Taking care of a child is quite a serious task if you ask me. You must plan ahead, tune your expenditures, help them raise awareness of their surroundings and support them with your heart until the ends meet. It takes excessive amounts of effort, I know, but seeing your own kid being successful with the help of the whole family is always worthy of believing in them at all times. Surprisingly enough, playing Volcano Princess had me going through the same steps and watching my daughter making me proud as she grew up continuously.

Prior to my experiences in gaming, I have never taken a deep interest in these sorts of genres. Volcano Princess is basically a game where you, as a father of a very cute daughter, try to raise her in the best and optimal way possible. My library of games usually tends to steer away from real-life simulators with character developments and stat-bars and all those so-called experience points. But, do not get me wrong, Volcano Princess was actually a great refresher to my overall opinion on this genre and I had fun watching my daughter grow up to be someone respectable and generous.

The Game itself is easy to pick up and play too, since everything is straight up explained in such a way that would not confuse you at all. The hints usually give a broad idea of what to expect from a new mini-game or an event that would appear as you keep playing through the story. Talking about overall progress, there were some harsh changes of pace in Volcano Princess, but it's better to talk about the general idea first and then criticize for what’s good and what’s quite unexpected.

Our story begins in the Medieval era town, located in a small place called the Volcano Kingdom. Unfortunately your wife passes away after she gives birth to your daughter. It is totally up to you to take the matter into your own hands and take responsibility for her, well, at least until she becomes an adult. Your late wife’s advice and memories project to your mind from time to time and it gives an idea of how to raise your daughter amidst the chaos that happens in the nearby forest, which I will briefly mention soon. Starting the game was actually quite easy as you are always in control of your infant daughter and she can’t mostly do things of her own.

Volcano Princess’ story starts off with your daughter being 6 years old and taking primary classes such as basic mathematics and learning how to read. Rose (the name I gave to my daughter, though you can change both your and your daughter’s name) usually had play time with her dad, visited the village's famous restaurant and lakeside for activities and got to know the local folk. Being friends with locals is an important task as it is quite important for the upcoming years.

Your daughter has 4 main stats to get built upon: Strength, Intelligence, Emotion and Imagination. These stats play a huge role as it actually affects the personality or even shape the future of your daughter. Such as, if you build upon her strength, she has a high chance of being a noble knight, or if you heavily work on Intelligence stat, she might become a highly-trained lecturer. Along with these stats, there are also three main character traits: Stamina, Mind and Charisma, to keep track of. These three act as a boost for the main stats, such as stamina boosts strength and intelligence, while charisma mainly affects emotion and imagination. There are few other uses of traits such as, according to their levels, Rose could take part-time jobs or be an actor in a stage play.

In the main stat screen, or as I would like to call it in your home, you can basically talk with your daughter, share information with her, guide her by giving little advice and plan what to do in the upcoming week. Through the home screen, you can also navigate to other places to visit and greet new people. Conveniently, home is the place you make plans about the weekly study cycle with her as well. Every week until adulthood, you need to create a weekly plan to proceed to the next week of events and courses. Planning consists of choosing lectures from a table of different options, and this is where the crucial “building your character” takes over. According to my selections per week, Rose actually gained skill points and stat boosts.

For example, my build was mostly considered on stamina and strength, and the rest of the traits were evenly spread. The reason why I wanted Rose to be involved in combat is, the forest nearby has creatures that often disturb the residents of the Volcano Kingdom, and the whole town needs new blood to keep creatures away. The game includes a turn-based RPG segment too which you can train your daughter naturally while she is taking sword lessons too. By visiting the forest with friends she gathers through her social interactions, she can take on the creatures and create close friendships.

Getting back to the education system, each week you are allowed to take a lesson per day, and they correspond to the four stats I listed earlier. There is a certain percentage to finish the said course and every time Rose took the course, she got more and more familiar with the lectures. When she finished a course, she gained a permanent stat boost on her personal traits. During her college years, she got free lectures of higher grades, it took longer for her to get a grasp, but the experience gained by them was immensely great. This sort of build-up actually leads to choosing what kind of personality you want your daughter to be and to be fair, it couldn’t be simpler.

On top of your weekly schedules, there will be some monthly events to partake with your daughter. Examples such as mathematics tournaments and huge ballrooms will help your daughter to have a better bond with you while learning how to behave as a grown-up. I feel like this is where Volcano Princess started to give its weight to keep you occupied. Events are pushed up to your face all the time and especially Rose became 12 years old, things got pretty much complicated and hard to track off of. I assume that is how real parenting feels like, but come on, I wouldn’t ever try to make my daughter become a knight in the middle of a city suburb, right?

After Rose grew to be 12 years old, as you would expect, she had a proper school life with friend groups and actual social life. Honestly, after the 12-year-old milestone, things turned south. The game, which was rather easy to manage, suddenly got a bit tedious keeping in mind every single action made by you and your daughter herself. You have to pick a lifestyle for her, and yourself as well. As weeks kept going by, Rose had to keep visiting the town to buy the required gear for school, try to earn money, keep about 15 friends in mind, spend time with your lessons OR her friends and much more… Of course, this leads to more strict parenting as well as guiding her to the path of life she wants to live but I felt like it was a bit excessive. However, it would be like a cakewalk to someone who is familiar with the real-life sim games, 

For the die-hard fans of the genre, of course, it would be a big yes. For 10USD, Volcano Princess actually allows you to have more than five different playthroughs, and even then, you wouldn’t be able to discover all the endings because Volcano Princess is quite vast when it comes to paths you can take in every playthrough. In short, it has a high replay value for a very small price. But we must warn you that you can only have one save file per game, therefore, you need to start all over again if you do not like the way your daughter is growing up. It is one of the most requested features from the developers, so we might see an update regarding multiple save files being current in the game.

Talking about developers, they have been very active since the release of the Volcano Princess and have been listening to fans’ requests. I can confirm that, as there is always a new update whenever I boot the game up. If you have any concerns or feedback about Volcano Princess, you can be sure to actually reach out to developers through their Discord channels or email address.

Now graphics and sound design are the least important topics to pick in a game like this, but Volcano Princess had a nice presentation with its well-drawn illustrations, suited background music and actually clever writing too. The game doesn’t have an English dub unfortunately, however, I must say the translation crew did a spot-on job translating Chinese to English. Most of the dialogues were quite comprehensible and had barely any errors in them. I had to use the term “barely” as there were a few dents I came across, they weren’t anything major though. Still, as I said, you can actually submit these issues to the developers to get them fixed in a jiffy.

Overall, Volcano Princess was quite a good ride in its own merit. If it had some slowdowns, they weren’t because of lack of content, it was more due to excessive content being presented to you all the time throughout the whole game. You just sometimes cannot catch a break and feel a bit stressed about what to exactly say to your friends, even more important, to your daughter. But I totally believe that’s the charm of actually building a solid character of your own. Volcano Princess is a game of a bunch of open-ends and basically a mirror of your own personality, turned into a story of helping your daughter become successful. Therefore, one simple suggestion to you before starting Volcano Princess: Choose wisely to whom you want to be known by.

AtillaTuran
Editor, NoobFeed