It was easy to fall in love with Fat Princess. Before smaller (and usually) independent games consumed the majority of release calendars, they were relegated to the outskirts of tradeshows and championed by an impassioned few. Flower and PixelJunk Eden were certainly highlights of Sony’s indie presence at E3 2008, but Fat Princess stood as the tallest little guy in the room. Competitive real-time strategy was basically non-existent in the console space, and Fat Princess’ cartoony world and buckets of blood made a case for both substance and style, respectively.
Fat Princess Adventures looks to do for cooperative hack ‘n slash what its predecessor did for real-time strategy. This seems fine until you consider how sharply the gaming landscape has pivoted in the last half-decade. Fat Princess, which once passed for edgy and attractive, is now at greater risk of homogenizing into the ether. Not only does its newly-adapted genre have some rough competition (including Gauntlet: Slayer Edition, which is a free PlayStation Plus game in December), but its style—referential humor laced with cartoony poise and gratuitous violence—is vaguely out of sync.
It sure tries like hell though. The omniscient narrator returns to provide candid instruction and rude commentary. Your own character is outfitted with dozens of one-liners, all with a cutesy pitched-up voice and references running the gamut of Bette Midler, Mork & Mindy, videogame review tropes, Oldsmobiles that have been dead for twenty years, Antoine Dodson, and late 80’s children’s infomercials. Not everything your character says sticks, especially once it inevitably starts repeating ad nauseam, but my god the writing team threw everything they had at the wall. My only gripe is some of the material was meme’d into oblivion years ago.
Visually, Fat Princess Adventures is right in sync with its namesake. It still looks like a cherubic animated featured and it’s still outlined with copious amounts of blood (which can thankfully be turned off if Fat Princess Adventures is being consumed by younger players). Hats, a mechanic that was used to define different classes, is still in play, albeit from a different perspective. Your hat always falls off when you’re killed and the same trick is played upon most of the hordes of bad guys you slaughter. I don’t think it means anything other than a wink and nod at some sort of continuity, but this literal tip-of-the-cap is an appreciated.
While hats aren’t a defining feature of Fat Princess Adventures, shifting classes still plays an important role. Every checkpoint comes with the option for the player to shift between warrior, mage, engineer, and archer roles. All of these classes break down into familiar archetypes. The warrior and engineer or both melee based with the warrior focusing a bit more of self-defense. Mage and archer are both great and ranged combat, though in my opinion the archer received more generous upgrades throughout the game.
Progression is handled through character levels. The higher level you are, the better chance you’ll receive more powerful gear either from loot drops or treasure chests. Initially armor, weapons, shields, and helmets are all about defense or attack numbers. Gold can be found out in the field and used to upgrade the basic attributes of any piece of gear.
As Fat Princess Adventures carries on, buffs or bonuses, like elemental effects, critical attack chances, or health restoration, are affixed to certain pieces of equipment. Each class gets its own gear and it’s tossed out of treasure chests or vanquished foes at random. This not only acts as a functional lure to switch things up, but it also allows the player to keep pace with classes that are otherwise sitting idle.
There’s a respectable loot loop running through Fat Princess Adventures, but it’s all in service of a shallow combat system. A two-button hack ‘n slash wasn’t necessarily destined for an abyss of gameplay, but weak enemy variety and rote tactics don’t even make it to the deep end. There are enemies that divide when you hit them, or leave a trail of poison, or annoyingly teleport all over the screen. Larger brutes require a bit more ingenuity but, playing as the warrior, shield-bashing them always opened up a weak point. It’s more challenging when they arrive in massive numbers, but even this approach falls to the almighty change-up move.
Thanks to a charitable check-pointing system, where every normal enemy you destroy stays dead for quite a while, most of Fat Princess Adventures challenge evaporates. You just bash away and if you die it doesn’t really matter. This even includes brief environmental tasks, like navigating through deadly ice fields or over and around massive aerial vines. The lone exception arrives with a handful of boss fights which, while generously outlined with fodder enemies and health pick-ups, demands a bit of foresight to bring down that massive health bar.
Challenge, ironically, arrives once portions of the game are cleared. Grindhouse is a separate mode that breaks levels out of Fat Princess Adventures’ open world and then revises them with class restrictions and other difficulty modifiers. Along with higher difficulty options Grindhouse is probably the best way to boost your levels and grind out (get it?) better gear, should you want to progress down that path. Additionally there are a dozen or so normal fetch-friendly side-quests that populate the base game, but most of them only reward in gold and (almost) all of them can be accomplished incidentally.
I suppose the overarching purpose of Fat Princess Adventures isn’t necessarily days of grinding loot or inventive mechanics, but rather a good enough dive into friendly monster bashing. A qualifier arrives if you’re committed to play alone, which, while functional, transitions into a ceaseless slog of repeating the same performance over and over again. In the event that you also have the cheaper-by-the-day Diablo III in front of you, or the literally free Gauntlet waiting on PlayStation Plus, Fat Princess Adventures becomes even harder to recommend.
Fat Princess Adventures doesn’t have the sustainability or subversive humor that vanilla Fat Princess achieved, but it’s fine as a decent way to have a good time with your buddies. If this is what keeps Fat Princess alive and breathing until we can have a proper follow-up called Height/Weight Proportional Princess or Who Cares What Her Body Type Is You Judgmental Monster, I’m all for it.
