princess nightmare Archives

Tag: princess nightmare

Charge of the Otomes part 2!

Posted on May 7, 2009 by LTB

Return of lame titles!

A while back I wrote a post about otome games making an appearance in the western VN market. It’s almost a year ago – and some more interesting stuff has happened since then, so I thought I’d make a follow-up post. I need to get this blog going again anyway, and what better way to procrastinate from the work I’m supposed to do?

First up is Dragon Academy, which is the game I wrote the most about back then. The first episode and a demo had come out at the time, and this original english web-based otome game seemed promising. Unfortunately, that’s all we ever saw of the game.
The promised second episode never turned up. After a while Go! Comi promised a re-vamp of their O-Play section that would bring new life to these games, but later the page went back to its old “coming soon” status, and the O-Play sub-forum has even been removed from their site. It doesn’t look too good.

But all is not lost! Where companies like Go! Comi have fallen behind, the indies are here to save the day.

As of my last post, the OEL game “Fatal Hearts” by Hanako Games was one of the only alternatives for english speaking fans. Since then a new indie developer has entered the scene and released two games aimed at a female audience – Heileen, a game that works mostly like a normal visual novels, and Spirited Heart, a game much like the Princess Maker raising sims.

I have played Spirited Heart quite a bit myself, and it is an addicting and challenging game where you can play as a human, demon or elf, and choose different jobs while havaing random encounters with guys that you may later end up marrying. While not as polished as the Princess Maker games, Spirited Heart is still a very nice game, and I suspect it will be even nicer when the upcoming premium edition gets released. (Premium edition… or was it special? I don’t remember).

And the indies aren’t the only ones who have been releasing games for us since last time.

A cute little game called Princess Debut has been released for DS in the US. In the game you play as a girl who ends up taking a princess’ place in another world, and then she has to practice dancing for an upcoming ball. Apart from that, she also has to choose one of the princes as her dancing partner.
The art is cute, and so is the story – but it’s generally something aimed at… much younger girls than me 😛 If you don’t mind some overly cute sillyness, princesses and tons of dancing, then you should give this game a shot and support the license. And then let’s hope something with a little more substance is up next!

I also mentioned a survey that Idea Factory had started on otome games in the US. Unfortunately not a lot of info on the results have come out yet. On the other hand it seems that the results of such surveys in a few different countries have ended in Idea Factory making a new brand called “Otome Forte”, which will release more gameplay focused games aimed at girls. The first title is “I will protect you” for the DS, a seemingly Castlevania inspired game. Whether these will stand a chance outside Japan is unknown.
Let’s hope that’s not all that comes out of it…

Last but not least is the Princess Nightmare translation project…. although it doesn’t look that way, it’s still alive, don’t worry. But don’t expect to see anything any time soon.

And what about that other guy in today’s banner? Well he’s just from an up-coming game that I am looking very much forward to, but hasn’t got anything to do with english releases (unfortunately). Let’s take this chance to end the post with some nice art!

Now back to work!

Sparkly eyes

Posted on August 19, 2008 by LTB

I recieved my Princess Nightmare artbook today! And it looks great! It’s a collection of pictures from a magazine called B’s Log, along with character guides and CG’s. I have never seen B’s Log, but seeing how many artbooks are collected from that magazine, I’m guessing it has a lot of pretty pictures.

Prepare for lame photo’s of book…..:

Character pages:

Prince in a suit!

Also, is it just me, or is this a picture of Yama together with Jin from Yo-Jin-Bo?

Neat.

I better get back to looking at the pretty pictures…. I mean, work on my projects…. 😛 And don’t worry, the avalanche of Princess Nightmare posts here should be over now.

Princess Nightmare – Final Impressions

Posted on August 18, 2008 by LTB

I finally finished the last route in Princess Nightmare the other day. I had finished most of the game a while ago, but kept delaying playing through Franken’s route – it didn’t really interest me that much. He’s a decent character though, and gives a different kind of ending than the other characters.

So, here’s some of my lame, final impressions on the game. Let’s start with the characters: Continue reading “Princess Nightmare – Final Impressions”

Smack

Posted on July 14, 2008 by LTB

And so I got a Good End and my sappy romantic scene in the Princess Nightmare game. Then I realised that the credits roll was filled with spoilers for the other routes! Aaaaaargh! *Has spoiler-phobia*

When you get on the right route, the game is a lot longer than I thought compared to the early Sad ending I got with Shinji. Like, twice as long or something like that.
Too bad I still have to get vampire endings before I can go for Shinji again… looks like the story is throwing hints that Shinji’s route will be quite climatic. I mean, I even saw Mephistopheles for a short moment.

Mephistopheles.

I hate that guy. At least he’s drawn a lot better here than he was in Animamundi 😛

Radou here I come! And yeah, I need to write about something else soon….

Princess Nightmare

Posted on July 12, 2008 by LTB

I have never been a hugely into otome games (games/visual novels for girls, usually with a girl as the protagonist). My impression of them have been that most of them consist of the main character wading through hordes of cliché bishies, just as many BxG games consist of the main character wading through hordes of moe-blobs. Or rather, it’s not that I didn’t like them, they just never really appealed to me.

But lately I have taken greater interest in them, and decided to try out a few to change my mind. Two games that caught my eye were Princess Nightmare and Heart no Kuni no Alice. Even though what I have tried of Heart no Alice looks very awesome indeed, I decided to go with Princess Nightmare first. It has the advantage of the heroine being voiced, which helps my understanding a lot, and then it’s not as insanely long as Heart no Alice is.

Anyway…. this game really surprised me in a good way. So far I have played through it once, and of course reached a bad ending, but I am enjoying this much more than I hoped I would. The characters in the game are a lot of fun once you really get into it, and the art is wonderful.

You play as “Little Dracula”, a vampire girl who wishes to go to school and try and live like an ordinary girl. Even though her brother Radou is set against it, her father (Dracula himself) gives her permission, and she starts attending a school that is very conveniently divided into day and night classes. Here she meets a human boy named Shinji, his classmates, and his good friend called Inukai (a werewolf).
Of course the vampires are hiding in Japan for a reason, and soon none other than Hellsing himself comes running after them, together with a crazy professor of sorts. I also managed to get a short glimpse of the mysterious “Prince” character before reaching the bad end.

The music in the game is great – especially the creepy tunes work well for me. The voice acting is fun to listen to as well, especially when the characters sometimes make some pretty funny personality changes. Especially a school play in the middle of the story makes me crack up – in spite of the theme being a bit cliché, that scene was just too funny.

It’s obvious that there is still much of the story in the game that I haven’t discovered yet, since I got the “sad” ending.

Unfortunately this game has a feature that seems to be in most Karin games (Yo-Jin-Bo and Animamundi has it as well) – when the game starts, you will be presented with a scene where you have to answer a row of short questions. These questions help determine your chances of getting different endings later in the game. I find it kind of annoying, since this most likely sets you up for a bad ending on your early playthroughs when you don’t know much about the characters. I will definitly end up doing the same thing I did in Yo-Jin-Bo, using a walkthrough for these first few questions, and then get through the rest on my own.
Also, every choice menu has a clock counting down, which makes it a little hard for someone with weak reading skills to make the right choices in time ^^; Thankfully none of the choices have been very complicated so far, so I have been able to read them without too much trouble.

Another thing that kind of put me off, especially at first, is a very strangely chosen standard pose for Inukai. In his standard pose, he’s giving you the finger. I mean, this fits well in some scenes, sure, but it’s strange to see him standing like that when he’s just speaking normally to someone, lol.

As some might know, Princess Nightmare is the game that was rumoured to be the next license by Hirameki before they went out of VN business. Because of this a small translation group by the name Otome Eternal has taken up the task of fan-translating this game. Unfortunately it looks like the project has stalled somewhat, but I do hope that they will succeed. This is a really good game after all.