"Lester: Okay, so, listen, as you know, the big Salesman of the Year convention is taking place this weekend in Riverside.
Jeff: But you never sell anything. You just eat Pirate's Booty and watch large-lady pornography.
Lester: I'm aware of that, but I rigged it so that every employee's sales this quarter have been logged under my name." - CHUCK [Season 05, Episode 04 - Chuck Versus the Business Trip]
In 2009 we got the classic game Fat Princess, developed by Titan Studios and released by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 3 [and later the PlayStation Portable].
Today we're focusing on the PlayStation 3 edition of the game, which likely some readers noticed when they saw the achievements shown on the sidebar of this blog. Sadly, LAN Play or System Link is not an option, but I was able to work around that with a Raspberry Pi to fake a PSN network to get some multiplayer achievements.
I played through the whole single player campaign, which is just seven chapters entitled "The Legend of the Fat Princess", and it was a lot of fun. The story is simple: two princesses live in a stereotypical fantasy kingdom and find magic cake growing out of the ground. Sadly they gained weight from it, and their respective fathers, each a king of his own kingdom, decided the cake must be cursed as the princesses become addicted, and it goes more unhinged from there, but I don't wanna spoil it.
The voice acting is oddly enjoyable, with Tom Kane [Professor Utonium in The Powerpuff Girls and Monkey Fist in Kim Possible] as the narrator and male player character.
On a side note, while the English voice actress for Fat Princess is Tara Strong, I also played the fighting game PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale for a possible future article, and will say the Japanese voice actress made me spit my Dr. Pepper everywhere due to the tonal shift of hearing Miki Itō provide the princess's voice, who for most people is Android 18 in Dragon Ball Z, but for me hearing the voice actress of Eva Ushiromiya coming out of a plus-sized princess really hits differently.
Now for the gameplay: it's your typical Capture the Flag, but rather than capturing a flag you are meant to capture a princess and bring her back to your castle while fattening her. You also have to prevent the enemy team from taking your princess.
The classes you get are mage, warrior, priest, and worker, with other classes available via DLC, but with the PSN network mostly shuttered you are gonna have to have already bought the game or been lucky and gotten it via PlayStation Plus.
The controls are shockingly tight and well-balanced. One of the only main issues I find is how unforgiving the AI can be at times. The game is meant to be played with 16 vs. 16, but without online play you're gonna be stuck with 16 AI players versus 15 AI teammates alongside yourself.
I would honestly love if we got a new game in the franchise, since it's been a decade since the last real sequel to the game, that being a dungeon-crawler called Fat Princess Adventures back in 2015.
Here's hoping we get something new eventually and maybe I can track down other games that scratch that same itch for titles that actually do something with larger female characters, since I sure as hell didn't get it from the Borderlands 4 DLC Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned.
If anyone has recommendations I'd genuinely love to hear them. For now, this is LOKZ and I still don't have a closing tagline.