In terms of sound and art, nothing I’m aware of in this genre has ever been remotely close to competing. There are even at least three different credit sequences.
If you’ve never played one of these games, the production value alone is reason enough to start here. If you have, don’t expect a whole lot new outside of all the great art. The day-to-day gameplay loop is almost completely standard for these games. That said, while skills and some kind of combat are relatively common genre features, they’re a little more fleshed out than usual here. You can pick a skill from the tree every time you level up a stat, and quite a few of them are actually very powerful. Combat, meanwhile, is a full turn based RPG that wouldn’t be out of place in a mobile game. It has some serious balance issues and fights are generally either cakewalks or completely hopeless, so it’s not the next great turn based game or anything, but it’s a lot better than what stat raisers usually have.
The one area where Magical Princess stumbles a bit is its characters. They’re not bad, but they are highly forgettable tropes with mostly one-note personalities. They serve their purpose and it’s cool that they all get unique roles in combat, but they also talk far too much for how interesting they are. I was mashing through most dialogue even before the end of my first playthrough. One other thing to note is that while its fairly common for games in this genre to be heavy on the fan service and Magical Princess even has a faceless dad character like it’s an h-game, there’s actually virtually none here and it might’ve even been an E rating if it had gone to ESRB. I’ve always found that aspect a bit creepy in games where the protagonist is supposed to be your daughter, so I didn’t miss it here. That said, it was a little uncomfortable that two of the romanceable characters look like preteens and one of them even makes a point of bringing up how young he is in every other sentence. It’s easy to avoid, though, and ultimately this game is so tame that no one ever does more than hold hands in the scenes I saw.
Finally, the one twist I mentioned: Magical Princess does require multiple playthroughs to reach some content. I won’t spoil exactly how it works other than to say that the true end was worth the effort to get to it. Subsequent playthroughs do introduce obvious changes to keep themselves interesting. Fortunately, there are a lot of different mutually exclusive paths to explore in this game, so you should also have fresh standard content to work through on second and third loops. However, don’t expect any high-difficulty stat checks that you have to build up to over multiple games like in Volcano Princess. Pretty much everything can be accomplished in your first loop if you focus on it, and any replay value comes from doing entirely new branches rather than getting further in old ones.
Conclusion
Overall, Magical Princess is a largely familiar but nonetheless solid take on the genre. Anyone with stat raiser experience will have seen most of this before, but it’s done well and with far better art than has been seen before. For a $15 game, that’s pretty incredible.
Rating: 85%
Time to beat: About 8-10 hours for your first playthrough. I hit the true ending and unlocked almost all of the normal endings in 18 hours. Thankfully, it lets you select any ending you qualified for in the last scene, so you can see tons of the 50 total endings from just one run. Reloading after ever ending and getting back to the new content does take about 10 times longer than it should, though.
Price: $15
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For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041
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