It's like dope: you'll give it a try, and you'll get hooked to it forever.
User Rating: 10 | Princess Maker 2 PC
During one of my nights of bore, I was surfing through the Home of the Underdogs site, looking for some oldie from my childhood to download, and I stumble into the Princess Maker 2 entry. I read the site owner’s enthusiastic review, and as my curiosity was itching, I downloaded it and began to play it. Wow, THAT was a surprise. I never thought that the job of Tamagotchi breeder could be so exciting. This game has a plot, but it serves only as an explanation for the sudden fatherhood of yours, which is the aim of the game. This is it: the apocalypse was on the loose, and a lonesome hero —that’s right, you— managed to stop it with his bare hands. The gods of heaven, in return, gave you a gift: a nine years-old daughter. Your job is to raise this child from her tenth birthday until she’s eighteen. Once you begin a new game, a series of questions will be prompted to you, and what you answer to them will affect drastically the development of the whole game. For example, you’ll be asked for choosing your daughter’s birthday, and the type of her blood. Why her blood, you may ask. I have read through the web that blood types, in Japanese culture, is thought to define one person’s personality traits. Your answers to these items will be used for the PC to calculate the starting statistics of your daughter. That’s right: your daughter's character sheet are, at the beginning of the game, a kind of astral chart of hers. From here on, you must send your daughter to work, and to school. You’ll have a great variety of subjects to study, and a great array of places to work in. Jobs and school subjects raise some of your statistics, and lessen others. For example, studying science will raise your Intelligence, but will lessen your Faith. Working at the Restaurant will raise your Cooking skill, but your Combat skill will go down. The decisions you’ll take will affect the development of your daughter, and will decide what career your daughter will choose when she gets eighteen. And here comes the whole surprise: the game has 74 endings. That’s right: 74 different endings. My first daughter “took” the fighters’ path, and ended up as a bounty hunter. My second one, became a fortune teller. I also got daughters that became a national hero, the kingdom’s general, a writer, a painter, a housewife, a ballet dancer… and a harlot. (Yes, you CAN corrupt your underage daughter by sending her to work at a cabaret or a sleazy bar. This way, she may became something related to the dark side of the streets…) And here we go into what makes this game the jewel it is: it lets you, the player, test different possibilities and alternatives over and over again. It’s not only about trying other jobs and school subjects: it has 4 tiny role-playing games for you to give them a try, and it has a bunch of secrets to uncover. Besides, as you don’t know what it takes to make your daughter an army mercenary (for example), you will start over and over again trying to discover what combination of statistics is needed to achieve one particular ending. And, finally, what is in my opinion the best issue of Princess Maker 2: you end constantly asking yourself what may happen in the end. What career might choose an eighteen years-old sorceress that became the best painter in town? What makes out of a theology student that likes fighting? And what of a professional dancer who works as a mason? If you didn’t ever play Princess Maker 2, download it from Home of the Underdogs, and add it to your collection. It’s a jewel that you certainly cannot continue to ignore.
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