Volcano Princess: Be the best single dad ever!

[Baudshaw]

This game came out on gamepass, and it's pretty interesting. I watched a video on a similar style of game (Tokimeki Memorial), and it's kind of similar, where you have recurring tasks that you can do over a long but limited period of time. It's far more strategic and game-ified than I realized, but it fits into a neat experience, even if the translation is not that good.

 

[Peklo]

There are similarities in this game to classic dating sims such as Tokimeki Memorial, but more precisely Volcano Princess is part of the "raising game" subgenre codified by Princess Maker after which it's largely modeled. Long Live the Queen would be a popular fellow representative from the last decade or so--and a slight break from the baseline in that you don't occupy a guardian figure's perspective in it, but directly the ingenue's in question--but in formative influences they're almost all sourced to the one defining work, which helps illustrate why they're almost all about young girls looked over by father figures, handled varyingly well (another exception regarding that aspect: Wonder Project J, about the coming of age of a robot boy).

 

[Baudshaw]

Oh, that’s interesting. Anyways, I decided to go into the martial path mostly, plus a beeline for the extra energy skills.

 

[Baudshaw]

Also, I was starting to befriend Hackett, but it turns out she's 14 and he's 20?? I guess all the actual romance stuff happens later on, but I still don't know why he wasn't aged a bit down, especially because he's kinda immature

 

[Baudshaw]

Despite that weird part I still think the cutscenes are pretty cute and funny, if a bit poorly translated. I befriended both Benson and Hackett for my adventuring party, so it's a cool coincidence how they're both already good friends.

 

[Violentvixen]

I played this on Gamepass too as I've had it on my Steam wishlist for a while. It was cute but I had a lot of bugs with the interface and the translation errors grated on me. Glad I finally got to play it and as you noted there's a lot of cute stuff in here, but to me it needed a lot more polish.

I like Long Live the Queen better and highly recommend you check it out. Good writing, fun characters, great art, each playthrough is pretty quick. It's only $4 on steam right now dang! It gives you the option to see what checks you're passing or failing, I strongly recommend keeping that off on your first playthrough to just experience it. After that go nuts trying to tweak your stats. We have a thread here too.

I feel I should also mention Chinese Parents although the game is weird in many ways and the core gameplay is built on matching/puzzle games rather than picking stats. The strictness of gender roles and how heteronormative it is isn't great, but there are a lot of glimpses into mundane day-to-day life in China which is interesting.