Steal Princess
- Dive into a playing field of unadorned design, but deceptively complex challenge, that combines action elements with puzzle-solving skills on a 3-D, isometric plane
- Jump, swing, climb, and attack as you search for the key to complete each level
- Over 150 levels to beat across different geographies and requiring different strategies deliver on the promise of right breadth
- A robust custom map maker lets you construct levels with any enemies, items, and victory conditions you want
- Trade maps with other players over Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection and local wireless for a never ending challenge
Product Description
Action puzzler fans, experience a puzzle/platformer hybrid on a mission to break the mold and redefine a couple of genres in the process. Over 150 levels of increasing difficulty keenly look forward to pushing your central processing unit (i.e., your brain) to its limits. When you’ve completed the stages provided, wipe your well-earned tears of joy away and jump into the powerful level creator to design your own devilishly tough maps, introduction enemies, constructing moving platforms, and even setting custom victory conditions! Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection support allows your custom creations to be shared online with anyone across North America!
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The Excellent: Atlus once again comes out with a solid effort at the roleplaying genre.
The Terrible: Like Knights in the Nightmare, it is hampered by poor stylus design and hard puzzling.
This game is worth the cash if you delight in constant trial and error to figure out what is desired, while all by the side of the lack of an ingame tutorial (or, at least, an ingame tutorial that appears to be stretched out over most of the opening section of the game) hampers your efforts. And there’s small use going to the manual, either. On the clear side, once I gave up on using the stylus altogether and changed to the use of the buttons nearly exclusively, it became far more playable.
The tale seems to go by the side of pretty at a snail’s pace (I’ve been playing for 2 hours, and I haven’t gotten out of the first ‘map’ yet), but I have doubts about its replayability. The game offers you the ability to make your own maps and upload them, but so far I haven’t found anyone else’s efforts up there.
In small, a quirky, frustrating game, but one that will probably prove rewarding to those who have slightly more patience than I have.
Rating: 4 / 5
Atlus U.S.A. is foremost in the industry when it comes to localizing niche Japanese titles for American audiences. Steal Princess, a quirky action/platformer/puzzler of sorts, is among the company’s latest efforts, but perhaps this is one title Atlus should have left in Japan.
The game involves Anise, a young thief who suddenly finds herself tasked (read: mandatory) with rescuing the King’s kidnapped son from a legion of demons. Despite being a typical ’save the damsel’ affair, Atlus’ brilliant localization, coupled with some attractive cut scenes, make for an entertaining tale that stands as the game’s main highlight. It’s a pity, then, that the rest of the title is such a mess.
The game is set on Talis Island, a land divided into various regions that are split further into 25 individual stages. These stages are essentially a series of puzzles that task the player with a specific objective, usually involving the defeat of a specific enemy, or all enemies, in a level. Because Anise is only armed with a nonlethal whip, players have to buy swords, flails, bombs, and other such weapons to properly dispose of their targets. Unfortunately, these devices often have arbitrary values or rules assigned to them, such as only being able to use a certain sword twice, or only being able to use a ‘red’ flail against a ‘red’ enemy. The basis for many of the game’s puzzles relies on this eerie logic of only being able to use certain items against certain enemies at certain times, and the process can quickly become grueling as players constantly replay stages to figure out the right sequence of actions they should make to realize their objective. To add insult to injury, many stages also feature various block pushing puzzles, but because blocks can only be went with the ’shield’ item, another limited-use weapon, it is all too simple for the player to accidentally use the item at the incorrect time and be mandatory to do again the level again (and again and again). It’s this pitiless, trial-and-error stylishness of play that robs Steal Princess of its enjoyment (no pun intended).
But the issues do not end there. The game is set in an awkward isometric perspective that is often hard to traverse with the limited DS d-pad (stylus control is also available, but that is a far worse option still). Anyone trying to go Anise across a long, narrow, moving platform will quickly notice the conundrum. Even worse, the awkward perspective makes the gauging of depth and space hard, chief to a lot of unfortunate cascade or jumps off cliffs that should never have occurred (and there is no way to rotate the maps around for a clearer view).
Even the game’s basic play mechanics are sloppy. Many puzzles require Anise to whip enemies and transport them to other locations in the stage. But accurately throwing a lassoed enemy is tough, and it’s not uncommon to accidentally hurl one into a hole or body of water. Inadvertently doing this, of course, usually violates the objective of the level, forcing the player to restart it once again. The game also features an erratic lock-on feature that in fact complicates things by randomly switching to another enemy before the player is prepared to attack the intended target (the player can also manually lock-on to enemies, but this does not work perfectly, either).
Lastly, the poor in-game graphics must be mentioned. Anise and the enemies are rendered in crudely drawn and animated sprites within terribly textured polygonal environments. Considering how gorgeous the hand drawn cut-scenes are, this lack of care the developers gave to the rest of the game is certainly disappointing. The music, on the other hand, is in fact rather excellent.
Steal Princess is a title that wants to be loved. It certainly has the memorable characters and pick-up-and-play mechanics that lend itself a certain charm and appeal. It even boasts a map editor, albeit a limited one, to further its replay regard. In the end, but, the game is simply too frustrating, tedious, and hideous to be easily recommended.
Rating: 2 / 5