The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince (Usotsuki Hime to Moumoku Ouji)

Publisher: Nippon Ichi Software

Developer: Nippon Ichi Software

Release Date: 05/31/2018

Available On

Fairy tales can be both charming and downright eye-rolling depending on how they are told. In this case, The Liar Princess is a charming story of trust and truth. One day a prince hears the singing of a girl at night, and over the course of months, he finally ventures out to find this voice. He climbs a cliff only to get slashed by the wolf who is singing to the moon. He ends up blind, and the wolf is so upset that she maimed someone who genuinely enjoys her singing that she brings him to the forest witch, who can let them be together by turning her into a beautiful princess, but at a cost. She must give up her singing voice. That’s the premise of the fairy tale, and it can be quite charming. There are cut scenes after every level and even a couple of plot twists. Sadly, that’s kind of the only thing worthwhile in this entire game outside of the art.

The game is incredibly sluggish, floaty, and hard to control with controls and mechanics that feel half-baked. If you hate escort missions in games, then you will truly loathe this one. The entire game is an escort mission. You must lead the blind prince around to solve puzzles…and do platforming. Yeah, that just doesn’t work out. With this awful physics you will constantly die and have to restart levels not even of your own doing. You can switch between the Princess and the Wolf at will, but you can not switch to the Princess if there is moonlight on you. This only occurs a couple of times in the game, so I think the developers forgot about this. As the Wolf, you can jump higher, are invincible to damage, and can attack enemies and “swipe” at objects to move them. As the Princess you can lead the Prince around by hand, and that’s pretty much it.

Where the frustration comes from is the awful glitchy physics and platforming. A lot of puzzles just don’t work because of this, and even the developers knew this, as after 10 minutes you can skip the level. For example, you will have two switches that need to be stood on, but a third one is behind a small wall with an opening to toss a heavy object through and onto the switch. You must swipe at an object to knock it over into the hole, and it takes dozens of swipes to get it just right. Sometimes the objects get stuck and you have to restart; sometimes they disappear. Sometimes you will drop down onto a mushroom pad (mushrooms are safe to land on), and you will scout ahead only to die from fall damage and respawn, and the Prince has disappeared and you need him for a puzzle.

Another frustrating scenario is swiping at plants that shoot balls at enemies, and these rapidly move from left to right. There are situations in which platforms will move underneath you, and you have to get the Prince onto them by timing everything. These plants move too fast, and getting them to hit enemies is all luck-based. I restarted an end level a dozen times only because I could not get these enemies to die fast enough, so I skipped the level. This happens all the time, and it gets worse as the game moves on. The Princess controls like she’s moving through mud, and it doesn’t help that on the Vita the game runs at 20 FPS. With my system fully overclocked, it can barely hit 30. This is a very poorly optimized game as well as all the other issues.

Combat is just as aggravating. You swipe at enemies, and because you’re invincible, there’s no challenge. I just wish combat would have been removed from this game. Enemies don’t attack either; they just move back and forth in a line. All this does is slow things down and make certain sections impossible to get past. There’s another mechanic where a Yeti can toss both of you up onto ledges, but he moves back and forth and throws you behind him. Timing this is maddening, as he has to have his back to the ledge you need to be on, but you need to be in front of him. There only way to control the Prince without holding his hand is telling him to move forward, backward, or pick up an object, and this is really slow. The Princess has to go through whispering animation, the transforming animation is also slow which leads to many deaths. The only parts I enjoyed were anything that didn’t involve combat, puzzles, or platforming, and that was most of the game.

With that said, the game is atrocious to play and a chore to try and finish. It feels like the game was half-finished and they released it anyway. The visuals are great, and the story is quite charming, but I would have preferred a short walking simulator (which this game feels like it originally was) to shoehorned, half-baked gameplay. I honestly can’t recommend this one to even the most curious players, as most won’t even get halfway through before giving up.