Code of Princess

My honest first impression of Code of Princess was 'Guardian Heroes with an anime obsession and a character designer who clearly lost a bet about armor coverage.' That lineage is not accidental: the director, character designer, and lead programmer from Sega's Guardian Heroes are all on record as contractors here, and the influence runs deep from the three-lane plane-switching combat to the way large enemy crowds threaten to murder your frame pacing. If you loved that Saturn classic, this is the closest spiritual successor available on PC, for better and worse. The combat loop itself has more going on than it first appears. You work with light and heavy attacks, a Lock-On system that doubles damage on a single targeted enemy, and a Burst mode that also doubles damage, meaning chaining both together produces a satisfying quadruple-damage window on bosses that rewards a bit of tactical thought rather than pure button smashing. Rail-switching between the foreground, middle, and background lanes adds a spatial layer that keeps crowd control from being purely reflexive. The four main campaign characters, Solange (sword-swinging fighter), Ali (agile thief with smoke bombs), Zozo (magic-focused, wrecks heavily armored foes), and Allegro (bard whose music is somehow a weapon), each have distinct enough movesets to warrant learning the timing differences. Past the campaign, Free Play opens up an absurd roster of over 50 unlockable characters, which on paper sounds wonderful and in practice means a lot of single-purpose novelty fighters with shallow individual depth. Here is where the RPG layer starts working against the game rather than for it. Each character maintains a separate XP pool, which on the 3DS made bite-sized sessions feel rewarding. On PC, sitting down for a longer stretch, the grind becomes obvious fast. If you want to seriously explore the roster past the main four, you are looking at repetitive stage farming that feels more like obligation than discovery. The per-level stat allocation system, where you freely distribute points after leveling up, sounds like meaningful agency but the correct answer is almost always dumping into your damage stat. Equippable items and accessories add a thin layer of variety, and finding a piece of gear that enables HP regeneration during Burst mode does genuinely change how survivable some fights feel, which hints at the more interesting build game hiding underneath. The PC port itself is the version most likely to leave you wanting. The game was clearly designed for a handheld with two screens: the secondary screen showing your stats and move list is just squashed into a corner of the display, controller mapping received minimal attention, and the short looping arenas that feel natural on a bus feel underbaked on a monitor. The English voice acting that existed in the original 3DS release was quietly dropped for this version, keeping only subtitles, which is a genuine regression and one the community noticed. Steam reviews sit at 55 percent positive across a modest sample, roughly matching the Metacritic score of 53, so this is not a hidden gem situation. The writing carries real charm, the fourth-wall jokes land more often than they should, and co-op with a friend genuinely elevates the experience past what solo grinding can offer. But if your idea of an RPG is systems that deepen past hour ten, Code of Princess will leave you staring at the ceiling.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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