That jumping mechanic is simply poor design and it makes the more mobile enemies much cheaper and nastier than they need to be, since it’s that much harder to avoid their attacks or counter with your own.Īnother thing that lets both titles down is the pedestrian design of the levels themselves, which, set against the vivid creativity that we see elsewhere, does come across as a missed opportunity. I have one very big issue with the action, as the Prinny isn’t mobile enough in the air and that inability to adjust course is going to cause unnecessary deaths that have nothing to do with a genuine kind of challenge. Between levels there’s a tiny little hub with a few characters to talk to and here, too, the games get their chance to indulge the very distinct wordplay of the Disgaea series.Īs platformers, both Prinny titles are perfectly functional, featuring all the movesets that you’d expect from a modern platformer (including a lampoon of Yoshi’s favourite butt dive attack), as well as some variety thrown in when you can jump into vehicles for some mechanical mayhem. One of the best motivating factors for pushing through the difficulty walls is the opportunity to see just what is lying behind the boss battle door. There isn’t much by way of plot, but the dopey way that the Prinnies wander around (and frequently die) is funny all into itself, and then before and after boss battles there are some interactions between the Prinny and the boss that can be… eye-opening, to put it mildly.
Soulcalibur ii reloaded series#
The Disgaea series has always been about a combination of self-aware humour with a healthy love of puns and the weird thrown in, and that’s certainly the case with these two titles. The Prinny games have figured out a system for making extreme challenge both fair (in that most people will be able to eventually push through the hardest bits and finish the game) and entertaining.Īnd they are very entertaining games – this point does need to be emphasised. Therein lies a core difference between the Prinny titles and older “hardcore” platformers – the latter throw “Game Overs” at you with glee. Every metaphoric wall of difficulty you hit is eventually clambered over thanks to a pile of dead Prinnies at its base, and after spending an hour or two stuck on a section, on finally clearing it you realise “hey, this level isn’t so long,” and you’re ready to move on to the next one.
A generous checkpointing system ensures that the most difficult bits can be tried over and over again without too much fuss, and while that 1,000 number haemorrhages rapidly, there’s an almost cathartic gameplay loop in just how quickly you do make progress. What makes the two Prinny titles quality is the fact that the levels are carefully designed to be extreme without making you want to scream in frustration either. A lot of very difficult games are terrible. They’re infamous for being the difficult to the extreme, where you’ll have 1,000 lives… and quite possibly need to use all of them to get to the end, but that difficulty in itself isn’t a marker of quality. They’re good – very, very good – but as to whether they’ll turn heads, though… I’m not so sure about that.įundamentally, Prinny 1 & 2 are well made (and they’re almost exactly the same as one another, so I’ll be referring to them both together throughout this review). Now, though, NISA has dusted them off for a dual-pack re-release on Nintendo Switch, giving them a second chance at discovery. And indeed these games have become hyper-niche things and the dictionary definition of cult classics in the years since. Taking the common peon and mascot of the Disgaea tactical JRPG series, and throwing them by the thousands into hardcore difficulty platformers, always struck me as a side-step for the franchise that no one actually asked for and made little sense for building the overall property.
The two Prinny titles – Can I Really Be The Hero? and Dawn of Operation Panties, Dood! are some of the most oddball titles that Nippon Ichi has created.
0 kommentar(er)
