An unexpected hop back into the past.
A simple scroll on Steam led me to come across a title that caught my eye. I felt a certain type of way as I have not played any princess-y related games since my girlhood. Back when flash games were prevalent, I was often found on my PC playing hundreds of them per day. Something about dressing up your characters, controlling certain aspects of their lives, perhaps even decorating their homes if it was an option – nostalgic and simple.
What I describe sounds like The Sims, which is still very popular today, but that is not the picture I am trying to paint right now. The picture I am trying to paint, however, are the games like the Shopaholic series from GirlsGoGames. So, when I tell you that I thought Princess Maker 2: Regeneration would give me the same feeling, saying I had the rug swept from underneath me is an understatement.
I went into this game blind, very blind. I merely saw the first 5 seconds of the game’s trailer and decided that I am definitely going to play, without even looking at the developer’s screenshots, or knowing the extensive history that the Princess Maker titles had.
Upon booting up Princess Maker 2: Regeneration, I was prompted to enter my name, then my age, followed by the name of my daughter whom I named Isabella; she just looked like an Isabella to me. After this, I was presented with a cutscene that went over my backstory as the “father” of my daughter.
I sat through my apparent origin story and began the game. My limited impression of Princess Maker 2: Regeneration was that I would have a Sims-like experience with a lot of fluff. I am raising a princess after all. You start the game when she is 10 years old and you must raise her into a flourishing princess into having a bright future, right?
I was wrong. Princess Maker 2: Regeneration is much more complicated than I thought. The main screen of the game, which shows you your daughter in her bedroom, also holds a bunch of stats to the right. Oh… so many numbers… I was a little taken aback by them. “So these are the stats of my daughter”, I thought to myself. It sounds comical in and of itself. Anyway, my butler, Cube, greets me and then asks me to set a schedule for my daughter.
I notice I have 500 gold and every task I set for Isabella costs some amount of gold. I understood the assignment and made my daughter study science for 30 gold for 10 days and made her work in a restaurant for another 10 days. The science lessons made her stats go up, but she made mistakes at work and was sent back after just 3 days, and she spent the last 7 days doing housework.
Okay, that went fine… I attempted to continue the science lessons, but to my surprise, I did not have enough gold to do so, but why? It turns out every action I assign occurs in chunks of 10 days and the price I am presented with is the cost of one of those days, which is a bit misleading. I made Isabella work a lot of the jobs as I needed the money, but it seemed like she was not suited for any of them except the Nursery. This made sense as she was only a child.
While this nursery still deducted Isabella’s pay when she made mistakes, she did not make nearly as my of them as she did in the other jobs. As I progressed I did things like give her pocket money which she used to go out in the city to reduce her stress stat, took her out to see certain parts of the city, etc. If I made her work too much, she became disobedient and would disappear for an entire month, which is incredibly concerning.
After these initial impressions and some digging on Princess Maker 2: Regeneration—this is a very old series and it is a remake of a refined release called Princess Maker 2, which came out quite a while ago. An entire 30 years have passed since the initial release of Princess Maker 2. The original series began in 1991 and concluded in 2007, spanning 6 titles, some spin-offs and an anime adaptation. It is made by a company called Gainax, who are the ones behind the making of Neon Genesis Evangelion.
I kind of glossed over the story and setting of Princess Maker 2: Regeneration to present my initial impressions as well as possible as I feel many players will go through the same thing. You are a hero who defeats a demon king and saves the world. The kingdom you reside in grants you 1000g a year as a reward for doing so, and you are bestowed upon with a daughter of the light by a Goddess, Saturn, who descends upon you from the stars.
“Until today she has grown within the holy light of Heaven. She is completely pure and innocent of vices that plague this world.” She says to you. “Whether she lives or dies, and the path that her life takes, is all in thy hands.” The goddess emphasizes once again: “Everything is up to thee… Yes, everything…”
This was emphasized for good reason, as every choice you make has an impact on the ending of the game, of which there are 74. The endings cover all the bases to a fault. Yes, absolutely to a fault. You raise this child from 10 to 17 to make her a princess, however the possibilities are quite scary. There is a wide range of possible marriage candidates for her—this includes a prince, ideally, or a knight, sorcerer, the demon king you killed, the butler or even you, for some ungodly reason. Do you recall how I mentioned this game assumes your gender to be male? Could this be why?
The attributes you accumulate while raising her affect the sort of person she will turn out to be as an adult. She could end up as a humble farmer, dancer, or even a prostitute. Given this game was developed by Gainax, this sort of makes sense, but the pedophilic ending where you marry your adoptive child is still the most off-putting, in my opinion.
The mechanics of the are very complicated and even more so if you hop into it blind like me. You have her basic stats like stamina, strength, intelligence, elegance, glamour, morality, faith, sin, sensitivity, and stress. The most important one to keep an eye on when playing is stress. If her stress levels go too high, your daughter will get sick or become a delinquent and refuse to work.
If she gets sick too often, she will die and one stat that I did not understand the meaning of way later is Sensitivity, which compels her to run away from home if it goes too high, like the others mentioned. There is also the RPG section in this game which is behind the “Errantry” option. I cannot say much about it as my little Isabella was not very successful on her voyages. Each attempt left me humbled, embarrassed and defeated.
You also have to worry about your daughter’s reputation which can be raised by winning competitions during festivals that come and go. If your daughter turns out to be a delinquent, she may get arrested which reduces her reputation. Your daughter also has skill stats: decorum, art skills, speech, cooking, cleaning, and personality. You can speak to the royal staff on most days, but you can only speak to the prince once in January, whose ending, by the way, is obtained by few.
All the stats you are presented with can feel overwhelming—like you would end up with an entire book if you tried to write what each stat does, however, there is a certain charm in trying to figure everything out. You feel like a father trying to figure out how to raise a child as she grows. You often end up asking yourself questions like “What does this stat mean?”
In a nutshell, Princess Maker 2: Regeneration is about finding the right balance. There is something to be said about the philosophy of this game. Each of your actions have consequences. Studying is expensive but it increases your stats, and working too much stresses your daughter out and reduces certain stats.
If you manage your daughter’s stress diet, she will be more obedient and easier to raise. If you overwork her now for short term rewards, you will face the consequences soon after. It is important to space out your work with rest days to have the best outcome. Princess Maker 2: Regeneration is like real life in more ways than one.
Princess Maker 2: Regeneration is based on the Refined edition of Princess Maker 2, with artwork redrawn by original artist and designer for the game, Takami Akai who largely preserved the vintage 90s anime look. My daughter is characterized with the classic big fluffy hair and large sparkly eyes. The background art is also very cute.
My daughter’s bedroom looms quite large considering I, her supposed father, have the financial stability of the settlement from Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II. Princess Maker 2: Regeneration sure is realistic about portraying how expensive raising a child is.
I briefly touched on an uncomfortable topic earlier regarding incest/pedophilia, and it would not be in anyone’s best interest to ignore that aspect of the game as it is not the only worrisome detail. For a seemingly cute game I believed to be for girls like me from back then, I quickly realized how much this catered to the male-gaze. There is a concerning amount of fan service for the underage daughter the player is supposed to raise.
The unsettling fixation with her bodily stats extends beyond her weight and height. I sat down to have father-daughter talks every now and then and felt a bit at unease when there happened to be an entire subgenre of our communication: her self-critical comments about her developing figure. There is another stat known as Glamour, which also oozes ‘problematic’. The Japanese editions use the term ‘Sex Appeal’ in the place of the aforementioned Glamour, but nothing will prepare you for what it can lead to as there is so prior trigger warning.
A high Glamour stat can lead to assault. We normally use games to escape reality and have fun. This is my preference, but I deem it very unnecessary for games to include such heinous acts unless it is absolutely integral to the story with adequate sizable warnings. Some endings and conversation options are exclusive to her having a huge chest.
From my time as a player of Princess Maker 2: Regeneration, it is impossible to not notice those features of the game, but I would still deem it to be a game worth your time. It is a proper look back at titles of the past and Japanese pop culture.
The game itself is addictive and poses to be a challenge many players would not be expecting unless they are already familiar with the franchise. A fix here and there would have gone a long way for this remaster, nonetheless, it was a very memorable gaming experience for me which I will not forget anytime soon.
