by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Prinny 1+2 Exploded and Reloaded 
• Developer: NIS 
• Publisher: NIS 
• Switch

With its fixed arc jumps and punishing difficulty, Prinny might initially seem to be an updated take on Capcom’s Ghouls and Ghosts. But spend a little more time with it and you’ll find Prinny is more about avoiding enemies than fighting them. The titular Prinnies, damned souls sentenced to serve inside explosive penguin bodies, are fragile, and they aren’t too hot with a sword either. Instead you’ll have to make use of the deceptively effective dash, which can make you completely invulnerable with the right timing. 

Weirdly technical, the dash requires charging with a spin, and has to be extended by chaining the dash back into another spin to continue it. The trick here is that the spin becomes invincible to attacks after a short time, but needs to be regulated as doing it too long, or failing to turn it into a dash,  will eventually cause your Prinny to become dizzy, making you totally vulnerable. Dashes end on their own after running out of momentum, or can be finished by ducking to turn it into an invulnerable slide. Time these well and you can fly through each level entirely invulnerable, but crucially, if you mess up any one of these steps you’ll probably eat a swift death. 

It’s tough, but it’s a hell of a lot more engaging than trying to engage with its combat, which often takes too long and halts forward momentum. Strangely enough, boss battles make that same combat into the highlight of the game, focusing on recognizing attack patterns and slamming them from above with your Hip Pound to put them into a stun state where you can inflict massive damage. Away from the chaotic level design of the main stages, the boss battles reveal a solid set of mechanics that can give the game a fun rhythm when given the right nudge. 

The sequel thankfully gets that and improves immediately on the combat with its new combo based moveset. Chaining Hip Pounds from enemy to enemy was already encouraged in the first game thanks to a combo meter, but there it only awarded points and, on occasion, an extra health point. In Prinny 2 the combo meter can be filled by not only chaining Hip Pounds, but attacking enemies and picking up food, resulting in a Break status that powers up existing attacks and extends your moveset. Spins can inflict damage, Hip Pounds can be charged for more utility, and the combo bar can be immediately emptied for a flurry of forward strikes. 

Getting hit immediately reverts you to normal, so combat still requires precision play, but these new options make it easier to carry your momentum and relieve the tedium of combat from the first game. Combat remains the secondary focus, but it’s much easier to get enemies off your back when you need to, which cuts down a lot of the time spent retrying. Alongside two alternate characters (who have some annoyingly esoteric unlock conditions), there’s a lot more variety to the combat here, to the point where it makes the first game feel like a prototype for the sequel. 

Regardless of how improved the combat is, the platforming can be as consistently frustrating as the first game. There are too many blind jumps and chaotic situations that require a very specific approach to prevent them from becoming immediately unwinnable. The series’ entire approach requires a mindset that’s ready to grind stages, until every enemy and jump has been memorized and can be effortlessly reacted to. It’s not too unlike something like R-Type, which asks you to memorize its choreography until you can play it back with finesse. It’s a platformer of performance, not expression. 

As far as the remastering goes, there really isn’t any. The 3D backgrounds are a bit higher resolution, they’ve added a bit of anti-aliasing and there’s an ugly blurring filter on the sprites. It’s more a port than any kind of enhancement. To me it honestly looks worse than the sharper PSP and Vita releases, and doesn’t offer any advantages aside from being on modern platforms. 

That said, once you learn the eccentricities of Prinny’s platforming it can be rewarding, allowing you to fly through stages untouched, and annihilating bosses in a few seconds. Until you burn the steps of each stage into your brain, however, be prepared to stumble, die every thirty seconds and hear the aggravating starting loop of every song.