About a month back, I finally hunkered down and beat the Atlus published arcade-style hack and slash beat'em up, Code of Princess on the 3DS. While I did enjoy the concept of the game, there were some issues overall that I had during my nine hours playing.
First off, let us talk about the massive blanche elephant in the room. The main character, Princess Solange Blanchefleur de Lux is a rather amusing name and title combination. To go along with her ever so slightly humorous name, is the armor she wears throughout the entire game. There are various armor, sword, and equipment upgrades that you can find and purchase throughout the game, but the visual of Princess Solange stays the same.
So let us talk a little bit about this decision.
First off, Japanese illustrator Kinu Nishimura, the brainchild behind the look of Princess Solange Blanchefleur de Lux, first designed the character and look before there was ever mention of a game. While unable to find an interview that describes what prompted Kinu Nishimura to design Solange, she did nonetheless, and the design was recognized and picked up by indie developer Studio Saizensen. The art style for Solange also appears to be somewhat consistent with Kinu Nishimura's style of drawing female characters as evidenced by Hazuki Kashiwabara from 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, and many of the fighters in Street Fighter II and III. So obviously Kinu Nishimura knows what she is doing when it comes to designing ridiculously proportioned female protagonists.
Does this excuse the obvious marketing of a titular protagonist? Probably not since Solange did have some specific animation (the first few seconds anyway), which was a deliberate choice made by someone at Studio Saizensen. The functionality of the armor is even brought into question by a couple of characters throughout the game and the reasoning is given is that it is the traditional outfit and a "royal gown" for the Princess of the Kingdom of DeLuxia. And while I do appreciate that at least someone either in the original Japanese translation or the English localization was able to call into question the all too often revealing nature of armor designed for women in high fantasy genres, I will say that in-game, there is no real time to ogle at Solange's attire.
The writing in the game though, never does take itself too seriously (there is a character named Milk Macchiato, a duo named Emble and Semble, and Ali-Baba who is the leader of a group of thieves), which I do appreciate as the story follows the traditional evil empire trying to take over the obviously good kingdom. Some of the characters even seem to take notice that they are in that type of a story and have a good time with the cliches that tend to run rampant.
And speaking of characters, while there are 52 playable characters in the multiplayer and online versus matches in the game, in the main quest you are limited to only four, which makes only a little bit of sense when you consider that of the 52 characters, Solange is joined in her quest by six other characters. Why you are only able to play as the first four friendly characters in the game, I cannot say. But again, you are able to play as these characters in various local, online, or single player challenges. That being said, I pretty much stuck with Solange for most of the game as I felt that replaying levels with new characters in order to level them up to be a bit redundant. I reached a point about half way through where I stopped trying to level other characters, just played as Solange and worked my way though to the end of the game; she was the tank after all and I desperately needed all of that sweet sweet HP and attacking power.
And speaking of stats, I did like that you could customize each of the four characters' stats as you leveled up. I quickly started giving Solange more and more points in the speed category so that she moved a bit faster than her sluggish starting stats allowed.
Now a few things disappointed me with Code of Princess. The first being that when I read descriptions of the game as an arcade style hack-and-slash, what I had pictured was something along the lines of TMNT: Turtles in Time, or Golden Axe, where you would start out at the beginning of the level and fight your way though an area and fight a boss or mini-boss at the end. What the majority of Code of Princess turned out to be was starting out on one side of an area, say a graveyard, then fighting to the other side which would be no more than a full second screen away. Basically, there was no moving through an environment, but just fighting within that one environment. Other locations included a tavern, a thrown room, and a village square. It really felt like the locations were more akin to a fighting game like Street Figther or Killer Instinct than to an arcade style beat'em hack'n up slash.
Secondly, I really feel that Code of Princess would have been a lot more fun if I had played it as a co-op game. There were times while fighting against waves of enemies that having a second player would have made my life a lot easier and a lot less frustrating. While I cannot comment on how the game differs with additional players, there were some battles in the late game, that definitely felt that they were not scaled for a single player experience, either in regards to the number of enemies or the types of attacks the main bosses would utilize. And while each stage did have a timer that counted down, usually from 20 minutes, I never felt that I was running out of time, no curious to find out what happened if I did run out of time.
Thinking about the 3D effects, I used them a bit in the early stages, but as more and more enemies started filling the screen, I did either turn them down or off completely.
Lastly, the music which was composed by a Japanese composer credited as ACE, was damn catchy and I will most likely be putting up a MIDI Week Single with some of that music later in the month. Nearly all of the music used in each stage was upbeat and exciting enough to help push through the last of the enemies and defeat each boss at the end.
 |
| Hot damn look how short her ski. . .oh shit, getting attacked again! |
The writing in the game though, never does take itself too seriously (there is a character named Milk Macchiato, a duo named Emble and Semble, and Ali-Baba who is the leader of a group of thieves), which I do appreciate as the story follows the traditional evil empire trying to take over the obviously good kingdom. Some of the characters even seem to take notice that they are in that type of a story and have a good time with the cliches that tend to run rampant.
And speaking of characters, while there are 52 playable characters in the multiplayer and online versus matches in the game, in the main quest you are limited to only four, which makes only a little bit of sense when you consider that of the 52 characters, Solange is joined in her quest by six other characters. Why you are only able to play as the first four friendly characters in the game, I cannot say. But again, you are able to play as these characters in various local, online, or single player challenges. That being said, I pretty much stuck with Solange for most of the game as I felt that replaying levels with new characters in order to level them up to be a bit redundant. I reached a point about half way through where I stopped trying to level other characters, just played as Solange and worked my way though to the end of the game; she was the tank after all and I desperately needed all of that sweet sweet HP and attacking power.
And speaking of stats, I did like that you could customize each of the four characters' stats as you leveled up. I quickly started giving Solange more and more points in the speed category so that she moved a bit faster than her sluggish starting stats allowed.
Now a few things disappointed me with Code of Princess. The first being that when I read descriptions of the game as an arcade style hack-and-slash, what I had pictured was something along the lines of TMNT: Turtles in Time, or Golden Axe, where you would start out at the beginning of the level and fight your way though an area and fight a boss or mini-boss at the end. What the majority of Code of Princess turned out to be was starting out on one side of an area, say a graveyard, then fighting to the other side which would be no more than a full second screen away. Basically, there was no moving through an environment, but just fighting within that one environment. Other locations included a tavern, a thrown room, and a village square. It really felt like the locations were more akin to a fighting game like Street Figther or Killer Instinct than to an arcade style beat'em hack'n up slash.
Thinking about the 3D effects, I used them a bit in the early stages, but as more and more enemies started filling the screen, I did either turn them down or off completely.
Lastly, the music which was composed by a Japanese composer credited as ACE, was damn catchy and I will most likely be putting up a MIDI Week Single with some of that music later in the month. Nearly all of the music used in each stage was upbeat and exciting enough to help push through the last of the enemies and defeat each boss at the end.
Now, would I recommend Code of Princess? Sure. Maybe? I dunno. It was a fun game that was at times frustrating, had very good music, and cliched and not overly developed story, but had an amusing script and decently voice acted. And ridiculous outfits for some characters. I did buy it on sale through Nintendo's eShop for $9.99 or less which I felt was a good price for the amount of game that I used; I did not fully go into all of the "extra" stages which seemed to be just the same in-game levels but only as one-off encounters as opposed to the story mode. I also cannot comment on the version that is out on Steam although a number of the reviews complain about the characters being too pixely for a larger screen, which does not really come across on the 3DS screen. So sure, why not.
Maybe.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Don't Go Trying Some New Fashion
No comments:
Post a Comment