Okay, let’s
be a tad more measured here, and let’s elaborate a little bit. Code of Princess is one of these games
that had everything to be great but ended up being just average because
somehow, laziness or uninspired thinking took over during development. Released
in 2012(jp/na) and 2013(eu/aus) for the 3ds, it was developed by Agastuma
Entertainment and published by Atlus, which should have been a guaranty of
awesomeness. I have some kind of pavlovian reflex that makes me associate Atlus
with great material and purchase blindly any game they release, and it usually
pays off beautifully; but this time, they somehow missed the mark when picking
up Code of Princess, which is annoyingly
subpar and fails to provide the sense of enjoyment, originality and quirkiness
that most Atlus titles have in spades.
I have to
mention that I didn’t purchase Code of
Princess while mistaking it for a RPG, which could have explained my
disappointment. Despite Atlus’ attempts to market it as a RPG of sorts, I knew
from the very start that this was a Beat’em Up, which is the very reason why I
picked it up. See, I enjoy playing a good Beat’em Up every once in a while:
it’s a welcome and refreshing change from the genres I usually favour, and it’s
perfect to let out the steam and indulge into some crazy button mashing. Along
with Brawlers, Beat’em Ups are actually my fourth favourite gaming genre. (And
what is the third, you may ask? Well, I’ll come to that sooner or later, he he.)
Granted, I’ve not played scores of them in my gaming life, but the few I played
remain embedded into my memory. For instance, I have the fondest memories of Streets of Rage on the Megadrive/Genesis
back in the early 90’s, which I played with my sister in some crazy, heated and
amazingly fun co-op sessions.
So yes, I wanted
a Beat’em Up, and I was delighted to get one with a medieval setting of
sorts; for despite my undying love for Streets
of Rage, I was never too fond of the gritty urban setting of that game. I
was thus more than ready to welcome Code
of Princess with open arms and I really, really wanted to love it. Alas,
that was not meant to be, for this game has failed me in too many ways to
deserve my unconditional love. It would be exaggerated to say that I hate that
game, but I certainly don’t adore it either. I somehow appreciate it, and
occasionally enjoy it, but my love doesn’t go any deeper than this.
That sticky, mushy RPG gloss
Like I
said, Code of Princess was heavily
marketed as a Beat’em Up with a strong and distinctive RPG flavour. This seemed
like a great pairing on paper, a mix that could have paved the way for total
awesomeness by coupling the better of two worlds. The resulting offspring of
that unlikely coupling, however, is fairly unimpressive at best and teeth
grinding-inducing at worst.
The
intention was good, yes, but the execution is decidedly poor. For some
unfathomable reason, the developers chose to pick up the pettiest and most
annoying aspects of RPGs for inclusion in Code
of Princess, deliberately ignoring the most pleasant ones. They could have
picked out the Branching Storylines, the One-for-all-All-for-one Party Fighting
or the Kick-ass Invocations, giving thus a refreshing lifting to the Beat’em Up
genre; instead, they extracted the Level-Grinding, the Million Useless Pieces
of Gear and the Plain Vanilla Story. Great selection, sirs, really.
The Level-Grinding,
yes. The one aspect most RPG players could do without, or at least with
slightly less of. If there is one thing I do NOT want to encounter in a Beat’em
Up, it’s definitely Level-Grinding. I mean, I precisely play Beat’em Ups to get
a break from level-grinding, not to have more of it shoved down my throat! In Code, all characters start at Lv. 1 and
level up through the game as they fight; in parallel, all enemies also have
higher and higher levels as the stages unfold. This basically means that if you
want to be able to switch characters during a playthrough, you will have to level
up each one of them individually as the game progresses in order to make them strong
enough to tackle the upcoming stages; and as you may imagine, this does involve
level-grinding, which in this game takes the form of replaying stages over and
over again. This is an absolute pain and feels more like a strenuous chore than
a rewarding process. Not only that, but the game regularly throws at you some
difficulty spikes that will corner you into forced level-grinding, which is a
complete heresy in a Beat’em Up to start with: this is typically the kind of
game that should be cleared while relying solely on your finely honed skills,
not on some cheap and brainless level grinding process. I’m here to beat the
hell out of trash mobs like there’s no tomorrow, not to plod through already
played stages in order to power up pathetically weak characters! Let me kick
some fresh butts already, damnit!
The Million
Useless Pieces of Gear is another RPG trope I could have done without, thank
you very much. Every time you clear a stage, you get some new pieces of
equipment, along with money that will allow you to buy even more pieces of
equipment into the game’s unique shop (which is actually nothing more a
cheap-looking menu display. Oh, well.) Let’s face it: most of this equipment is
completely useless. There are way too many items available and trying to keep
track of them is seriously cumbersome and irritating, and the clunky browsing
interface doesn’t help matters either. The effect of most of these items is
barely discernable and often boils down to petty increases and decreases of
some of your stats that make very little difference when fighting on the field.
So yes, this equipment galore is vastly useless; but at least, it’s graceful
enough to remain innocuous and unobtrusive, unlike the aforementioned unwelcomed
guest that is Level-Grinding.
And last,
but certainly not least, is the Plain Vanilla Story. Now, I have to get this
out of my chest: Beat’em Ups DO NOT need stories. If there is one single genre
under the gaming sun that does not need a storyline, it definitely has to be the
Beat’em Up genre. A text that rolls when starting the game, à la Streets
of Rage, is all the narrative content one needs when playing a Beat’em
Up. But Agatsuma Entertainment though
they could do better, them fools, and tried to squeeze a storyline into their game. The
result is miserable, mostly because it somehow manages to fail in all
departments. On one hand, since Code
remains a Beat’em Up, it doesn’t give enough room for decent story and
character development; as a result, the narrative feels rushed and painfully
superficial. On the other hand, it still manages to completely break the rhythm
of the game by forcing cutscenes on the player at the beginning and at the end
of nearly every single stage, which becomes quickly irksome and maddening. Now
that’s a lose-lose situation if I ever saw one, and the loss is all on the
player. It creates a jagged gameplay experience that is hard to fully enjoy,
even though you can fast-forward through the cutscenes by pressing the R
button. Content-wise, the story is, well, plain vanilla: it summons cliché
characters, cliché settings and cliché events and gives them a comical twist of
sorts. Now, I can see what they were trying to do here: Code of Princess is obviously meant to be a tongue-in-cheek J-RPG
parody, making fun of all the genre’s tropes in a light-hearted way. It
succeeds to some extent: some one-liners are definitely clever and humorous,
and the game deliciously takes the piss out of a few J-RPG fixtures. But those
moments of grace are unfortunately too few and far between— for each
witty one-liner, there are three lame ones— and that attempt at parody never
manages to fully hit the mark. It ultimately appears half-hearted and shallow,
and definitely not as hilarious as one would have hoped. On top
of that, there is a blatant issue with this very concept: why on earth would a
Beat’em Up try to parody J-RPGs to start with? The ties between these two gaming
genres are tenuous at best, and one fails to see how a Beat’em Up could have any
legitimacy to satirise the J-RPG genre. Frankly, I’d rather see a Beat’em Up poking
fun at Beat’em Up tropes, or a J-RPG debunking J-RPG staples; that would seem
much more valid and legit and certainly turn out better. It’s hard enough for a
gaming genre to draw a good caricature of itself without trying to take the
piss out of other genres—especially when the outcome turns out to be so mediocre.
The name of the game
Now that
I’ve mercilessly exposed and smeared Code’s
clumsy and caked attempt at RPG make-up all over the place, let’s move on to
the core of the game: the butt-kicking. Does this game fulfill its duty to the player
by offering them hours of exhilarating button-mashing fun? Well, I’d like to
answer that question with a beaming “yeaaaaah”; but unfortunately, I can’t. I
can’t, because despite having undeniable strong points, the fighting in Code of Princess is dragged down by a
slew of issues that really hinder the gameplay and steal away a massive portion
of the entertainment you’d rightfully expect from a Beat’em Up. Granted, those
are only small issues, mere details in fact: but once combined, they grow more potent
and harmful, and very hard to ignore indeed. So here they are, thrown at you as
haphazardly as the stages of that game.
—The basic
walking speed is unbearably SLOW. It’s more of a crawl, really, and it makes no
sense whatsoever in a game where you are supposed to dive head first into
fast-paced fighting. If you want to run, you have to press Left or Right twice
on the D-pad, which is absolutely counter-intuitive and extremely clunky.
—There is
no dedicated button for jumping. If you want to jump, you have to press Up on
the D-pad or use the analog stick in the upper directions. Once again, it’s
totally counter-intuitive and clunky at best. On top of that, jumps are
horribly slow and imprecise, which definitely doesn’t encourage you to put through
this annoying control scheme to perform them.
—Trash mobs
are way too strong. They take a million hits to die, and slashing the same mean
enemy over and over again until they have the grace to finally let go gets old
and boring really quickly. I would have preferred to face tidal waves of
weaklings rather than a couple of overpowered pests clutching to dear life like
lice to a scalp.
—Boss
battles are one hot, horrendous mess. On top of the boss, the game throws at
you a cohort of these annoyingly strong trash mobs, along with a few hindering scenery
elements for good measure. As a result, there are so many sprites on the screen
that the battle quickly becomes a complete chaos, in which visually keeping
track of your character is nearly impossible, let alone follow any kind of
strategy to kill the boss. More often than not, you’ll end up blindly mashing
buttons until your thumbs cry in pain while hoping that the boss dies before you do, and that is anything but
satisfying and rewarding.
—Character
models are way too small, and the camera makes it worse by often positioning
itself quite far from the action. That may be tolerable when being on the world
map in a RPG, but Beat’em Ups require more precision and thus bigger sprites, especially
on a handheld, and Code’s ridiculously
tiny characters don’t quite meet this criterion. As a result, it’s unnecessary
uncomfortable to play. My vision is top-notch, and yet I often found myself
putting the 3ds really close to my nose and goggling at the screen in a
desperate attempt to get a better visual grasp of the unfolding action.
—As though
this tiny sprites problem were not enough, the game hinders you further by
throwing in foregrounds elements that block your vision. This is a level design
heresy that should have been left in the 16-bit era crappy platformers where it
belongs, not carried all the way to a 2012 Beat’em up.
On top of
these blatant gameplay issues, I have a few more general gripes to mention:
—This game
makes you meet allies over the course of the storyline, only to let you fight
alone in 95% of the stages. This is the Dragon
Quest IX embarrassing paradox all over again, only reversed: your
supposedly faithful allies mysteriously disappear when fighting time comes. Do
they chicken out and hide, or sneak away to drink a pint of beer at the local tavern? Sheesh, what a bunch of useless figurants.
—Here is
another game that teases you with beautiful and stylish art, gloriously displayed
in the booklet and on the box, in order to lure you to buy it; and then, once you’ve
spent your money, it serves you mediocre cutscenes drawn in a cookie-cutter and
seen-a-million-times-before anime style. I hate when games do that. The cover
and booklet art should offer honest renditions of what the characters look like
in-game, not some enhanced and unfaithful version of them that is bound to
create disappointment when you finally play the game.
—And while
we’re talking about looks, this game’s presentation is decidedly cheap.
Granted, the characters and monsters sprites look great on the field, but the backgrounds
are horrendous and look like they are pulled straight from a phone game. Add to
this a clunky and crappy-looking menu interface and you have a game that looks
more like a flash game than a boxed release.
So, here
are the main aggravating points that made me fume during the course of the
game. But it’s not all doom and gloom, fortunately. Despite being globally
unpolished and flawed, Code of Princess
also contains some enjoyable features that can make it worth playing—that is, if
you’re persistent enough to ignore its faults and soldier on through the game. Now
that I’ve vented out my frustration and exposed my gripes regarding that game,
I can elaborate on these good points. Here we go!
—The
characters all have very distinct fighting styles, and there are dozens of them
to play. To switch characters nearly feels like playing a completely different
game, and it’s a sheer joy to browse through them and experiment with their
respective abilities.
—As a
result, the game has a HUGE replay value. Not only can you go again through the
main story with each one of the four characters in your party, but you can also
play individual stages with other characters. It would probably take dozens of
hours of play to master all the subtleties of each available character’s
fighting style; we’re definitely far from Streets
of Rage’s meagre trio of heroes that all recycle the same moves.
—The
characters are stylish. They each have their own stance, attitude and set of
interjections when fighting, and their respective personalities shine
gloriously during those fights. Much more so than during the cutscenes, shall I
say, which is quite ironic and further proves that Beat’em Ups don’t need
narrative at all. Let the fists do the talking!
—Despite
appearances, Code of Princess is not
just another fan service-laden title that uses a scantily clad heroine to sell
itself. It’s quite the opposite, in fact: it gloriously takes the piss out of
the often ridiculous and over-the-top fan service present in many Japanese
productions. Instead of acting like it’s perfectly fine and dandy for a woman
to go on a battlefield wearing only her underwear, characters incredulously
comment on Solange’s ludicrous outfit, to which she boldly replies that this is
the latest fashion at court, thus pointing out the foolishness of both fashion
and excessive fan-service. This was a really pleasant surprise and a nice
change from all those fan service-loaded games that take themselves way too seriously.
To encounter a game that is self-aware and derisive about its own propensity
for fan-service is quite refreshing and should definitely be a more frequent
occurrence.
—The game
does look very good with the 3D on. In fact, this is the only 3ds game I ever played
with the 3D enabled. Not only does it look great and sharp without ever hurting
the eyes, but it also facilitates the gameplay by giving you a better view of
where the enemies stand. This is by no means necessary, but it definitely
helps.
—Replaying
the main quest is much more pleasant the second time around, when your
character is conveniently leveled up. You can then slash your way through
enemies, bask in your own strength and luxuriate in smooth fights where you
always have the upper hand. It’s a pity that you have to trudge through a
tedious first playthrough littered with forced level-grinding and messy fights
to reach such sleek mastery, but it’s definitely worth it.
—The last
boss battle is amazing. The game lets you fight one-on-one at last, in a
gorgeous setting to boot. This ultimate fight is neatly balanced, involving
strategy, sharp reflexes and the use of all your abilities, and is a sheer joy
to play. It doesn’t make you forget all the other messy and irksome boss
battles, but it allows you to clear the game on a very positive note.
—The
soundtrack is a feast to the ears. From the gorgeous Sailor Moon-like theme that
accompanies most battles to this amazing Mexican-sounding acoustic guitar track
that unfortunately plays way too rarely, without forgetting the ludicrous and
hilarious shop theme, all the songs in Code of Princess are pure ear-candy.
So, here we
are. When all is said and done, Code of
Princess is not a horrible game: it can actually be quite enjoyable at
times and offers some really pleasant features. It’s only disappointing to
realize that it could have been a much, much better game with the right amount
of effort and gusto. Now, would I recommend purchasing this game at full price?
Absolutely not. I paid my own copy 30$, and it definitely feels too expensive
for that game now that I’ve played it. This is a game that would have been more
fitted for a digital release, for it lacks the depth and polish of most
physically released titles and has decidedly shoddy looks that are more
reminiscent of an indie or a flash game than of a boxed one. (As a matter of
fact, it was released in Europe and Australia as a downloadable-only title,
which fits its nature and content quite aptly.) Still, and despite all my
ranting about Code of Princess, I will probably play it again
in a distant future, especially now that I’ve soldiered through its flaws and
reached a relative amount of mastery. As for now, thanks for reading, and be my
guest anytime!
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