Magical Princess is a raising simulator by Neotro Inc. based on publisher MAGI Inc’s board game series. In this game, you can raise your daughter by choosing classes, having her socialize with friends, and participating in other activities to raise her stats and guide her toward one of the over 50 potential endings. Will she take up a place guiding the kingdom toward prosperity, spend her time traveling the world as a merchant, or even become a NEET? These are just some of the many possibilities that await.
Defeating the Crimson Moon
The prologue of Magical Princess opens by introducing Alice (or whatever you choose to name her), a young girl cherished and doted upon by her parents. They read stories to her, play with her, and take her to meet her new friend Cornet. Unfortunately, tragedy soon strikes; her mother Sara falls ill and soon passes away. This leaves the task of raising her to her father alone.
Following a time skip, she returns to the city as a young woman to enroll in the Royal Magic Academy, accompanied by her father and Ebon, a talking cat who joined their family following Sara’s passing. This begins the main portion of Magical Princess, where you will choose classes, work part-time jobs, learn skills, and fight. Whether the daughter spends her time and energy studying and praying at the church or fighting in back alleys and talking back to her father, it’s up to you.
The exact way that the story unfolds depends on your choices. There’s a main story throughout which can end in a number of ways, but many of the events along the way are connected to friends who are all potential romantic interests. There are also additional story segments connected to completing certain activities or meeting other requirements.
In terms of the main story, the daughter is drafted to fight monsters. The Crimson Moon, which once appeared years ago, is back once more, and they need everyone they can get to keep it safe from the monsters that appear alongside it. It’s an interesting story that builds up by revealing hints of a truth about the man behind the monsters and the mysterious behaviour of the queen. While it’s not as substantial as a standard visual novel despite the similar presentation, it’s far more so than many other raising simulators, and it has quite a few emotional moments.
As is typically the case with raising simulators, it’s intended that you play Magical Princess multiple times to reach different endings. This mechanic ties into the main story particularly well, revealing further information in subsequent playthroughs if you meet the requirements and connecting to the story.
Due to the sheer number of endings, they’re all very short, as you might expect. They’re entertaining and give a brief glimpse of a very wide variety of potential future careers and romances. Magical Princess ties together several segments to make an ending, so for example, you might get the normal main ending, a chosen career, and a romance with a character all at once. You’ll typically unlock quite a few potential careers at the same time and have to choose one and any associated unlocks to carry through to your next playthrough, but you can save and view them all before proceeding.
Romance and Dates
There are seven potential romantic interests in Magical Princess, which include four female and three male characters. Unlike certain other games in the genre, the father is not a romantic interest here; though (depending on your choices), both father and daughter are very affectionate and open about how much they love each other. Amusingly, if somewhat disconcertingly, the daughter can flip between sweet and adoring one day, and rebellious and rude the next, depending on the speech options chosen. Moreso than one would reasonably expect from even a rebellious daddy’s girl, anyway.
The friendship/romance system works by giving the daughter the chance to speak with each character once a month, and by doing this to raise affinity, it eventually unlocks the chance to go on dates and to give gifts, as well as additional scenes with that character.
I was impressed by the sheer amount of date scenes available for each character. Some do tend to repeat a little bit with commonalities, such as visiting the bakery or mall, but I enjoyed seeing the characters interact and the little romantic moments. Some help to flesh out the main story too, providing background detail on past events, or just showing how characters are connected to each other.
That said, while you can upgrade your relationship to ‘Lovers’ or ‘The One’, it never goes too far with the romance, and you can do this with multiple characters at once. Any sort of official romantic relationship is left to the endings, and even those aren’t always as direct as you may expect.
The romance options themselves are all interesting characters, and some are more than a little quirky. My favorite was Fran, a boyish female knight who is embarrassed about her femininity. Crois, a summoner with a penchant for theft and an obsession with sweet buns, was always amusing. Chocolat is a healer who acts as a big sister; she is always sweet except for when it’s time to lay down the law. And Cornelia certainly has the most interesting events.
Of the male romance options, Noah, a young boy who is smarter than his age, was quite cute with his childish insistence on how mature he is. I wasn’t as much of a fan of Shail, a musician with a standoffish personality at first, but after learning more about him, I grew to like him. Hasis the assassin also has his own charm, even if he gives the impression of being a slightly edgier version of Kirito from Sword Art Online, complete with twin blades.
Raising a Daughter
Each run of Magical Princess is split into 36 months. Each month, you are given ten energy to spend, though this limit can be raised as you progress. Along with managing energy, you also need to keep your stress levels in check. Otherwise, your stats won’t increase as effectively, and if it goes even higher, you’ll run into other issues. You’ll also need to choose skills from a skill tree as you earn points by ranking up stats, letting you customize your growth and learn abilities for battle.
Each month starts in your home, where the daughter can speak with her father, occasionally ask to go on trips, and cook meals. Then it’s off to the academy to choose which classes to take, each in a category that is more-or-less connected to one of the four main stats.
At first, you’ll only have a few options, but as the game opens up, you’ll find plenty of after-school activities, whether they’re focused on improving your stats, gaining items, or building affinity with the potential romance options. Not that the romance endings and dates are the only reason to build affinity; it’s worth increasing it for at least two characters each time.
As part of the main story, you’re called upon every few months to fight monsters, and you can bring two characters with you. Building affinity with a character is one of the ways to make them stronger and help you to survive the Crimson Moon. There are also a number of optional battle activities which give you access to certain unlocks, including endings. Or you could even choose to avoid battles even in the main story, though it may not be great for certain career prospects.
The battle system itself is relatively simple, but it works well. It’s a classic JRPG-style battle system, where it waits for you to choose an option when the timer reaches your turn. It comes with a few elements and the resistances/weaknesses that you might expect, and a few status effects and buffs. There aren’t many possible moves to learn, but between stat increases based on how you train and equipment that you can buy, there’s a reasonable amount of depth to it. I did find it to have some level of challenge on the first playthrough, but it became relatively easy on subsequent playthroughs, outside of attempting certain things too early. Trying to clear the final dungeon for the true end on month six did not go well, but trying it on month thirty-six after leveling up my magic skill far beyond what was needed for S+ rank was incredibly easy.
Time After Time
So, you’ve reached month 36, your daughter has graduated from the Royal Magic Academy and embarked on a new career and perhaps romance, then the credits roll. What’s a father to do now? Try it all over again, from the start!
As you progress through Magical Princess, you’ll unlock in-game achievements called Feats. Some of these will occur naturally during your first playthrough, while others involve completing certain tasks. This works well to encourage players to try different things in subsequent playthroughs.
These Feats persist throughout loops and grant you Achievement Points, which can be spent when you start a loop. This lets you unlock advantages for the new game, such as starting with higher stats, powerful equipment, money, affinity with a character, and more. The number of points is based on your unlocked Feats, so spending them doesn’t reduce them for the following run. As long as you’re trying different activities, romance options, types of endings, and so on, you’ll naturally accumulate more points for your future playthroughs each time. This can put more difficult Feats within reach, as well as making it easy to complete what were previously challenging tasks.
Along with quite a few different endings to unlock and too many events to see during one run of the game, playing again is encouraged as certain endings require you to have played the game more than once. If you want to know the full story, you’ll need to complete a number of runs, increasing your overall power along the way through the Achievement Points.
Moving Characters and Anime Acting
While the gameplay of Magical Princess is quite impressive compared to others in the genre, the production values are even more so.
Aside from the father, the game is fully voiced in Japanese and features several experienced anime voice actors, including all the voice actresses behind the four main characters from Bocchi the Rock. Character sprites are attractive and expressive, moving and shifting between poses with lip-synced speech using Spine, a tool similar to Live2D.
There are quite a number of CGs throughout both the main story, the optional events, and the endings. Outside of that, there are quite a lot of what have been termed ‘Comic Panels’, with events sometimes having half a dozen of them to tell part of the story. They’re less detailed than the CGs, but still look great and work really well. The user interface deserves praise too. Everything is clearly laid out and very easy to understand and use.
In terms of both graphics and audio, Magical Princess is far above any other raising simulator I’ve played, which is even more impressive when you consider that it is quite low-priced. The genre tends to be indie and other low-budget games for the most part, so this is very much a stand-out exception.
Verdict
Magical Princess may just be the best example of a raising simulator yet. The story is engaging and works well with the replay mechanic, it gives plenty of time and scenes to get to know the characters, and it nails the gameplay and usability. Combined with top-class audiovisuals and a very reasonable price, it is a must-play.
MAGICAL PRINCESS IS A MUST BUY
If you are looking for another title with simulation gameplay, you may enjoy Galaxy Princess Zorana or Machine Child. We have also covered a wide variety of visual novels both original to English and localized from Japanese, which you can check out here.
Many thanks go to MAGI Inc. for a PC review code for Magical Princess.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
