First off, it's important to understand that everything you know about Fat Princess is a lie. While screenshots and videos will suggest that the game is about killing each other in the pursuit of an overweight bag of cakes, the actual game is a tangled mess of strategies, skill, and teamwork in the pursuit of a princess who sheds weight faster than an anorexic teenager during a famine.
Ironically Fat Princess isn't even always about the fat princess. Rescuing the princess is but one of several modes that players can enjoy, although it is the best. For straight-up massacres, team deathmatch will quench any hardcore gamer's blood lust, but it's also a training mode to sharpen those arrow dodging techniques and teamwork strategies. Then there's the capture the tower mode where teams must capture towers scattered across the map to earn points to victory. This also feels like a training mode to allow the players to be familiarized with the maps. Combining the two modes together, add a fat princess, and it's the rescue the princess mode, which is by far the most entertaining and well balanced mode in the game.
This is the mode where players will battle it out to wrestle their princesses from the other team's castle. It's the mode where workers really shine because of their importance in constructing shortcuts such as bridges, ladders, and catapults. So far, the game sounds to be pretty much what gamers expected from its announcement at E3. But the geniuses at Titan Studio has also included a soccer mode where teams are spawned as normal villagers at first, trying to kick the soccer ball into the goals. But as time passes, class hats are dropped so that villagers can become a special class in this all out killing spree.
And it really is a killing spree. Take away the trees and ledges found in other modes, players will, most often than not, forget that the game is about scoring goals; instead, the game quickly turns into a messy slapfest with burning carcasses. But it's still all in good fun, even when nobody is really playing the mode to accomplish its goal, the game never fails to be fun. When you're riding that seventeen kill streak, you'd forget that the game is about holding towers, and you won't even care.
Fat Princess isn't just great based on the modes alone, though. It's the fact that this mindless killing spree isn't mindless at all. Beneath all this red veneer, there are depth and hard choices. The depth comes from the well balanced set of classes, and the choices come from the well balanced set of upgrades. Sword warriors can be upgraded to pole warriors. Archers can be upgraded to shotgun shooters. Fire mages can be upgraded to frost mages. Healers can be upgraded to life absorbers. Workers can be upgraded to cannon ball throwers. Both variation of a single class has their own special abilities so that even when a class is upgraded, players will opt to switch between the variations depending on the circumstances. For example, sword warriors have a spinning attack that is useful for attacking clumps of enemies at a time; whereas pole warriors has a running slice attack that is useful for chasing down fleeing enemies.
As far as hard choices are concerned, aside from the expected amounts of classes and upgrades, the game throws in a twist with the fat princess, which is essentially a fat kid sitting open-mouthed at the end of a chocolate assembly line and you are the conveyer belt. Choosing to feed the princess costs valuable mining or constructing time; however, a fat prisoner does make her much more difficult to rescue, not to mention the game is called Fat Princess, which instils pangs of guilt for not actually feeding the lady to that standard.
But none of those technicalities sound fun. The fun part ultimately results from the game being easy to pick up and play, but difficult to master, making Fat Princess the perfect girlfriend game for its cuteness and the perfect hardcore gamers game. Basically, there are four buttons to understand. L1 locks on to targets. Square is the action button, such as attack or construction. Circle picks stuff up. X jumps. That's the easy girlfriend part, and it works very well. In fact, the controls are so easy and intuitive, senile grandparents with the worst case of Alzheimer's can pick this game up and be good at it almost instantly.
Fat Princess, through its controls and graphics, has accomplished what Nintendo has failed: introducing hardcore games to casual games that doesn't involve standing up and looking like a complete douche. Wait, before you hardcore Casio-calculator-watch-wearing pro gamers dismiss this review because “casual gaming” has been synonymous to “crappy games,” Fat Princess is the extreme opposite from casual games. There's skill and teamwork involved. Button mashing on this game will most definitely be rewarded with failure, albeit fun-tastic failure. For example, archers must hold their fire until there's a clear path between them and the targeted enemy, or else the arrow will wind up hitting a tree or a rock. And it is this satisfaction of pwning noobs that makes any online multiplayer fun.
In fact, Fat Princess is funny. Nothing beats killing a scrub that's been chasing you with full health all throughout the map only for that scrub to respawn for you to kill again. The fun also comes from teamwork. A warrior and a healer can rescue the princess by themselves if they are skilled enough. The rush of rescuing the princess midst the entire enemy team is unprecedented, and we're talking more satisfying than sneaking up behind an enemy with one of those taboo Gears of War chainsaws. Only after someone's attempted to rescue the princess do teams actually start working together. Players will form a meat shield around the princess to prevent the carrier from being killed, and enemies will attack from all sides, trying to break that shield.
The presentation in this game sets a new standard for Playstation Network games. The carnival soundtrack enhances the atmosphere of fun and light-hearted action thrills, and the cartoon enhanced visuals really fit the game very well. Every piece of wood that you collect and every cake that is used for fedingd look the same; however, this repetition isn't bad at all because, instead of seeing the game as this fantasy world, Fat Princess treats every aspect of the game as keys to do something, like wood is to construction. So in that sense, repetitive visuals make sense, since only one type of key can unlock one thing. But it's not just the audio or the visual that's amazing, it's the level design.
At first, the maps feel sort-of the same-ish with your shortcuts surrounding an open valley in the middle. Then, there is the lava map, which rivals even the most genius levels in Little Big Planet. It's an infuriatingly frustrating map to learn and to master, which is partly why it's growing to be so much fun. The lava rises and falls, which conceals parts of the map into death traps for amateurs who just want to rush in for some kills. Not only that, the lava creates cliffs for teams to just start massing archers to shoot across until the cliffs connect, then normal killing resumes. Just to talk about the ingeniousness of this map alone will require several dissertations, so we'll just say that it's an incredible map that players will hate at first and love later as their experience grows. And this map makes us wonder at all the wonderful DLCs that will inevitably appear in the future, especially because, as of right now, there doesn't seem to be enough maps nor is there enough classes.
There are some flaws, unfortunately. The cell shading isn't perfect like in Naruto or Dragon Ball Z, and the network connection requires more luck than hitting a royal flush in a game of Texas Hold'em. But the graphic's are ultimately not so bad that it's mildly distracting, and the connection is a mere speed bump on the way to gaming bliss. The main problem, however, is when you decide to turn on a couple of bots and go it alone in a single player brawl. The game is too balanced. The AI bots end up fighting each other to no avail, and it'll eventually comes to you single-handedly charging into the castle and trying to wrestle the fat princess from her captives, which makes each round unnecessarily long and tedious.
This brings us to the next point: co-op. Fat Princess is the perfect game for co-op play because it'll make single player much more enjoyable, thus eliminating the only major flaw of the game, and, to be honest, laughing at someone in the face is more satisfying to laughing at someone to yourself. But faulting Fat Princess for not having co-op is like faulting the PS3 for not having a 6-disc changer. Sure, it'd be a nice thing to have, but is it really a fault? No.
It's pretty obvious that Fat Princess is actually two experiences: plug in the ethernet cable, and the game is an instant classic, but disconnect the cord, and it's an instant chore. Still, though, at fifteen bucks, Fat Princess sure as hell beats mopping. So that's what Fat Princess ultimately is: a never-ending adrenaline rush, from when the game first loads until the end credits starts rolling (best credit scene ever, might we add). And it's fantastic.
