A lot of people have great memories of beat ‘em up games, playing co-op with your friends in Streets of Rage when you were a kid, or playing Double Dragon with your brother in your living room. It says something special about arcade style beat ’em ups when they end up providing some of people’s fondest memories of their gaming childhoods, so does Code of Princess stand up to this rose-tinted view of one of retro gaming’s favourite genres? Well, yes and no.
Code of Princess is an RPG/beat ‘em up hybrid from Studio Saizensen originally exclusively for Nintendo’s 3DS handheld, now getting a release to PC via steam on April 14th. Obviously, 3DS to PC ports are pretty rare, so it’ll be interesting to see how the transition from the handheld to PC has gone.
The first thing I can immediately notice is that the port hasn’t changed too much. The secondary screen is displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen by default, and as with the Nintendo 3DS version it is primarily used to display the stat screen or the moves list. While this information isn’t strictly necessary during gameplay, it probably would have been for the best if this information was transitioned to a pause screen, so that more of the screen space could be devoted solely to the actual gameplay.
Another interesting factor about the port is that the controller mapping leaves something to be desired. It’s not made extremely obvious if the keys have been remapped once you try to do so, and once you have remapped the controls, the button which accepts the changes is swapped to the new button mid-way through accepting said changes, meaning that it can be very tricky to actually get the game to accept new controls. Other than these minor issues however, the game has survived the transition mostly unscathed, and doesn’t look too bad on an HD monitor.
Graphically the game is okay, obviously coming from the 3DS, the models look a little fuzzy but not to the point that you can’t tell what or who everything is. The drawn graphics look very smooth and have scaled up to the higher resolutions nicely, with many of them looking like they were drawn with HD in mind. The cut scenes are very well animated, and could almost be confused for something that came from a companion anime series as opposed to animated exclusively for the game itself.
Code of Princess’ story concerns a barely dressed princess whose home is attacked by monsters. After taking a holy sword on the orders of her father, she must journey to destroy the evil queen who is attacking the land and telling lies to the people. The story is pretty basic but tends to shine in the humor area, with many fourth-wall breaking references to RPGs and sly references to gaming in general. Although I rarely care about the actual events of the story, I do find myself drawn to the different characters who are all at least subtly endearing.
Getting into the meat of the game, we find a very simple system that, nevertheless, takes a little getting used to. The game supplies four tutorials to help explain some of the basics of the gameplay and they are vital if you’re going to try and get into this game. You get your basic heavy attack, light attack one-two punch as well as blocking, dodging, and switching between 3 possible lanes to attack different enemies and move past obstacles. Most of this is pretty standard for beat ‘em up gameplay, although the fact that you are fixed to one of the three lanes until you specifically tap a button to move yourself does eliminate the common issue of accidentally missing an enemy because they’re on a different lane than you.
Another interesting facet to the combat is that you can do a special attack that locks onto an enemy. While locked on to said enemy you do double damage to it. You also have a ‘burst’ mode that also doubles your damage, so if you target an enemy and then activate burst mode you do quadruple damage, making a lot of the earlier bosses a cake walk.
Despite the simplicity of the combat, it can take a while to master with many characters being unlocked as you make your way through the game. Each character has their own move list and their own independent XP meter, so you can either spend ages leveling up the character you like the most, or you’ll spend a lot of time grinding up everyone’s stats so you can learn their moves. Once you get the hang of the game’s mechanics however, you can find yourself getting sucked in and the constant addition of new characters, side missions, and online multiplayer will probably keep you playing for a very long time.
The biggest issue that I had with the game stems from the fact that it was not what I was expecting. When I saw that the game was being sold as a beat ‘em up I was excited, my memory immediately conjuring up images of those long days playing Streets of Rage as a child. This game is fundamentally different to most beat ‘em ups, however, the fact that all level progression is done through a list of missions on a menu and not on a map screen or directly through the animated cut scenes makes the missions all feel like separate instances and not an overall world were the characters and areas exist. This game has more in common with tournament fighters than it does with beat ‘em ups, with the huge roster of characters and the completely isolated environments to do short fights in it feeling more like Mortal Kombat than Streets of Rage.
Developer: Studio Saizensen
Publisher: Degica
Platform: Nintendo 3DS, PC
Release Date: 14th April 2016