Volcano Princess

A fun time-management life-sim with great visuals and a wide variety of content that's enjoyable despite some of its rougher edges. Reminiscent of something like Long Live The Queen you raise your daughter by picking activities, classes, talking to people, earning money to buy items, and another wide variety of mechanics. It's a bit overwhelming at times but intuitive enough that I always had a rough idea of what to do, so it never really hindered me. They smartly start you off with a few less options when your daughter is still young, and slowly introduce some more as time passes. Although sometimes interacting with it all can be a bit of busy-work, there's enough variety here that I never truly found myself bored with it. A downside is the English translation, which isn't very good. It's not terrible, and I was perfectly capable of following along with every conversation, but there's quite a few typos, graphical glitches, and some of the conversations can feel a bit stilted and I found myself skipping through some of them because of it. It definitely helps that the character concepts and art are strong enough to carry these relationships, and pretty much every character in the game has something interesting going on with them for you to discover. It also feels like the world has a lot of mysteries to uncover, but - at least after my first playthrough - I was still left with plenty of questions, and I'm unsure whether subsequent playthroughs will really expand on it, but regardless the ending I got still felt satisfying. Another point is the combat. There's a JRPG-style turn-based combat system in one area that's decently fleshed out (although a bit restrictive at times), but it was pretty fun to figure out some good strategies there. But there's also a whole separate combat system that's used for duels (and another area later in the game), that's really strange. It has absolutely no player input, the visuals turn to a very basic pixel-art style with barely any animation, and there's not even a background to these fights. Turns in this sytem happen completely automatically and there's some text log that explains what happens but it goes by way too quickly to actually parse it. It really just comes down to hoping the game decides you hit more and harder than your opponent so they die before you. There's some stats that determine your health and attack, but I have no idea how these correlate to your stats in the rest of the game, nor how it correlates to the actual damage you do in the fights, so it all just feels completely random, making it quite a feel-bad. This caused me to rarely engage with the mechanics that relied on this, which was kind of a shame. An absolute win for this game is the visuals though. Your daughter looks incredibly cute, and all of the other characters have interesting and good-looking designs. All of the other art - from the backgrounds to the chibi characters to the (ending) CGs - look absolutely fantastic, and it all made this game a joy to look at. This game definitely won't be for everybody. I think Volcano Princess is a great-looking life-sim that (mostly) plays well and has a lot to offer in terms of characters, story, and visuals. Some of the rougher edges might push you away if you're not already a fan of the genre, but I don't think any of them were bad enough to get in the way of my enjoyment. So if Volcano Princess sounds like something up your alley, I'd definitely recommend giving it a try!