I would forgive you for thinking it was one of the best games on the site in your first hour of playing, maybe even your first three. I adored my time with this game to begin with, because:
- Well written
- Aesthetically beautiful
- Amazing sound design
- Fantastic sex scenes with animated sprites
However... If you keep with the game, you'll realize the true horror of "Princess & Conquest", the depth of such horror that I'd wish upon no fellow fapper.
Princess & Conquest's initial presentation as a high-quality game with fantastic animations only makes the gameplay starkly more frustrating. This game is horribly designed; I cannot stress this enough.
Let me give you an example of what getting a sex scene is like for a microcosm of this game's quality:
The "Human Princess" is someone that appears early in the game as a potential candidate to develop a relationship with. The best way to build a relationship with a kingdom is to have sex with strangers that reside in said kingdom, and this can be a fun process, if not somewhat repetitive due to some monster girl species only sharing one scene.
At 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 affection, you unlock a new scene with the Human Princess.
And so, I visit her at 2.
No sex scene.
Grind for 30 more minutes.
I visit her at 4.
No sex scene.
Grind for 30 more minutes.
I visit her at 6.
No sex scene.
Grind for 30 more minutes.
I visit her at 8.
No sex scene.
Grind for 30 more minutes.
I visit her at 10.
No sex scene.
Wait...
WTF is going on? Where's the porn in my porn game?
I couldn't figure it out. I'd talk to her and there'd be no progress, she began repeating lines. There were no quests or anything particularly obvious missing. I was never told to do anything by the game. So I continued on with the game under the assumption that her content would come later. Surely?
This vicious cycle wasn't exclusive to the Human Princess either, I also experienced it with the Cat Princess and Kobold Princess before I ended up giving up.
So, despite playing for hours, why didn't I get a single sex scene with a princess? (Except the Fairy Princess, we'll get into that...)
Turns out...
1. Human Princess: To advance her relationship into something sexual, you must gift her a specific outfit, sold by a specific merchant. Okay... WHAT? I would never have done that unprompted.
2. Cat Princess: To advance her relationship, you must camp outside her kingdom. Okay... WHAT? I could have literally gone 50 hours deep and never have done that. (Also, the only way I found to travel between the north and south of the map, something you will be doing very often, is a long 3-4 minute tunnel, which SUCKED.)
3. Kobold Princess: To advance her relationship, you must raise her love to "3", well EXCUSE ME, I raised her lust to 8 and love to 2 and ended up with nothing.
Everything in this game is like this, and it gets worse. If you don't figure out these obtuse, borderline impossible, needle-in-a-haystack type advancements fast enough, some of the most attractive girls in your game world can have their content seemingly permanently locked away from you. It was day 3/4, I'd finally given in and looked at the wiki to figure out how to advance the Cat Princess's quest. Only for her to immediately be invaded when I step out of her kingdom (this is after I'd helped her win a battle on that same day) and now she refuses to talk to me and I can't advance her relationship. And this is no small criticism, the Cat Princess has some GOD-TIER animations hidden behind that quest, and this game just committed one of the biggest sins of porn games by giving me the middle finger and preventing me from seeing any of that content.
The objectives are extremely unclear, and the pacing is ruined by having such gigantic gaps between non-generic pornographic content.
And I think the most hilarious part about this is the battle fucking. The Kobold Princess won't fuck me or have her quest advanced when she has 8 Lust and 2 Love, oh no, but she will happily fuck any enemy in the overworld. Losing her vaginal, anal and nipple? virginity with ease, and even potentially getting pregnant. Oh, but will she have sex with me? Nah, I have to solve this Rubik's Cube underwater while doing a handstand first, wiki said so.
This game continues to shock me with how poor the decisions made regarding gameplay are time and time again. It'd be impressive if it wasn't so damn frustrating, and it's only more frustrating because you know there's absolute gold hidden under the shit. These animations are top tier, and I really want to try and unlock them, but I just don't care for scrawling through a giant wiki and completing exhausting step-by-step guides. We need to stop designing games with wikisyndrome. Tons of open world RPGMaker games on the site have this and it's not an acceptable practice. A game should be a complete package, and you shouldn't expect someone else to pick up the pieces and create a guide to make sense of the absolute absurdity that is buying a single, specific item from a single, specific merchant to advance the relationship of one of the first Princesses you meet.
Also, a lot of princesses have "routes" that lock you out of every other princess's route. I'm here for the porn and you've just offered me a button that implies that I'm locking myself out of seeing more of it. Why would I EVER choose that option? I don't care if it's a requirement to see any of the content that I'd be locked out of in the first place, it just feels wrong to have an arbitrary lock.
And... let's say you do finally complete a quest that leads to a sex scene. Perhaps you got lucky and found one that didn't require you to reference the wiki ten times. There's a chance you might get a "CG" sex scene. Everything about the game being beautiful takes a colossal nosedive. Some may enjoy it, but I'd wager that, to most, the CG art is certainly not fappable.
Another thing to note is the writing quality dips greatly the further into the game you get. For some reason, the protagonist, John Monster Fucker, who has slept with 30 different strangers around the world to earn the affection of a single princess, gets extremely flustered at the prospect of sleeping with someone. Like... I literally just pumped a fairy full of cum behind the tree over there, why am I being skittish about fucking the Fairy Princess all of a sudden? How am I supposed to take that seriously?
This game needs a giant overhaul. Like a puzzle, it needs to be fundamentally smashed and re-pieced into a better experience for everyone. But for some reason, the game just keeps getting more extremely random additions. It's like a Jenga tower that fell over years ago, but for some reason, the developer just keeps throwing more pieces into the pile!
Not to mention, the colossal scope of this project seems to be dragging it down. This game didn't need to be this complicated, and it really doesn't add much that it is. Embarrassingly enough, this game would make a better animation gallery than it currently is. Bigger is NOT better. And the insane lag in menus, saving, and the overworld should say it all.
Here's how to improve this game instantly and massively:
1. Replace all ambiguous objectives and tie them into increasing affection.
2. Give a reward with each princess for increasing their affection.
e.g:
2 Affection: Kiss/Tease/Nudity
4 Affection: Handjob/Blowjob
6 Affection: Virgin Sex
8 Affection: Second Sex Scene
10 Affection: +Party Member
3. Remove the obtuse Princess stat function. It's far too easy to just miss the arbitrary requirements. Have it be affection-based again, where all the protagonist has to do is sleep with two NPCs of that character's species. This streamlines and focuses the game (something that it really needs).
4. Remove route locking and just enable you to have all routes simultaneously. What's the point of locking players out of content? The pacing of this game is bad enough without being more restrictive.
5. Quality of life, quality of life, quality of life. No more extremely long 5 minute journeys between the north and south. Give us fast travel, the ability to camp whenever we want, and more!
6. Time to fix the lag and rethink the Conquest System. There are clearly too many parallel processes happening at once, and the save files are so bloated with variables and switches. It's cool what you're attempting, but it's not working; the engine can't handle it. It's time to kill your darlings and figure out a better solution. I don't think anyone is really that invested in the Conquest System, which effectively only functions as a timer on locking more content from you.
7. Fix the Pacing! I make this point at the end because it ties into every point. If you complete all the other points, this one will be fixed. It takes far too long to grind for sexual content, and the game is too vapid and shallow to motivate you in any other way. Let's not kid ourselves, this game doesn't stand up to scrutiny if you remove the sex scenes. So let's try to get at least one new non-generic sex scene in the player's face per hour.
Overall, this game is like an extremely shallow pool the size of a lake. If you jump around, very rarely, you'll find a deep pitfall in this lake and drown in it. As you can imagine, it's not even worth the effort.
I recommend using a cheat to view the gallery. It's certainly not as much fun as playing a proper game and experiencing that content naturally, but it's certainly a lot more fun than playing
this game.