Princess Maker 5

In Princess Maker 5 you are  the legal guardian of a ten-year-old girl. She’s the only daughter of a royal bloodline and the center of a political dispute that quickly escalated into open war. Surrounded by enemies and fearing for her safety, you take her far away, into another dimension, to the land of early 2000s Japan, in order to give her a safe and decent upbringing. Cube, your loyal servant and friend, is there with you. You bond as family. Your new life begins.
 
I just finished my very first run of this game. This is the first PM I played and the first raising sim game I played as well. I’ll say the most important thing right away. This title needs your complete devotion. It plays like a casual game but it needs your complete emotional investment in order for it to work. I think this is why it’s a rather niche sort of game. I don’t think many people could play this to the end and the reason is simple; Gameplay is pretty much looking at stat numbers slowly rising while the same sequence of short animations play over and over again. It is repetitive, slow and mostly uneventful. Yet, this is one of the best games I’ve ever played. How is that possible?

Like I said, it all depends on your emotional investment. For the past several days I did nothing but play this. I would close the game and think about my decisions and how to make the life of this girl under my custody better. A lot better. In fact I was aiming for a beautiful childhood. This was the point that appealed the most to me and what made me enjoy this game so much; the possibility to provide someone with a meaningful, wonderful childhood.

As such, my gameplay was guided completely by roleplay. I didn’t look up any guides or tips on how to improve this or that stat or what to do in order to get this or that ending, I didn’t care about the numbers so much. I wanted to experience this game in a completely organic manner, mistakes and all. For example, I allowed my protégé to continue to attend music classes long after she mastered the skill, just because her best friend also attended there. I figured that’s what she would like, given the fact she only had that single friend during that time. This is how I made every choice in this game and it was completely worth it. I was completely invested in the task of raising this girl and it made every consequence very meaningful to me personally as a player.

If this is the type of thing that sounds appealing to you, then there’s only one problem to overcome with Princess Maker 5 and that is the gameplay. It’s a raising sim and that means creating a routine for your daughter is fundamental to her upbringing. This game will make you feel what a routine is like. You’ll watch every single week of an eight years period, as she goes to class, attends extracurricular activities, extra courses, cram school, do tests, club activities and later, part time jobs and everything else in between. You’ll help her pick birthday presents for her friends year after year and you better remember which friend is which. It is repetitive and I even feel asleep a few times (if you watch my streams, on rare occasions you’ll see the mouse cursor running offscreen. That’s because I dozed off for a few seconds) but the repetitiveness of it gives it the proper weight of reality and gives you the time to actually care about the game and with some luck, you’ll end caring a lot and having a fascinating experience with it.

Graphics are beautiful. I love the character design and the animations. It has that appeal of early 2000s anime like Toradora, Soul Eater and Haruhi Suzumiya. It has a sort of quiet charm about it, can’t really explain it but the visuals add a lot to this game. The music is so good I consider it to be a good enough reason to at least play a couple hours of PM5. It’s relaxing, engaging and quite beautiful in its own right. In fact I predict I’ll continue to listen to some of those BGM for years to come.

Only one thing bothered me while playing this game and it’s the lack of character development for many of the characters, particularly the students. There’s just not enough events in there for everybody. The few that there are are really nice to follow and read about, but it’s too little. It took me about 50 hours to finish this, I completed the entire ‘arc’ of several students and there’s just not enough text for them, they deserve a lot more dialogue, a lot more things going on in their lives. I can well imagine a Princess Maker game being enhanced this way by adopting a little bit of VN gameplay. It would be absolutely perfect. In my opinion it’s the only thing missing really.

I think that summons up my experience with PM5. A beautiful, precious gem of a game that maybe requires a very specific type of player to really enjoy it, but if you’re one of the lucky few, man, you’re in for some very good times with it.