Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?
Jan. 8th, 2013 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroSomeone ate Demon Lord Etna's dessert, and it's up to the prinnies to collect the ingredients for an Ultra Dessert from the demon lords--in ten hours or less--or she'll make them wish they'd just exploded. It's a goofy 2D platformer side-story to Disgaea, with the same sensibilities and many recurring characters.
This game gives you 1,000 lives (each representing a new prinny with the magic scarf that keeps them from exploding when they land or are jostled), and you need them, but only because they control scheme is kinda lousy. The prinnies have semi-committed jumping (if you start jumping straight up, you can't shift to the side mid-jump), a needlessly complex stomp attack (press down and X together; X alone is the double-jump), and a problematically long stun animation (which means when you're hit mid-jump, you're almost certainly into the nearest pit). If prinnies could move like Mario, I doubt I'd die on the first few stages.
Among the gimmicks is the fact that there are only six stages, but you can do them in any order, and the difficulty levels of each stage change as you do them later (as time passes in the story) which affects the layout and the enemy distribution. New enemies are added, platforms rearranged, or enemies are replaced with their stronger palette-swaps (the corn monsters are replaced with invulnerable metal corn, for instance). So in theory you could play the full game through over and over and have a different experience each time. Or you could play it as I did, by restarting repeatedly and playing stages until you couldn’t get through them anymore.
The bosses are fun in theory, though in practice the fact you need to stun them with the butt-stomp (which is needlessly hard to do) can make them annoying. They’re usually the same when you do stages at different times, but some of them change up or get more difficult.
There are also plenty of secrets and unlockables, if that’s your cup of tea—even an entire alternate storyline, not that the story is incredibly detailed in either case.
Overall: It’s an old school sort of platformer, with the problematic controls and large number of deaths you might fondly (?) remember from the NES days, beefed up with modern graphics and Nippon Ichi’s sense of humor. I tired of it quickly, but if that description appeals to you, you might not.
This game gives you 1,000 lives (each representing a new prinny with the magic scarf that keeps them from exploding when they land or are jostled), and you need them, but only because they control scheme is kinda lousy. The prinnies have semi-committed jumping (if you start jumping straight up, you can't shift to the side mid-jump), a needlessly complex stomp attack (press down and X together; X alone is the double-jump), and a problematically long stun animation (which means when you're hit mid-jump, you're almost certainly into the nearest pit). If prinnies could move like Mario, I doubt I'd die on the first few stages.
Among the gimmicks is the fact that there are only six stages, but you can do them in any order, and the difficulty levels of each stage change as you do them later (as time passes in the story) which affects the layout and the enemy distribution. New enemies are added, platforms rearranged, or enemies are replaced with their stronger palette-swaps (the corn monsters are replaced with invulnerable metal corn, for instance). So in theory you could play the full game through over and over and have a different experience each time. Or you could play it as I did, by restarting repeatedly and playing stages until you couldn’t get through them anymore.
The bosses are fun in theory, though in practice the fact you need to stun them with the butt-stomp (which is needlessly hard to do) can make them annoying. They’re usually the same when you do stages at different times, but some of them change up or get more difficult.
There are also plenty of secrets and unlockables, if that’s your cup of tea—even an entire alternate storyline, not that the story is incredibly detailed in either case.
Overall: It’s an old school sort of platformer, with the problematic controls and large number of deaths you might fondly (?) remember from the NES days, beefed up with modern graphics and Nippon Ichi’s sense of humor. I tired of it quickly, but if that description appeals to you, you might not.
