Archive for October, 2008

Princess Debut

So, I’ve played Princess Debut from Natsume for about 7 or 8 hours, enough to finish 1 playthrough and get halfway through another. 

Plot: You’re a normal girl called Sabrina. One afternoon you come home from school and a weird animal pops out of your closet. A girl who looks just like you follows him, and says that she’s your double from another world. She’s also a princess, and she needs your help. There’s a dance competition coming up in her world, and she’s awful at dancing, so she wants you to take her place. You agree and pop through the portal.

As soon as you get there you have to go to a dinner party, where you meet 5 (6 on the second play) princes, who you recognize as doubles of guys you know from school. There’s Vince, the class clown, Klaus, the popular one, Luciano, the quiet one who has no sense of direction, Liam, the dreamy nice one, and Cesar, the wanna-be playboy. On the second time around you meet the intellectual…

At first you can only raise your ‘love’ level by answering questions, and it’s not that obvious all the time as to how to answer. Also, once you can move around freely, sometimes you run into the guys and can have events with them. I got Liam on my first try, though I wasn’t trying for him – it seems like he, Vince, and Cesar are the easiest to get. At a certain point for each guy, you can become their dance partner. Then every day you practice together (before this point you practice with an overgrown bunny) and raise your love level.

This is also a sim; as you practice you go up in skill level and increase your stamina. The speed at which you improve depends on how well you perform the dancing minigame.

The dancing is pretty well-done. It’s simple – you follow the cursor on a set line with the pen, and this leads you through the dance moves. For each move you get a rating of Bad (if you totally fail), OK (if you complete the line), and Great (if you follow along with the cursor exactly and don’t go outside the line). Sounds simple, and it is. There are about 12 different dances though, each with their own moves, songs, and rhythms. At the end you get a score, and raise your experience depending on the score. As your level increases, you learn new dances which are harder but give more points. The whole thing ends up being pretty fun.

The art is juvenile, as suits such a young-targeted game, but it’s nice. There are no voices, but the princes are cute and there’s a little bit of story for each – not much though. Even at the end, don’t expect a big declaration typical in teen-targeted otome games – there’s a couple lines of dialogue, and then a teensy epilogue with you, not the prince, explaining what happened. 

Other gameplay info: You can get different outfits to change into for dancing, and it does make a difference. When you dance, the top screen shows a 3D movie of you and your partner going through the moves, and the motions looks surprisingly real – I wonder if they actually motion captured real ballroom dancers. The models are pretty blocky, but it is fun to see the different outfits and princes.

The audio is unfortunately not great – the melodies are fine, but the sound quality is just one step up from a MIDI – tinny and flat. 

Also, the only CG I recall seeing was at the very end – other than that it’s all talking heads (outside the dancing).

In short, it’s not a revolutionary otome game, but it is fun and would be a good intro to otome games for someone young. The lack of voices is really too bad, but it being in English partially makes up for that. The dance mechanic is addictive, and I’m going to keep playing to try and get Luciano and Klaus.

TGS Tidbit

Ah, it’s good to be back! Thank you for the comments, by the end of my vacation I would have posted a ‘net news’ thing if I could, but internet was very.very.slow. Like, remember dial-up? Slower than that.

If you weren’t dead to the world like I was last week , you may have heard about the Tokyo Game Show, the biggest Japanese industry show in the year for publishers and developers to show off their stuff. It’s going on all this weekend, and though the big game sites may be distracted by names like Square Enix (btw, I just saw that the two main characters for their upcoming RPG Last Remnant are Nojima Kenji and Ono Daisuke!), but I found some info on otome game publishers over at otomen.jp - including photos of the final two of the Harutoki 3 hachiyou, RizVaan and Atsumori! Senseiii hoshiii!!

Ahem. Anyways, another interesting thing mentioned: a D3 rep said that their next otome title would be sci-fi. 

I’ll try to keep checking the next couple days and report back!  But probably tomorrow my main post will be Princess Debut! 

Back from vacation!

Sunburned and happy to be back I am!  Cuba is amazing, but after a while I couldn’t wait to get back to my otome games – TMGS just couldn’t hold my interest…*sigh*.

So while I was gone Kanuchi kept getting pushed back, but I finally got a notification of shipping, so I should get it next week! Other new things to blog about are the Princess Debut game that I got yesterday, and the Girl’s Style mag that should have come out a couple days ago (I haven’t checked it out yet). And of course the whole economy going down the tubes, but I won’t dwell on that *wince*. Right now I’m quite happy to live in Canada instead of the US. I hope any Americans that read this blog are doing okay so far.

Anyways, I’m happy to be back, and my sunburn is finally healing, yay!