Princess Maker 2 Regeneration Game Review – Game Review

The original Princess Maker 2 game was released thirty years ago, in 1994, and hasn’t gone away since. Some English-language players may remember the version for DOS (or DOS Box, depending on your age), but it did eventually get an official release, followed by two refinements: Princess Maker 2 Refine and now Princess Maker 2 Regeneration. The latter is the thirtieth-anniversary release localized by Bliss Brain. While it’s still basically the same game, it features some new art, voiced lines (including the heroine), and constantly open stat windows so that you can better monitor your progress.

As the inclusion of stats suggests, Princess Maker 2 Regeneration is, like all of the other games in the franchise, a childrearing sim. The game’s premise is that you are the hero of the war against the demons, and as a reward for your bravery, the gods grant you a daughter to raise from age ten to age eighteen. Which god you specifically interact with is determined by the birthday you choose for your child – you also get to choose her name and your own, which becomes her surname – and the blood type you pick will also affect her starting stats, with B being the one that’s easiest for new players to work with since it lowers stress by two points. The gameplay involves setting her schedule for each month, with a choice between education, work, errantry (adventuring), and time off. Every choice you make affects her stats, and the idea is to aim for one of seventy-four specific endings. Needless to say, with that many possible endings, the replay value is high.

Ostensibly, the goal is really to raise your daughter to be the princess, as in she marries the prince. Technically, you can get her to be three different kinds of princess – she can marry a human prince, a dragon prince, or go over to the dark side and become a demon princess. (In an incident that has become a family legend, one of my sisters was aiming for the in-game equivalent of dominatrix but overshot, ending up with a demon princess instead.) She can also bypass the prince altogether and become the queen or one of the king’s concubines. If you don’t like the idea of raising a daughter just to marry, that’s fine – the majority of the endings are actually job-related. There’s a wide variety of work, from the refined (prime minister, artist, knight) to the basic (innkeeper, lumberjack, lady-in-waiting) to the more questionable (bar wench, harlot, crime boss). In the Steam and Nintendo Switch versions, you can also have your daughter grow up to marry you or the butler Cube, but those endings have been excised from the PlayStation releases, along with the purchasable item “buxom pill.”

As you might guess, there are still some very sexist overtones to the game that were frankly not okay in the 1990s and definitely aren’t now. Many of the father-daughter conversations have your child talking about cooking and cleaning or her bust size even when that’s completely irrelevant to what she’s doing in classes or for work, and conversation options with the people at the palace also tend towards remarks about women pleasing men. Yes, the game is pseudo-Medieval in setting, but given that plenty of traditionally male jobs are endings, it feels particularly unpleasant. Additionally, managing your daughter’s weight is a piece of the game, with three options for meal size, which could be an issue if you’ve dealt with disordered eating.

The key to the game is figuring out what balance of various stats you need to achieve your desired ending. For example, working as a Hunter will raise combat skills but lower refinement, making it more difficult to talk to higher-ranked people at the palace, a must for any royal endings. Studying science will raise intelligence but lower faith and magic. This means that if you want to balance things, you might raise intelligence with science classes and then raise faith by having your daughter work at the church. Each ending requires a different balance of stats, and part of what I always found fun about the game was the trial-and-error of determining what stat combinations would land you what ending. In my experience, the two easiest endings to get are housewife and harlot. While others are fairly intuitive (a nun requires high faith and morality, and a soldier requires a high fighting reputation), some need careful balancing. Stress also needs to be managed alongside the more class-based areas, as high stress will have a deleterious effect on her progress and can also cause her to run away.

Alongside these elements, the game has an option for “errantry,” which is when you send your daughter out on an RPG-style adventure. This plays just like an old-school JRPG, and it’s a nice variation on the gameplay, although if you send her out with too few skills, she’ll die, and you’ll lose progress as she “recovers at home.” Additionally, you can purchase items to help raise some stats or make her more comfortable in hot or cold weather, with various weapons and armor available for her adventures. Once a year, the kingdom holds a festival, which can be very helpful; winning any of the competitions will garner a hefty sum necessary for attending classes, as the 500 gold a year the kingdom grants you is emphatically not enough. Periodically, a traveling fortune teller will stop by and evaluate your daughter’s progress for a fee, which is how you can get an idea of what route she’s on and make adjustments as necessary.

Princess Maker 2 Regeneration is a fun game despite its issues. The multitude of endings gives it high replay value, and while the new art isn’t markedly different from earlier iterations, it is still nice. The translation is smooth for the most part, and the addition of voiced lines is a plus. Not being a fan of censorship, I can’t entirely recommend the PS4 and PS5 versions because of the removed content, but if you’re a fan of raising sims (child or otherwise), this is worth checking out. You don’t necessarily need to rebuy it if you own an earlier version, but if you’re still playing that DOS Box one, this is a nice chance to have an official release with all the bells and whistles.