Here, your choice of skater becomes important, as the better they are at a trick, the less Heat they need to accumulate to pull it off successfully. Their approval is measured in something the game calls Heat, and the Heat also plays a part in the three required tricks you execute every time you go skating. Your difficulty setting will determine how these are laid out on screen and how quickly they’ll disappear if you don’t tap them, the player needing to build up successful taps to earn high point combos and keep the three judges pleased. The snowflakes appear on screen and have rings close in around them, the player earning the most points for tapping the snowflake right when the ring has fully wrapped around it.
#Nintendo ds ice skating game series#
However, the fact you can do just as well with the game muted is a bit of an indicator that the music choice was perhaps not the best match for this style of play.Īs for what those prompts ask of you, most of them involve a series of snowflakes numbered 1 to 9 before they loop back to repeat the sequence. However, you can almost say that the game develops its own rhythm, since each stage only really has one or two sequences of button presses it uses that do have a groove you can settle into. Princess on Ice decides to blaze its own trail with its prompts, your inputs only sometimes lining up with the song or your dancer’s movements. This might come from the fact the game uses appropriate but calm classical music for much of its skating challenges, meaning that the player wouldn’t have much to follow if they were accurate to the beat. Most rhythm games will have on-screen prompts the player needs to follow that match the beat of the music, but Princess on Ice’s prompts just seem to be doing their own thing most of the time. Princess on Ice is billed as a rhythm game, but it seems to ignore the usual construction such games follow. The dip into strangeness doesn’t effect the girls or how you’ll be skating though. and in front of royalty, but things take off into strange directions when you skate in Egypt in front of the Sphinx, down at the South Pole, and in a Mermaid Arena that might actually be meant to be underwater. Things start grounded if a bit fanciful, moving from skating at a fair to skating on T.V. Another unexpected direction for the game comes in where the girls are skating. This actually does make each character’s plot almost consistent with what the other characters see on their journeys save how things turn out in the end, although strangely enough, there are bad endings to be had if you don’t skate well enough at the pivotal moment. As you skate around the world, the girls meet each other and develop a friendship, but no matter who you play as, the game sort of leans the plot towards Kelly. Depending on which girl you pick, that one will be the one who has a shot as becoming the Princess on Ice, a prestigious title that all four girls are interested in achieving. Kelly is the middle ground and de facto main character, good at all three of the special tricks, but Gabrielle, Madison, and Alyssa all excel at one type of trick to the detriment of their other skills. When playing through the main story of the game, you choose a difficulty as well as one of the four girls to be your main character.
Regardless of which visual direction you prefer, Princess on Ice plays the same in all countries. It’s difficult to tell which of the four girls in the English version of the game are meant to match their supposed personality types, with personality traits like “bookish” and “prone to playing pranks” just assigned to them rather than having some clear design element or set of expressions to indicate that is their personality. and Europe instead got four girls wearing a bit too much makeup and all wearing the same three large bracelets on each arm. The four skaters seem to have more character and personality in their original Japanese designs, while the U.S. While anime aesthetics can be a bit generic due to their prevalence, in this case, the anime look seems like it would have been the preferable direction. While not actually a case of gaming censorship, Princess on Ice is a Japanese title that received an art style overhaul when translated for the West, removing its anime influences in favor of something a touch more realistic.
A game like Princess on Ice isn’t likely to get even a second glance from most gamers, but it ended up on my personal radar thanks to an interesting video made by the Censored Gaming Youtube channel.