Princess Maker 2

This is one fucking hilarious game. I was looking for a nice simulation game, maybe Harvest Moon or SimCity, but I noticed on Wikipedia this game: Princess Maker 2
The premise is intriguing. You raise your daughter into a princess, a prostitute, or 72 jobs in between. I had to try it!

So first thing I noticed in this old DOS game is the interface. It's pretty primitive, so things don't work as well as you'd hope. Also, it's an unreleased English translation, so there are several mistranslations.

Now for the story. It's really stupid. There's an unnecessarily long prologue describing who you are. Basically you're a knight who saved a corrupt king from the prince of darkness, who was under direct instruction of god, which is really weird. Anyways, you defeated the prince, he retreated, the king thanks you and promises he'll be good. NONE of this plays a role in the ACTUAL story.

So you're chilling one day and there's a shooting star that lands right in front of you or something. Inside is a 10-year old girl. Then some god/goddess comes and explains that you have to raise her. What's interesting is it first asks you what you want her birthday to be, which affects which god/goddess is her guardian (it's based on her horoscope). What's weird is it also asks for your birthday, but nothing ever happens on your birthday. It also asks for her blood type, which is more important in Japan where they consider that also. Anyways, this questionnaire takes place before the long prologue. To continue...

After you get the kid, the game starts. You have this weird demon-creature butler (this whole world is infested with magical demons, but the one working for you has no powers!!). You get a lot of options and it looks like you get a great deal of control over your kid--greater than you actually have. You can change her diet to make her gain, keep, or lose weight. You can take her to the market and buy her a meal, clothes, weapons and armor, or to donate to the church. You can talk to her (ask how she's doing, ask how her studies are, or just small talk). You can send her to the castle to socialize. And you can plan out her schedule for the month, which is the most important one.

I say that you don't get that much control because you do this at the end of every month. You interact with your daughter once a month! Anyways, planning the schedule is important for developing her skills. As Napoleon Dynamite phrased it, "Girls only date guys who have good skills!" Same works for your daughter. Each month is divided three ways and you choose what she does for each third. So she'll be in school for a little over a week if you want her to. She can also work, take an adventure, or relax.

School is the best way to raise her stats. She can take science, poetry, fencing, dance, and some other things, each raising certain stats. Some lower other stats, which is interesting. For example, the more she studies science, the more her intelligence goes up, the lower her faith goes. I actually like this, because it makes it easy for my girl to be an atheist. Unfortunately, tuition is expensive. It's about 40G per DAY. Unfortunately, you can't keep her studying.

Work is a good way to earn money, but you need good stats to get good money. Without good stats, the employer yells at her and docks her pay. Even if she fails, her stats slowly increase through work, and some of them are stats that don't increase through school, like cooking (there's no cooking school for some reason). As she gets older she can get tougher jobs like hunting or lumberjacking or cabaret dancing.

Stress is the big problem in this game. The more she works or studies, the more stressed she gets. And if her stress levels are high enough, she'll stop working and become delinquent. If it keeps getting worse, she gets sick and dies. To reduce her stress you have to let her rest by going out on the town or going on vacation to help her relax.

So I realized something really stupid. Your character is a hero who saved the kingdom, but he's in a fixed income of like 100G a month and an extra 500G a year. This really sucks because everything is fucking expensive. School averages 40G/day. When she goes to town, she'll ask for money, and if you give her, she's taking like 100G. You don't have to give her money, but her stress won't go down as much. If she's delinquent, she'll take money even if you say no. So basically it's impossible. I got so tired of this that I got bored and decided to kill her. It was actually pretty funny, because the butler kept trying to change her diet from the anorexic one I chose to the weight-gain one, and I kept changing it back. Her stress went up so much that she had to lie in bed. And when you ask her how she's feeling she says "This is the end for me... have a long life, dad" Owned. Eventually she died, just barely reaching age 12.
SO I found a cheat to give me more money, which actually allowed me to do something.

There are RPG elements to the game, which make no sense. She can go on an adventure, which means you control her in an RPG minigame, fighting monsters and looking for secrets. It's really pointless unless you can afford tons of weapons and training. In fact strength is only useful for gaining a reputation, which will cause random townsfolk to attack her, and if you win, your reputation goes up even more. It's also useful for the harvest festival, where there's a fighting tournament.

The harvest festival takes the entire month of october. She participates in one of four events: dance, cooking, art, fighting. My girl's cooking skills were maxed out but she still got only 9 points (the winner got 180 points). Apparently you can't cook with a low "sensitivity" stat. They give you useless prizes if you win.
Eventually my girl got a rival. Some girl in her dance class challenged her and my girl won. Owned.

One thing that really really bothered me is the physical growth. She starts out like 4'8" with no tits or ass, weighing like 70 pounds. Well she's 10 years old, right? Her breasts were slowly growing, so I decided to speed up the growth for when she becomes a prostitute. There are pills that increase her size 3/4 an inch. I gave her a lot so by age 12 she was size 36. I didn't realize she hadn't finished puberty, so by the time she was 18 her size was 42, which is bigger than even most porn stars. Her hip size was like 32 and her waist was 20. She weighed under 110 pounds. But she was sooo short. At age 18 she was 5 feet tall. WTF!! I guess I set her up for back problems...
Oh and I bought this really really slutty dress for her, but she couldn't fit in it because you have to weigh like 90 pounds to get in it. As soon as she could fit, she started starving.

So there's a social factor in this. The better your stats are, the easier it is to socialize with people in the castle. You have to work your way up, talking to the lowly castle guard until you're popular enough to talk to someone more important. What's funny is the first time I tried, the guard told me to find someone more important, meaning I had enough popularity points, but I still got rejected from everyone else. Anyways, it actually helps because the merchants sell you stuff for cheaper if you're popular and the judges at the harvest festival inflate your score a lot.

So I trained my daughter to win all the harvest festival competitions and I gave her huge tits and I got her to age 16. That's when I started making her work at the sleazy bar, where she flirted with drunk people. One day, some old guy is all "Would you like to be my mistress? I'll pay you 165G a month." She's all "Haha, okay, sure, nice to meet you!" Owned. What's funnier is the demon guy is all "uh oh that can't be good. Would you like to scold her?" and I'm all "Fuck you, if that's what she wants to do, who am I to say no!" Owned.

Unfortunately, I failed. She didn't become a prostitute like I hoped. Instead she ended up some sort of bandit.

Such a funny game...