Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero

I will freely admit to being amused by Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?. And this is part of the game’s intent – to amuse. It’s a curious little game, this Prinny. You play as a slang-slingin’, peglegged quasi-penguin – or, rather, as one of 1000 such quasi-penguins. The innovation with Prinny (so far as I know, it’s an innovation) is that you have a finite number of lives – 1000 – with which to complete the game. Which is another way of saying that you have 1000 chances to finish the game; within each chance/life, your quasi-penguin can take three or four hits before exploding in a tragicomic fireball. Sometimes I let Prinny die just so I could see the fireball and hear him (her? it? I’m just going to coin a new, Prinny-specific pronoun) prit exclaim, with prits expiring breath, “I’m finished, d00d!”

Review of Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?
by X-34 minus 5R1-6X36

Game: Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?
Platform: PSP
Played For: 12 hours

That’s the other thing – I hesitate to call it an innovation – about Prinny: the main character speaks in a weird version of l33tsp34k. In all seriousness, Prinny may be of greater interest to linguists than to gamers; if you know a linguist, buy him or her a copy of this game. Prinny traffics in a bizarro, humorous hybrid of hacker-talk, surfer slang (incidentally, did you know that few subcultures have contributed more to American slang than that of surfing? It’s true, and here’s a nice surf lingo lexicon for you: http://www.riptionary.com/), general teenage argot, and self-reflexive gamer jargon, all presumably filtered through both English and Japanese intelligences. It’s a weird olio of linguistic nuttiness, and I have to admit it’s pretty funny. I thought it would be grating – and, here and there, it is – but, for the most part, it’s one of the more engaging elements of gameplay. Prinny has a number of stock phrases, such as “Gotta have muscle, d00d!” and “Eat it, d00d!” (the latter said whilst attacking enemies; all of Prinny’s sentences, spoken or printed on the screen, end in “d00d’; several of them begin that way, too), and they really do help establish a consistent character. Which is, I suppose, ironic, given that you play not as one Prinny but as one of 1000 interchangeable Prinnies; but, then, that’s part of the joke. The game makes many quips about the expendability and general dronelike nature of the Prinnies, and it’s kind of fun to play as a hero who is aware of prits own fallibility, if not incompetence. I think that, as a cultural meme, this whole “superhero” thing is pretty played out, anyway.

Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero? is mostly pretty fun, even if, while I played it, the 1974 pop chestnut “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero” played in my brain incessantly. But my own overexposure to 1970s AM radio is not the fault of this game. However, the Bad Things about the game are legitimately annoying, or worse. One thousand Prinnies or not, this game is difficult. I played it on “normal” difficulty, and still found myself exploding many a Prinny on every level. (I think I gave up with about 700 Prinnies left, and most stages still unconquered.) The stages within each level are fairly short, but this doesn’t mean they’re not tricky. But the trickiness does not come in the form of having to figure out a difficult sequence of moves, or of unlocking a challenging puzzle. Rather, the difficulty has everything to do with the fact that success in the game demands highly precise moves, but the game’s physics engine is frustratingly imprecise. To immobilize enemies, Prinny’s principal weapon is the (highly humorous) hip drop, in which prit double-jumps and then paralyzes said enemy with a fat slab of penguinish hindquarter. Understandably, this leaves enemies motionless, with little stars flitting about their heads. But Prinny then bounces up again, losing a couple of seconds that are precious to repositioning pritself and further incapacitating the enemy. This quirk of physics renders the battles with the bosses particularly difficult; I gave up on a couple of them. Jumping, as well, requires a terrific degree of precision, especially when Prinny encounters the soon-to-be-ubiquitous flying carpets. But precise jumping is damnably difficult with Prinny. Given that your character is a peglegged quasi-penguin, I suppose there’s some diegetic logic to this trickiness, but, still, it’s really hard to land or jump exactly where one needs to jump.

This requirement for precision in the face of great imprecision is what makes Prinny a less than-fully-enjoyable game. It’s just too damn hard. Granted, I’m not the most dextrous PSPer in the world, but 30 or 40 failed attempts to simply jump across a gap or defeat a weird bunny – this was more than enough to try my patience, and I set the game down in frustration more than once. That said, on those regrettably rather rare moments in which I got a good gaming “flow” going, Prinny is pretty damn fun – and weird. Though Prinny’s arsenal is pretty limited, a mastery of the aforementioned hip-drop is, though difficult, the key to succeeding at this game. I’d say that I acquired about 40% competency with this move, and therefore reached a middling level of satisfaction with this game.

Don’t let the apparent, self-celebrated quirkiness of Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero? fool you into thinking that you’ll be playing a lightweight, oddball, unchallenging game. It’s weird, yes, and sometimes pleasantly so; but that weirdness is more than fully offset by formidably tricky, and often frustrating, gameplay. Go for it if you have a good sense of humor, and are up for a challenge. d00d.

Will I play it more?: A solid maybe. I find gameplay fun, but the level of frustration is fairly high.