Princess Maker 2: Regeneration Review – A Charming but Repetitive Journey

Introduction to Princess Maker 2: Regeneration

In time for its thirtieth anniversary, Bliss Brain and Monkey Craft have brought Princess Maker 2 outside of Japan for the first time in a new version, Princess Maker 2: Regeneration. This game sees you playing as a hero tasked by a Guardian from the Heavens to look after a child brought down to Earth after helping save a Kingdom from a war against monsters.

Depending on the girl’s astrological sign, the Guardians, ranging from Venus and Mars to even Hades, hope the girl will lead an incredible and pure life and have chosen the player to act as their adopted parent.

With a new role in life, it’s up to you to make sure your adopted daughter is well cared for and help guide her down a fulfilling life from ages ten to eighteen. The goal is to help her grow up to be a soldier, dancer, or even a princess like in the title, and maybe help her find love along the way with the help of your butler Cube.

Gameplay Overview: Preparing Your Daughter for the Future

Princess Maker 2 has you set up plans each month for your daughter by scheduling various events for her to do. These events include attending classes such as poetry, dancing, or painting to help her pick up a talent in which she could become a professional as she grows older. Some classes would bring her closer to royalty and help her become a princess, such as decorum or a soldier, such as martial arts, training in magic, or fencing. Attending classes helps increase her stats to perform better with skills and the various encounters she will entail.

However, this is where one of Princess Maker’s challenges quickly comes in. Like most classes in real life, they cost money. The more your daughter attends classes and advances in level, the higher the cost.

To get more money to send your daughter to classes or even buy her new things to improve her relationship with you down at the Village, such as books, dolls, or new dresses (or just clothes, in general, to help her through some harsh winters or sizzling summers that will hit the Kingdom at various points), or even to eat out at the town’s cuisine restaurants, she will need to do multiple odd jobs across the Kingdom.

Helping Your Daughter Earn a Living

Due to her young age, your daughter starts with only a few jobs. Still, as she grows older, more jobs and opportunities will become available, such as working at graveyards, as a mason, or even at bars, from a typical kind of bar to one on the sleazy side of the Village.

Depending on how many skills and stats she has, she won’t be good at most jobs at first and won’t get a lot of money from them either. Patience is vital for her to improve. Sometimes, you will have to send her to other jobs to help her increase her strength and stamina if she wants to be better at looking after children at the nursery or attending the village inn.

The farm was my preferred job to send my daughter to due to how quickly she picked up on it and the money she earned. I only attended the other jobs if they would be helpful to her career path and nothing else of value, such as attending chores around my house to help improve her cooking or cleaning skills, her relationship with Cube, and her reputation around the house. Later on, when the lumberjack job was unlocked as she became a teenager, I had her do that job instead of the farm because she got more money from that than any other job.

In my first playthrough, I trained my daughter in strength and fighting, hoping to turn her into a sort of super soldier. I succeeded in doing this relatively fast because, by the time she turned sixteen, her strength stat alone was 999. While this helped her later in the playthrough, it wasn’t of her interest, and our relationship deteriorated by the end of the playthrough (and she also became a bandit).

While getting money to support your daughter should be your main priority to help her lead a good life, her interests and ensuring she stays on a good path are just as important and should be as much of a priority as everything else.

Managing Stress and Health

Your daughter can quickly become stressed whenever she attends classes or does jobs, especially during the early parts of a playthrough when she’s still young. Keeping a good eye on your daughter’s stress level is important, as she will start to rebel and become a delinquent if she has too much of it. She will start going down a troubling path of talking down to adults, acting chaotic whenever she goes into town, or slacking off when at work.

Sending your daughter into town lowers her stress levels, especially if you give her pocket money. I do this at the start of every month to ensure she doesn’t become a delinquent and to make the month easier for her to get through.

You also have the option to go on vacation with her and are provided with new and improved CG images that will consist of your daughter having fun in either the snowy mountains or the fresh ocean breeze, depending on where you go.

Keeping Your Daughter Healthy

Your daughter’s health is essential as well. During the first few in-game years, she could get sick, and you will likely spend a month having her rest in bed or have her go to the Kingdom Asylum to get better. You can also head to the Village Clinic to treat her illness that way.

The menu lets you check her health and how she’s currently feeling. You can even change her diet, as some dresses you might buy for her won’t fit unless her physical stats are at a certain amount and she needs to lose weight. Please don’t go overboard with putting your daughter on a diet, though, as there’s a risk she could become more ill due to the strain it will put on her body.

As I learned the hard way, I only did this to help fit her in some dresses before switching back to the normal diet routine.

It’s also best to spend as much time with your daughter as possible by talking to her through the interface. You can scold her whenever she does something bad, give her some spare pocket money to lower her stress, or ask about how she’s feeling recently and how her studies are going. She will hint at what she wants to do in life and what you, as the player, can do to make her happy.

Festivals, Events, and Rivalries

As you work on improving your daughter’s skills, she can put them to the test at the Kingdom’s yearly Harvest Festival hosted around October. During this time, your daughter can enter a contest ranging from painting, dancing, cooking, or a dueling tournament.

You won’t succeed right away in getting first place. After all, it’ll be around an hour or two by the time the first opportunity to enter the festival comes up, so it’s best to continue training your daughter down the path you want her to go until she’s ready to enter a contest.

The newer visuals for this release are the main improvement from the original, with backgrounds and some sprites looking cleaner.

Of the four contests, I found the dueling tournament the hardest. I even spent an entire playthrough trying to get her to win first place, even when she was powerful in magic and fighting. Winning these contests feels worth it, especially if she beats her rival.

As your daughter grows in skills and spirit, she will encounter various characters throughout her journey to adulthood. Some of them, such as the Guardians of the Heavens or demons from the Underworld, will provide her with stat boosts when she’s doing well in a particular career path. Some of these characters will form rivalries with your daughter to prove themselves to be better than her at the career path she has chosen, giving your daughter more motivation to better her talents. If you wish for your daughter to pick up a more violent career, she will also enter duels whenever she heads home from her job or classes. This is when Princess Maker 2’s RPG elements switch things up.

The RPG (And Repetitive) Side of Princess Maker 2: Regeneration

When fighting various enemies, your daughter can fire magical blasts or use a sword or dagger she bought at the Village’s armory shop to fight against them. Depending on how good she is at fighting and using magic by learning in class, by the time your daughter fights her first enemy, she could defeat most of them by depleting their health or morale to either defeat them or scare them away to fight her again another day.

These fights occur whenever you send your daughter out on a week-long errantry between four locations. Two of these are a forest and river setting that is easy to go through, while the other two are a desert and winter setting, both of which are the most challenging errantry to undertake. You will likely encounter a few bosses in the process. If you’re down with that, you might even find romance with various monsters. I found errantries easier to make money during the second half when my daughter was older and could take on more in the world.

I felt like I was going through a routine over and over where nothing new happened in my daughter’s life until well into my playthroughs.

While I no longer had to worry about money problems, I soon realized that errantries come with their own problems regarding keeping my daughter pure. Killing monsters also caused her sin meter to rise more than her sensitivity meter, leading her down a dark path, compared to the peaceful times when she would learn in class or work out in the forest chopping wood. While at first, I found errantry to be a nice change of pace from the visual novel-like setup the game has; I quickly found them repetitive. I would run into the same enemy every five steps, and they became just another way for me to get money in the four digits rather than have my daughter do her jobs.

I also found the controls during the errantry segments to be janky. It took me a few more steps than necessary for my daughter to interact with a treasure chest she found during her adventure or read a sign she stumbled across. This wasted time and risked the chance of my daughter going home without opening the treasure chest, forcing me to come back again to get it. Also, during the safer parts of these areas, my daughter would repeatedly come across the same kind of NPCs, giving her the same vague advice about what she would experience on her adventure. I had the option to fight them as well, but I knew for a fact that doing so would raise my daughter’s sin meter. Ultimately, these NPCs weren’t helpful and quickly became annoying to talk to.

Raising Your Reputation and the Benefits of Saving Money

Fighting, learning magic, attending classes, or helping out around the house all raise your daughter’s home, social, fighting, and magic reputation across the Kingdom. Raising specific skills will allow you to have proper conversations at the Royal Castle and talk with the King, the Queen Consort, or maybe even find love again. While once again repetitive with no fresh dialogue, these conversations help raise your daughter’s renown.

Although players can quicken the text speed to skip these dialogues, I wished there were more conversations to be invested in. Saving money is also wise, as you can spend it on a Fortune Teller who will give hints about your daughter’s future or a traveling salesperson who owns various expensive items that would come in handy later, such as a necklace that belonged to the Guardian Venus, or a demon pendant that could be helpful to your daughter in learning magic if given to the right person, or demon.

Interface and Visuals

I liked the unique interface, although it took some time to understand which button worked for which besides the apparent schedule button. It gets easier once you begin to know the layout and functions of each of them.

The newer visuals for this release are the main improvement from the original, with backgrounds and some sprites looking cleaner than they initially did. Although some of the characters still look a little off at various points, that could have been improved, and even my daughter looks a bit awkward at multiple points depending on what she’s currently feeling, such as when she’s sick or wearing certain clothes. The newer CG images of when she’s on vacation are especially nice to look at, and the photos in the gallery also serve as a nice little treat for Princess Maker fans to check out now and again.

Conclusion

While I enjoyed raising my daughter in Princess Maker 2: Regeneration and seeing her succeed, I was quickly bored with how repetitive it became. I felt like I was going through a routine over and over where nothing new happened in my daughter’s life until well into my playthroughs, and even during the later parts, the repetitiveness sticks out. The dialogue was another problem, as it was sometimes difficult to read. The grammar was wrong at various points or pushed together with no spacing, which was most prominent when it listed my daughter’s final stats at the end or when I gave her some spare pocket money. This made me feel that some parts of the translation felt rushed. More quality-of-life changes could have been made before this release besides graphical improvements.