Prinny Can I Really Be the Hero? (PSP)

[aruljothi]

Release Date: 02/17/2009
ESRB Rating: Rating Pending
Genre: Action
Publisher: NIS America
Developer: Nippon Ichi

You know all those parent watchdog groups that go on and on about how video games are brain-rotting garbage that destroy your ability to be creative? Clearly they've never seen Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?, Nippon Ichi's attempt to parlay the Disgaea franchise into an action series. I've just played through the game, and I'm bursting with creativity. I've never used (or heard!) such imaginative obscenities in my entire life. George Carlin would be proud.

Oh yes: Prinny is an intensely frustrating game. Brutal. Challenging. Sometimes bordering on the impossible. It's a lot like the Disgaea games that way -- it seems cute and friendly on the surface, but then you reach the back half of the game and discover that it's all a ruse. Beneath that whimsical exterior is the blackened heart of sadistic old-school game design.

Yet despite the utter viciousness on display, Prinny is also one of those games you keep playing to the end, even when doing so makes you want to smash your head against a wall (or your PSP against a wall, anyway). Its most obvious analog is 2006's Ultimate Ghosts 'N Goblins: both games are merciless 2.5D platformers founded on the twin principles of killing players with cruel level design and revealing its deepest secrets only with repeated play. The similarities go even deeper than that: both games star a hero with fixed jump capabilities -- once you take a leap you can't adjust the angle or trajectory of your movement except by executing a double-jump. Prinny is ultimately the better game, though, because it gets a few things right that Capcom's PSP effort fumbled. They're subtle differences, but they draw a clear distinction between success and failure.

By far, the most significant advantage here is Prinny's complete lack of random elements. Every platform, every enemy has been carefully placed to make your life difficult -- but deliberately so, and always in a manner that can be counted on to behave in a consistent, predictable way. You'll still die plenty, no question about it, yet death never once feels like something that was unfair, or out of your control. That alone is the difference between merely frustrating and utterly infuriating. Prinny goads you into doing better rather than make you feel as though your hard efforts are for nothing.