Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero?

Review - Paul asks several questions of this platformer

If a platform game wants to succeed you'd think the first thing it needs to ensure its mastered, right from the start of development, is the none too mysterious art of jumping. To mess up such a core mechanic is surely unthinkable and would doubtless render any game that make such a mistake worthless and unplayable. So, it's something of a surprise to find that new Nippon Ichi PSP platformer Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero manages to somehow balls up this most sacred of platforming arts yet still remain, not only playable but thoroughly enjoyable as well.

In fact, so enjoyable is Prinny that I feel a little bad by starting this review on such a downer but really, the frustratingly restrictive jumping is the only thing stopping this from being one of the best PSP games around at the moment. Let me explain. In pretty much every other platform game you care to mention once you start a jump you retain some degree of control over where your character lands, a kind of after touch if you will. This allows you to make mid-air adjustments to land on moving platforms, avoid enemies etc., most of all it just feels 'right'. In Prinny your landing location is set in stone from the moment you press the jump button, you have no chance to fine tune your angles or anything. It's perhaps hard to truly understand how limiting this feels without playing it but you'll have to trust me, after years of jumping freedom to feel so restricted is hard to adjust to and at times PSP throwingly annoying.

But anyway, as I said, once you learn to live with this limitation there's a hell of a lot left to enjoy here. The game casts you as a Prinny (reincarnated souls of evil humans that look like penguins with peg legs, bat wings and who have a fondness for the word 'dood') serving under the evil demon master Etna. These strange little creatures first appeared in the Disgaea series of tactical RPGs where they were used as a kind of live weapon due to their unfortunate tendency to explode when thrown or dropped.

Given a staring role here for the first time, the story starts with Etna in the midst of a hissy fit having found all of her favourite 'Ultra Desert' has gone missing. Blaming the Prinny's for it's disappearance she tasks them with making another batch before the next day. Yes, this is in fact a game about collecting pudding ingredients which should give you the impression that it doesn't exactly take itself too seriously.

Of course the one thing stopping Prinny's from being ideal platform game stars is their ultra explosive nature, the thing that brought them fame in the first place. To get round this Etna awards them a red necktie that stops them from combusting at the merest touch. Unfortunately there's only one of these magical garments to go around meaning that only one Prinny at a time can take part in the quest while the rest of the thousand strong army wait in line ready to take their place should they die. This rather neatly gets round the whole Prinny's go bang issue while giving some kind of plot inspired reason for the one thousand lives limit the game gives you.

While a thousand lives may sound like a lot it's not as ultra generous as it first seems because Prinny is a game that will kill you a lot. You'll fall down gaps, get killed by enemies attacking from off screen and generally get beaten into submission by the often frantic nature of the action. In fact were it not for the massive number of lives available Prinny would be a painfully hard game. Should you end up running out of lives before the end you'll unlock a new game mode that endeavours to make things that little bit simpler with the addition of a special attack to your arsenal. Thankfully dieing regularly isn't the pain it could have been thanks to the frequent and well judged continue points which ensure there's never really a sense of having to keep repeating the same bit again and again once you've passed it once.

Prinny's aren't blessed with a huge repertoire of moves but what they do have are effective enough. As well as your slightly fudged jump (and double jump) there's the butt bash which stuns enemies and is activated by pressing down and jump while in mid air. There's also the sword swipe (both in the air and on the ground) and a nippy little sprint to round things off. While these limited moves do the job well enough and keep things simple its a shame you can't string them together nicely. Instead there's a very brief enforced pause between moves meaning a quick sword swipe followed by a jump for example is never quite as instinctive as you want it to be.

You'll get plenty of chance to master these moves during the game's six different stages, each is differently themed and include places such as Nethergrasslands, the High Tome Forest and the Magma Hideout. Interestingly the order you play them in is up to you which provides a nice quirk since they actually vary depending on when in the game you play them too. Since your mission is to collect all the desert ingredients over the course of the games day if you play a particular stage early in the game first time round but then play through the game again leaving it till near the end it will be prove a much harder task second time around. This system gives the game a pretty unique slant on the re-playability front with each level having six different incarnations you play through if you want to be sure you've collected and unlocked everything you can.

At the end of each stage, and in the best platform game tradition, there's a boss to defeat before you can claim your desert ingredient. These are all pattern-based and thus rely on you learning the ins and outs of the different bosses attack patterns before you can reliably best them. This familiar genre staple helps things feel achievable even when you're being killed for the umpteenth time, although the last boss does stretch the boundaries of fairness to their very limits.

Prinny is one of those 2.5D games; it plays like a side scrolling 2D platformer but the engine is fully 3D. This allows little flourishes like the camera spinning behind your Prinny during air attacks to show off a more dramatic angle. It's a purely cosmetic trick but effective none the less, adding emphasis to your actions in a nicely subtle way. In fact the game as a whole never looks anything less than lovely with some impressive character animations giving the inhabitants of Prinny's world massive amounts of personality. Add to that some lovely music and a surprisingly amusing and well written script and you have a game that delights on an audio-visual level.

In some ways Prinny succeeds in spite of itself. Who'd have thought a platform game with an annoying jumping mechanic and an over familiarity with easy deaths would prove to still be so enjoyable. Part of the game's success is perhaps down to the underdog nature of the Prinny's themselves, they're clearly not designed for all this heroic jumping around yet they struggle on regardless becoming ever more endearing as they go. It also obviously helps that the levels and difficulty curve are so beautifully designed and judged that you keep wanting to explore further even when the frustration levels rise. Then there's the game's ever present sense of fun and the added bonus of some great boss battles to keep you smiling. Sure, it's not perfect by any means but what it lacks in fine tuning it makes up for in charm. Dood.

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