Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero is a tough game. Get hit by anything while jumping and you plummet to the ground (if you’re lucky) or into a bottomless pit. Since you can’t recover in mid-air expect to repeat jumps dozens of times just to get the timing down. I’m not kidding. You’re either going to love the old school feel or loathe it.
At least Nippon Ichi is generous. Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero has a healthy supply of checkpoints and you start the game with 1,000 lives. If you’re patient you should be able to get through Prinny without losing all of them. Cautious players can also make multiple saves as emergency life conserving checkpoints.
But, what happens if you actually use all 1,000 lives? It’s game over until you reload your last save. Nippon Ichi does give you a consolation prize for you. Highlight the text to see what it is.
You get an “ending” with Usagai and Plenair reporting on the sorry state of the Prinny Squad’s culinary crusade. You also unlock the Prinny Bomb move which is a meteor shower of exploding Prinnies. As long as you hold R + square Prinnies continue to rain from the sky, but each time a Prinny explodes you lose a life.
The real challenge of Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero is collecting trinkets. Orbs that unlock extra options are hidden in stages. The first one you get lets you save the game. Good thing you automatically get this orb in the beginning of the game. Other orbs open up the stage recording feature and open completed stages. Revisiting levels is important if you want to find Lucky Idols, hidden monsters revealed by butt stomping the ground. One neat element is levels are slightly different depending on the order you visit them. All of the stages are easier in the beginning. Bridges help players with jumps and enemies are often reduced. This eases players into Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero’s strenuous challenge a tiny bit.
Food for thought:
1.) I wish Prinny came with a level editor. Even a simple one that let’s players place existing sprites would have been awesome.
2.) What happened to the Japanese voice track? We have two builds of Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero an early one with English text/Japanese voices and a later one with English text and voices. Unless NIS America hid the Japanese track in an orb there isn’t an option for the original voices in the final version. This is unexpected since most NIS America published games have voice options.
3.) Which existing characters will Nippon Ichi make playable if they remake this? Prinny Laharl seems like an obvious choice.
