Prinny - The hero video games deserve, and need

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Hello everyone! How are those advanced classes in psychiatry and survival going? Good? I hope the continued exposure to high doses of madness has no affected too much your minds, at least not yet. Well, you cannot complain I didn´t warn you. Anyway, to try to compensate a little bit all the darkness from the last entry (the madness perhaps not so much), in this new entry I bring you something more happy, to be more specific is one the best 2D platform games I had the pleasure to play in recent years, and probably also one of the most challenging. I´m talking about “Prinny, Can I Really Be the Hero?”. Let´s see what the adventure of videogame´s most famous (and charming) penguin-like creature has to offer.

Etna is not a very patient or kind lord...

The games uses a 2.5D graphic style.

Prinny, Can I Really Be the Hero? is a 2D platform game developed exclusively for the PSP by Japanese developer Nippon Ichi Software, one of my favorite developers and a well know company in the Tactic RPG scene due to their successful career in this genre, having developed several cult hits such as Disgaea, their most popular franchise, and other games such as La Pucelle Tactis, Phantom Brave, Makai Kingdom or Soul Nomad, games that have contributed to help Nippon Ichi to reach the heaven of the Tactic RPG genre, but it seems this is not enough for this lovers of the bizarre, so from time to time they decide to take their chances in other genres too, and judging from the results obtained with the adventures of the “daredevil” (penguin?) Prinny, you could say they fared really well so far. I´m sure many of you right now are doubting that a company specialized in RPG games, and more in concrete in the Tactic RPG genre, is capable of delivering a competent platform game, but as I said before, those that know Nippon Ichi know that you can expect about anything from these guys, for they are specialists in making the bizarre their identity mark, and Prinny, Can I Really Be the Hero? is just but one more example of this. As always we will start by explaining a little bit the “story” of the game, but first we will try to explain what is a “prinny” for all those that are new to the Disgaea world. Let´s see, a prinny is basically an artificial body created by the demonic engineers of the Netherworld. This body was created in the most awkward and humiliating way possible, that is the body of some kind of chubby penguin with tiny bat wings, wooden sticks instead of legs and a waist pack. When an evildoer such as a killer or a thief, or those that committed a deadly sin such as suicide, go to hell, their souls are attached inside a prinny and they are forced to serve one of the lords of the Netherworld in order to be able to redeem their sins and gain like this the right to reincarnate, a task that as you can surely imagine is far from being easy with such looks in a place filled up with sadistic and twisted demons addicted to bullying anything that is weaker than them, and the prinnys are by far the weakest ones. Bottom line, a prinny is the ultimate loser. Oh yeah, and one last small detail, prinny bodies are EXTREMELY volatile and will explode with extreme easiness, so one of their most common uses/destinies is to end up being use as a hand grenade when their lord has no other weapons at hand... or just needs to release some stress. Very well, not that we cleared up that point, we are ready to move onto the “story” of the game. It seems someone has stolen the favorite dessert of Etna, one of the main leaders of the Netherworld armies, and that is an offense that Etna is not willing to let go unpunished, so she has given the order to her personal prinny army to recover the dessert no matter what it takes, unless they want to end up being used as fireworks for her next birthday party. Period. No, you are not tripping due to the secondary effects of playing Darkest Dungeon for too long, at least not with this, you did indeed read well. Other than the “fireworks for her birthday” part, which is just my personal guessing of the possible punishment for their failure, that is the actual story of the game. Nippoin Ichi has never been popular for their serious and dramatic stories, but more for the opposite, in fact, Nippon Ichi stories tend to be so hilarious that one could almost say without being afraid to be wrong that Disagaea is the equivalent to Konami´s classic Parodious in the Tactic RPG genre, and a spin-off featuring the mascot of the franchise couldn´t be less, so you better get ready for a bizarre ride Made in Nippon Ichi.

One of the game´s bosses.

As I already mentioned, Prinny is an old-school 2D platform adventure, although it includes several Nippon Ichi style unique features that help the game to distinguish itself from similar games. Our objective will be to complete a series of stages in order to defeat the boss at the end of each stage and obtain one of the ingredients we need for Etna´s favorite dessert. Well, “ingredients”, because I´m sure some of those things could easily make Rambo puke. To fulfill this mission we will count with a prinny army composed of no more and no less than 1000 prinnys, or what is the same, 1000 lives, and no “continues” allowed. Now I´m sure many of you are thinking “Jeez, with 1000 lives, who needs continues? You are such a noob”, well, soon we will discover that our number of prinnys/lives will decrease at the same rate Nintendo makes new Mario games due to the I-N-S-A-N-E difficulty of the game, which will take any chance we give to it to torture our prinnys without any kind of pity, giving us a quite accurate idea of how it must feel like to be a prinny in such a horrible place. In fact, the whole game itself is so mean that could be considered a torture for the prinnys themselves. The adventure will have six main stages which will be able to complete in any given order to obtain the ingredients. The stages will be:

Nethergrasslands
Located north of the Prinny Base, the serene scenery turns deadly late at night. It's ruled over by a voracious beast, the Gourmet Ogre.

High Tome Forest
A forest said to be filled with countless tomes of knowledge. Two girls named Kim and Chi frequent this area under the pseudonym "The Knight Sisters".

Death's Watchtower
A criminal execution site, the tower is haunted by souls who are eternally bound to this place. The tower abruptly changes height, and the visitors must beware of two skull dragons who patrol the area.

Demon Sea Aria
A casino that floats atop the Demon Sea by night and sinks to the bottom during the day. It is owned by a zombie named Bok Choy, who has hired several guards to protect the area, including a mysterious fox girl.

Magma Hideout
The ninja hideaway ruled over by the female ninja Hoshikage, or "Star Shadow". Also sheltered within is the great dragon, Lee-Shang Long.

Moab Fortress 
This huge fortress where the Moab Army makes its home is fraught with interweaving paths. It's tough, but at least the challenge is the same day or night.

In our base we will have access to several options.

Between the stages we will visit hour “base”, which will allow us to perform several actions through the different options available at it, although most of them won´t be available till we rescue first the soul of the character that manages each option. To do so, we will have to find all the hidden orbs that contain the souls of these characters scattered through the stages. And talking about hidden items, the game makes use of a day and night system, so every time we complete a stage, the time will advance. This time lapse will affect, not only the composition of the stages themselves, but also the kind of enemies and items we will be find in them, for these will vary depending on the moment of the day we enter the stages, which will make necessary to replay all the stages more than once if we want to find all the items that are hidden in each of them. Once we complete the first six stages, we will advance to the final stages, which we will play in a preset order like it happened also in Capcom´s classic Mega Man series. The items we will be able to collect will allow us to unlock a fair amount of extra content that will help to expend the game´s durability, something that is common in many Nippon Ichi games. Among the content we will be able to unlock we find an extra stage called the Martial Tower, in which we will have to face new bosses, and a new game mode called Asagi Mode that will allow us to play new stages with a secondary story in which will face Asagi, a character that appears in several episodes of the Disgaea series and that seems to be obsessed with being the protagonist of her own game.

In some parts we will be able to use vehicles.

As for the visual aspect of the game, as its tradition in the Disgaea series since it´s very humble beginnings, Prinny, Can I Really Be the Hero? makes use of really colorful and detailed sprites to make the characters designed by famous Japanese illustrator Takehito Harada, who has participated as a character designer in many Nippon Ichi games, come to life. Harada´s unique style has become one of the Disagaea series´ signs of identity, till the point where you could say that a Disgaea game without Harada-san just wouldn´t be a Disgaea game anymore. The characters also count with a big amount of funny and elaborated animations that really help to make the game´s hilarious humor and charm stand out. The stages themselves are designed in 3D boasting all kind of details, giving the game a spectacular 2.5D feeling that really helps to enhance the game´s overall presentation and which is similar to the one Capcom used for their Ultimate Ghosts´N Goblins also on PSP.

U.S. Special edition of the game including a PSP case, a plush of Prinny, the OST and a comic.

Last, but not least, I would like to mention also that the adventures of Prinny continued in a direct sequel called Prinny 2: Dawn of Operation Panties, Dood! also for the PSP, which in top of having an even more hilarious title, followed step by step the path of the first game I just talked about while improving altogether some features. In this new adventure it seems some little perverted demon has stolen Etna´s underwear, so following their master´s orders, the prinnys set in a new quest to find the missing panties of Netherworld sexiest demon-girl, which will plunge them in an even more hilarious adventure than the previous one. And make no mistakes, regardless of the complains of many players about the cruel difficulty level of the first adventure, the second adventure is as difficult (if not even more) then the first one. Anyway, whether you are fans of Disgaea or not, if you have a PSP and you feel like playing some good old-school and challenging game, then you should definitely give a chance to Prinny, I´m sure he won´t disappoint you, although I cannot say the same about driving you insane... Just in case, I don´t recommend to mix it with a dose of Darkest Dungeon... Enjoy, dood!


GAMEPLAY VIDEO PRINNY 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJeutsprk3I

GAMEPLAY VIDEO PRINNY 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX9UqvHNtfU

I cannot finish my own game, dood!