Prinny Can I Really Be the Hero? is one of my all time favourite games, and I feel it gets misunderstood an awful lot. Sure Prinny was difficult, but if you can get past that you’ll find a great game with a ton of replay value. My play time on Prinny CIRBTH is 71+ hours, and I’ve done pretty much everything in the game. With a game that I adore so much, it would be quite difficult for any sequel to match it. Well Prinny 2: Dawn of Operation Panties, Dood! has been released, and guess what? It doesn’t hold up to the standards of the original. I’ll fully admit that I haven’t completed Prinny 2 yet, but I HAVE played through the first six stages where you can choose them in whichever order you like. So what’s wrong with this follow up? Well let’s take a look.



First of all, let’s take a look at the main character, and compare him to his counterpart from the first game.

In Prinny CIRBTH, Prinny was naïve, stupid, and carefree, but he was also a nice guy for the most part. The fact that he was on such a dangerous mission, yet so accepting of it made him a strangely hilarious character. Sure his comrades were getting murdered, but for him it’s just an ordinary day at work, and still has a pretty bright attitude. His voice was also a joy to listen to, not just because he had a lot of funny lines, but because all of his emotions were completely over the top. He was all around a really likable character, and he was a character that I was really rooting for the whole way through. Everyone likes an underdog, especially when the underdog is a nice guy that is deserving of a reward.

The Prinny in Prinny 2 had none of the traits that made him likable in the first game. His voice was changed to a more generic voice which decided to ditch most of the over the top emotions, and instead of a bright carefree attitude he was hit with the asshole stick and now spews insults and back talks with every other line. Now granted an asshole character can be great fun so long as the insults are funny, but they don’t even get that right. Much like everything else he says, his insults are so bland and emotionless that they just make me want to punch him. Due to all of this, Prinny isn’t likable, and I don’t want to root for him anymore. I’m rooting for Etna to blow his brains out so he can’t be a dick anymore. You know a Prinny is unlikable when you’re more willing to side with ETNA than it.

Next on the list is the feeling of accomplishment. Prinny is a notoriously hard game, but one of the big reasons why it’s such a joy to play is that every victory feels like you just got your report card back and saw that you got straight A+ marks. A very big part of that feeling of accomplishment was the victory music when awarded with something. The victory song after beating a boss, the song on the results screen, and the song when getting a netherworld award all feel extremely victorious, and as you sit there listening to it you feel that you’re slightly better than everyone else.

Now in Prinny 2 that feeling of accomplishment is severely decreased because none of the music sounds all that victorious. It takes one of the best parts of Prinny 1, and makes it much worse. I realize that saying “the victory music isn’t as good” sounds like an extremely petty complaint, but unless you’ve played both games, you really don’t understand just how big of an impact it makes.



What’s worse is when you get a netherworld award. The netherworld awards are special medals you can get for pulling off significant accomplishments, such as simply beating the game, to getting 50 S Ranks. In the original game these are such a joy to get because you work so damn hard for them, but the victory is so great that you really feel proud. A camera crew comes up to you and awards it to you, and there’s a great song in the background that I’d always sit and listen to for a while. Now in Prinny 2 the camera crew is still there, but the music is completely bland and not celebratory at all, and the camera crew now has distracting voice acting. Adding those voices really hurts that victorious moment somehow, and rather than feeling proud about getting an award, I just felt annoyed when I had to listen to the host’s annoying voice. As I said, this all sounds petty, but believe me when I say it’s a big issue.

However probably one of the biggest issues for me personally was the addition of stage specific hazards. Now a lot of people complained that Prinny 1 had very little variety, and to this day I object to that. After all, did the original Super Mario Bros. have much variety? Did Ninja Gaiden have much variety? Just because Prinny was on more capable hardware and had the possibility for more variety, didn’t mean it was really required. The stage specific hazards in Prinny 2 were not only poorly handled, but one in particular threw away everything we had been taught about how to play Prinny.

Prinny is all about patterns. Everything you do will result in a set pattern, meaning that once you figure out where to stand, when to jump, when to attack and so forth, you could discover a pattern that could get you through the stage no problem, and once you found that pattern you could do it every single time. There’s a certain stage in Prinny 2 where there’s a thing in the background that shoots fireballs at you, and you can stop it from shooting for a brief time if you hit certain switches to attack it. It’s not a big deal at first, but at the final checkpoint there’s a part where you have to do some vertical platforming while that thing shoots fireballs at you. No matter how hard I tried, I could not find a pattern that worked, and it dawned on me that it was shooting them at random. I might be wrong about that, but no matter what I tried, I couldn’t get it to shoot in a consistent pattern.

Because of the way Prinny is designed, there’s basically no room for twitch reflexes. Unless you know exactly what to do, the chances of you making it through the stage are slim. When a game that centers around patterns suddenly throws in something that’s completely random, the game completely falls apart. It’s completely unfair, and there’s no excuse for such a poor choice.



Another problem with Prinny 2 is the story. Now of course it seems unfair to criticize the story in a platformer, but I have a good reason. In Prinny 2 the goal is to retrieve Etna’s stolen panties, and for the first six stages you get a rare item at the end of them to put in a trap to lure the thief. In the original game the goal was to collect ingredients for the ultra dessert, and since the sort of items you often got were things like monster toenails, it was much funnier that they were being put in food, rather than just a trap.

The final thing that stinks about Prinny 2 is that in the normal mode you now only have two spare hits before you die. Three hits and you’re dead. In Prinny 1 you got four hits on normal mode, and it was possible to regain health through a combo meter. This design is still in Prinny 2, but it has been turned into the baby mode. This is really unfortunate because the health system in baby mode is a much better design, but the levels themselves have been made easier too. It strikes me as a bit of a kick in the face that they disguise a poor design choice as “hard mode”.

But in the end, is Prinny 2 bad? Well I’m not entirely sure how to react to that. In the eyes of a lot of people, Prinny 1 was bad because it was just too hard, and at first glance had a lot of poor design choices. However once you sit down and get into it, you may be surprised to find that it’s actually a really well designed game, and that some of those “bad” design choices actually work to the game’s advantage. I don’t think the same can be said for Prinny 2. The bad design choices they made for the sequel are simply bad, and no matter how much I love the original, I cannot excuse these choices. My advice? Pick up the original game, and ignore Prinny 2. The complaints above may seem petty, and most of them only really apply if you’ve played the original, but if you have played the original, trust me when I say they really add up. Prinny 1 is just a better designed game, and thus I cannot really recommend Prinny 2.