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Now this is an interesting game with a very interesting history. It's a sim-style game, like an old-school "The Sims". You raise a girl from 10 to 18, making all decisions about her life, back in the middle ages. Sounds dull, right? Not really. With over 70(!) endings, from grand poobah to peasant wife to Queen of the Underworld, this game has some serious replay value.
The translation and subsequent un-release are a story in themselves. The game was originally translated around 1995, when DOS games still ruled the roost. Windows 95 was delayed (again!), making DOS the platform of shoice for gamers and developers alike.
A group of guys working though a text-based adventure group named Adventions licensed the game for translation. However, translation proved difficult, pushing the release date of the game back past the eventual release of Windows 95. This killed some of the buzz around the project, since the game is DOS-based.
Time passed. Most of the group moved on, but the small company SoftEgg, headed by one of the translators, tried to sell the publishing rights to the now fully-translated game. Intracorp Entertainment eventually showed some interest, and promised a release. Intracorp then licensed the game to another company called Ignite, who were...not altogether with it.
By January 1997, things had taken a turn for the worse. Ignite had shut down, Intracorp was on its last legs, and only all three parties could legally bail the others out. Unfortunately, with Ignite legally gone, everyone was stuck in a Catch-22.
In the end, the only creator who still was working for the project, Tim Trzepacz, who had created an entire company to get this game to US shores, said this: "Last year, I met Princess Maker 2's creator, Takami Akai, at Fanime Con. [...] I printed up a special copy of the english language version, complete with the full color manual, which I presented to Akai-san in a public ceremony at the convention. I said, 'I've been a bad father, the daughter has turned out poorly. I am returning her to you now.' In the tradition of the game, I returned the child to the creator at the end."
Links
- The whole story, from Tim Trzepacz himself.
- rather nice overview of how to play.
- The rather infamous SomethingAwful.com "review".