The storyline is pretty linear, and requires that you talk to as many villagers as possible, since that’s the only way to open up new locations on the map. Thankfully you can travel between certain towns through the use of magical transportation shops. Your characters aren’t exactly speed demons, and even when running, travelling between destinations can be extremely slow. This allows free exploration of the kingdom without having to deal with menus or map screens.

Whenever you reach the end of a path, you’re given a choice of your next destination, if the path branches.

Each of these locations is connected by straight pathway. The kingdom of Valendia consists of several towns, along with your standard castles and caves. None of the dialogue is voice acted, and outside of the introduction, doesn’t really feature anything in the way of cinematic cutscenes. After finishing the game, each of the three side characters star in their own playable story, which intersect with Gradriel’s tale and retell the same events from a different points of view. His familiar is a flashy toucan named Drake.Īlthough Gradriel is the main character, she’ll run across the others several times during the course of the story. He manages to be quite a fighter despite his debilitating peg leg. Portgus is Valendia’s equivalent of Robin Hood, a pirate who steals from the rich to give to the poor. Naturally, life outside the castle isn’t quite as she’d imagined it, especially when her sister and kidnapped, and she learns of an evil sorceress summoning great evil, who is naturally out to destroy everything. She’s advised to let the knights take care of these issues, but Gradriel decides to sneak out of the castle to observe everything firsthand. There’s all kinds of trouble afoot, ranging from witches that are kidnapped to kids to dragons that are terrorizing the populace. The young princess Gradriel has been put in charge of the kingdom, and begins listening to the pleas of her subjects. The intro shows the queen kicking the ass to some invading monsters, before forwarding to the present day. Princess Crown takes place in the kingdom of Valendia, which, unlike medieval kingdoms in most traditional fantasy stories, is a matriarchy. As a gorgeous side-scrolling action-RPG, it’s effectively the origin of Vanillaware’s games, if not quite in name, as the company hadn’t been established yet. He was later put in charge in Princess Crown, a joint effort between Atlus and Sega, in the later days of the Sega Saturn. The signature style is primarily due to artist George Kamitani, who got his start in the video game business as a graphic designer for Capcom on their Dungeons and Dragons beat-em-ups. Japanese game developer Vanillaware has a long standing reputation for absolutely gorgeous 2D visuals, with titles including Odin Sphere, Muramasa: The Demon Blade, Grand Knights History, Grim Grimoire, and Dragon’s Crown.

Princess crown english patch saturn