the game has 58 endings and is an rpg action dating sim. the main point is that youre taking care of your daughter and trying to raise her to be her "perfect self" but you take technically raise her any way you want to. i really enjoyed/do enjoy this game and i know a lot of people dislike it because of its poor translation - if you actually like the game/are interested in it, the translation really doesn't matter. i can understand everything and even if something is misspelled or wrong, it's still easy to read. the creators took a hard time trying to translate this big ass game and i applaud them for it

Despite some abso luxurious artwork and presentation here I'm left a little dry. One of the problems I keep running into w/ the princessmaker genre is in how little these games do to offer emergent expressions of lifegoal improv, i guess? Like once your child hits their middle age (13), you probably already have a ""build"" in mind, a desired outcome you're beelining to - in the form of hammering the same handfuls of classes or extracurricular activities to pump cold and unfeeling stats & numbers up. As funny as it is to have a scrunkly faildaughter, the game doesn't react to it in any holistic or meaningful way - lower stats means fewer doors open to you.
Granted, it's not a soulless spreadsheet simulator or anything - it really is a lavish production filled with events that trigger according to certain milestones being hit, the problem for me is in how much it rewards a straightforward and narrowminded grind rather than making tough decisions, reacting to your own daughters autonomy and wishes.
And there's little else to it, really - the cast here are a little charming and it's heartwarming to watch your lilbabie fill her boots in the vocation of your choice; but when the artifice falls out from under me i realise i've spent days clicking the same buttons, watching the same animations, hoping to increase my chances where I get an ending screen akin to whatever da hell I wanted my daughter's job to be. Full possibility my brain is not wired for this kind of game, I just wish it felt more like parenthood and less like EV training.

I don't usually do these but uhhhh I guess TW for Uterus Talk and Bodily Dysfunction Talk?

This game tapped instantly into all of my weird parental urges that have been overwhelming my body and soul as of late. Amongst any one, even animals that I cross by on the street when I'm out in the city, I find myself defaulting to this sort of role my brain registers as inherently 'parental'. I consider myself, for some reason, the owner of whatever responsibilities exist for us, and all these hormone pills I'm taking for my bodily conditions leave me an emotional mess whenever anything vaguely bad happens to any of them.

Due to my birth conditions, I cannot have a child naturally. Not that I'd really want to, I consider anything but adoption immoral on a completely personal level (i.e., I do not extend this moral expectation to people who aren't myself). But, over the course of the past year, even though I already know I'd never do it, and I'd never want to, the chance that I might eventually be able to medically conceive and have a child has been constantly offered to me by medical professionals, only to be taken at the last moment. I don't really know why I care, but I imagine it has something to to do with all the hormone treatments.

So I definitely cried at this one. I'm a crier, y'know.

Steam Summer Sale struck this year, me and my friends all excitedly shared gifts we'd been planning for each other all month. I gave one of my best friends a copy of Shadowrun: Hong Kong, since I heard they liked Disco Elysium and that they'd been branching out into RPGs with some more combat-oriented gameplay. That same person sent me this, and I'd never heard of it before, but I vaguely knew about this whole 'parenting as a maths simulator' game genre from getting scared at the gruesome endings of Long Live the Queen as a kid and, very recently, trying this wonderful but egregiously difficult game called The World According to Girl from the Steam Next Fest this year.

And, while this game has a ton of weird aesthetic choices that offput me at first (switching perspective from the parent and the child on such crazy whims I had trouble following a couple scenes being the most notable, and the mobile game-esque look and feel being the other) it just started affecting me emotionally, like, every third scene.

For the first hour or so of this, I was on the phone with that friend I mentioned earlier and we were shooting the shit joking over this. Some of the hardest laughs I'd had in a long ass time, I'd say. At some point, I realized we were both pretty Into It, though. I didn't even realize it was one in the AM at some point, when we started at ten that night. We'd stopped talking about our days eventually, throwing out 'what ifs' about what this kid we were virtually co-parenting could get up to.

I woke up this morning after and, after going through my morning routine, made a beeline for my computer desk and got right back to it. I think my interest in this particular piece, a few hours separate it now, came from a recent fascination with the mundane and more 'wholesome' or placid tales. After writing so many stupid thoughtpieces to my colleagues about the current state of our cinema, which I can't imagine read (or meant) anything much more than 'old movie good new movie bad', I've found myself completely absolving myself, on accident, of the tolerance so many of us have for 'world ending stakes' so many generic narratives default to. Or, in the case of many of my complaints, more complex and interesting narratives that suddenly default to such huge stakes as a way of enforcing that 5-part act structure for film they teach you every day in screenwriting classes.

Straight up, you can just ignore the world ending threat in this game. I got 80% of the way there and stopped, humbling myself as a person and entertaining the idea I probably shouldn't have such expectations of even this virtual kid I trained to use swords for seventeen years. The game ended, and things were fine. Not perfect, but fine. Everything I'd been stressing to get through from the parent's perspective were all just those same stupid worries I have every other day of my real ass life.

And you probably know how the ending of a game like this is structured. The music starts playing, there's a series of snapshots telling you how every one's lives went after or whatever. I'm a pretty simple person when it comes to my tastes, I think, and y'know that's all I really need to get to weeping. Maybe all the other stuff I wrote here is like- some sort of way to internally 'justify' what might feel like a silly reaction, or maybe it just works and I shouldn't pretend to have stupid high standards.

This is a fairly new game at the moment, and it definitely still has bugs (some game-breaking ones that I experienced personally) as well as several English translation/typos.

However! First I would like to say the devs currently when they say they will fix something, in a day or two, they do! They really care about this game, which is awesome to see!

Despite the issues/bugs I experienced, I REALLY loved playing this game, and look forward to playing it occasionally to get different endings. There seems to be quite a bit replayability, and you are rewarded for doing so. The game has very cute art, decent music, and the writing/stories and cutscenes were much better than other games I've played in this genre. Also, there's so much you can do in this game! The mini games are fun, the combat is decent, and the game is just all around cute. I was genuinely surprised how much I enjoyed this game, and I hope others will give it a try!

A sweet stat-raiser game in the same vein as Princess Maker, but not nearly as punishing as other games in this subgenre. Instead of a breakneck run through your daughter’s childhood as you try to balance her emotional needs with creating a productive member of society, Volcano Princess throws the entire world open to you. Have your daughter make friends with whoever you want, focus on whichever stats you like, and don’t worry about all that stuff about degradation and a monster war. That’s only there if you want to dig into it, and you don’t have to if you don’t want to. Volcano Princess is one of those games where it takes more effort to get a bad ending than a good one, which is helped by the game encouraging multiple playthroughs via the Talent system. Cash in the points you earned from your daughter’s most recent completed save file by giving her a leg up on the next one with boosted status, higher friendship levels, good gear from the jump, and more. This made my second playthrough with an eye towards the true ending a breeze.

But despite that excellent quality of life upgrade, the game still has some rough patches. One playthrough is all it takes to figure out that a character with a petrification skill makes the combat trivial, and there’s an easy early game exploit with the blacksmith’s sale that turns money into a non-issue. Parts of the UI feel more at home with mobile games than a PC stat raising sim, and the translation ranges from “this could’ve used a second edit pass” to “I have no idea what these characters are trying to say.” Add that last part to a late-game lore dump if you decide to go the True Ending route, and the story ends up confusing at best.

Yet, even through all of that, the game still charmed me from start to finish. The art style is beautiful, and what I did understand of the story led to a heartwarming ending. I’m glad that my warrior girl and her fortune teller BFF turned wife are living their best lives out there, and that’s what I really want out of games like this - a happily ever after.

Princess Maker games are pretty appealing to me on a conceptual level, but they've always had a hard time being compelling enough mechanically to work properly. Volcano Princess is almost there, but it still suffers from a couple of big problems, enough that I couldn't bring myself to finish it.

Biggest problem is that the English translation is incredibly rough. You can understand what they're trying to say, but it becomes very unenjoyable after a few hours. It makes it hard to tell how good the story and characters are, since the flow of dialogue makes them sound like weird robots regurgitating dialogue that only hints at their character traits. It seems like there's very little going on with the story as well, since it does a poor job of developing it in a way that the player can get invested in. Raising your daughter is all you can latch onto. Granted, it is at least pretty cute and your bond feels genuine enough.

The rest of the mechanics aren't quite compelling enough to pick up the slack. It's initially engaging, as you figure out how you want to raise your daughter and get familiar with the mechanics. Once you settle into a build, it becomes a tedious grind until you hit the end. There aren't enough wrenches thrown in your way to make the gameplay more interesting. While there are mini-games, they're very bland and don't add much. Not even the tacked on turn-based RPG section, which just feels bad to play.

Despite all that, it's not that bad of a game per se. It at least does an okay job at giving you the illusion you're raising a daughter. The art is very cute when the effort is put in. While the mechanics are generally lacking, there's still some fun to be had in an overall sense, planning out your run to be efficient and get the ending you want. There's some alright moments sprinkled throughout, even through the bad translation.

Which is my main problem here. I could be much more forgiving of what's here if the developers got a proper, professional translation. I'd at least be able to invest in what's going on and latch onto the characters easier. I can tell what's here isn't half bad, and I like what they're going for. But until then, I can't be bothered to finish it.

I played through this game twice, once normally and once to get the "best" ending. The art's pretty cute and this is my first dip into the princess maker genre. Overall I had a good time but I definitely had my complaints. First, you can access most of the endings by your 2nd playthrough in the same run by just saving the day of the ending and picking what you want. There's not really a ton of choices to be made, you're just getting stats. Second, while there are a lot of characters they're all pretty shallow. Each of them get about 3-4 events, one of which is their epilogue event if your daughter chose to marry them. So over the course of 5 years you get 2 personal moments per character. 3rd, I don't think the story was good and part of that might have to do with the translation. It is in pretty rough spot for English. 4th, the combat is very basic. I know that's not the focus of these types of games but its another example of this game trying to do too much but very poorly.

I think this game had the right idea but a very poor execution. It had a good balance just not enough content. And of the content it had it was all very samey. There really wasn't much difference between each of the career paths other than a a blurb or 3 throughout the whole game. The only real difference is the career ending cg and the tiny bit of text accompanying it. What a sequel or major patch could do is make branching actually relevant between the 3 major paths that it points to as well as adding more depth to all the side characters in the game. A moment or 3 isn't enough to sell a side character past their design.

this is just my review after dropping the game but finishing like 90% of it
pros
+ a genuine successor to the princess maker series made with real love and passion put into it and i think it can even rival the later installments of PM
+ really cute art style that just works even if the current scenario is a bad one
+ really easy, and you don't really need a step by step guide unlike other daughter raising sims such as PM or long live the queen

cons
- daughters age at the beginning is only 12 and most of the romance options are WAY older than your daughter with the EXCLUSION of nina, craig, and if you're okay with the romeo and juliet law; lon and ze. some characters, like hackett, despite being adults, flirt with your daughter while she is only 12. some of your romance options are your teachers or role models whom don't show ANY kind of romantic interest until after you've finished the game, or a character implied to be blood related to your daughter (spoilers). the only nonromantic endings are with basilou and jermaine.
- while you are left on your own for your first playthrough, your stats are improved after each playthrough because you gain points through achievements, making it SIGNIFICANTLY harder to get normal, worse or bad endings late-game. i managed to get the best ending without using any cheats and my other attempts at getting the normal endings after that has been harder than getting the best ending itself

other than that stan kenneth #autism

Surprisingly solid life sim with some nice work at baking in combat, relationship sim, multiple endings and an overarching world plot (that you scratch the surface of in your first playthrough).

If you've played Princess Maker, Long Live the Queen, Growing Up or Chinese Parents, you know what to expect here. The sheer number of endings and achievements makes this seem like a great game to replay again and again.

The game is good enough that I can look past the really mediocre translation and crashing, but not quite enough that I can give it the 8-9 that I would like to. Crashing isn't the hugest deal, but without mid-day saves, having to redo a whole 10-15 minute day you already did is super annoying. The translation also isn't unreadable, you can always parse out what it's trying to say, but it's just distracting enough that I found it taking me out of the game a number of times.

I'm going to come back in a month or two to replay it and see what the state of the grammar/translation and save system are like, maybe I'll be able to bump the score then.