Armored Princess Analysis: Introduction

Armored Princess is probably the favorite entry in the series as far as commercial and critical success goes, and with good reason. The art is refined. the gameplay is refined, the races have been made more interesting without arguably being made gimmicky, the switch has been made to the islands-based world map, thus cutting out a lot of the tedium from The Legend, the game's writing is still quirky/fun in its distinctive way, and there's few major shifts in the design paradigm to alienate people who bought it because they were so happy with The Legend.

At least, few really obvious shifts in the design paradigm.

If I had to recommend a single entry to someone on the idea they'd never touch any other game in the series, I'd be torn between Armored Princess and Warriors of the North and probably end up recommended Armored Princess just because there's no overtly terrible decisions in Armored Princess. Even though Warriors of the North runs smoother, has more interesting and varied unit design on the gameplay level, it has enough fairly miserable moments I'd hate to spring on unsuspecting players that... yeah. Armored Princess.

Armored Princess is also interesting for how it casts light on a lot of The Legend's design decisions, in no small part by virtue of having a female protagonist. I'll be covering this in more detail in, among other areas, the Companions analysis post, but the short version is that certain elements of The Legend that look stereotypically sexist seem a bit unlikely to be that straightforward, when taking into account how Armored Princess handles the flipped-around version of the same basic elements. Yes, in spite of the fact that Armored Princess' boxart is the most scantily-clad version of Amelie, where The Legend's boxart is a handsome dude in armor.

The gameplay as a whole has quite clearly also responded to how real players played the game, rather than continuing to carry on with how the devs imagined the player would play the game. The Legend seems to have been designed under the assumption that the player would suffer fairly hefty casualties in every battle, and indeed that probably a typical player would lose a battle outright a few times before getting a handle on themselves: you actually get kicked back to Darion's castle and given some replacement troops and a good chunk of cash if you lose a battle and don't choose to reload!

In actuality, it's really easy to take minimal casualties in most fights, and entirely possible to beat The Legend on Impossible without ever having even single casualty recorded by the game, with this being the standard 'serious' (For lack of a better term) players default to aspiring to. Even a more casual player will generally not have money problems past the early game, and won't often suffer more than minor-to-modest casualties, so long as they aren't insistent on heavily using the generic melee units I've been harping on the poor utility of.

Armored Princess' design reflects this awareness, for better or for worse: where The Legend's design has tons of easy fights throughout the game serving to make it easy to grind to keep having easy fights to grind off of, Armored Princess has a much tighter design. In the early game perfect play will leave you constantly short on gold for keeping up with your forces' growing size, your hunger for Scrolls, and of course you'll be longingly eyeing good Items and mostly not buying them. It's only once you've left what I call 'Bolo Hell' that the game opens up, your money problems largely go away, and perfect or near-perfect play stops being so important, and even then you don't have a lot of wiggle room for grinding your way to being able to fight on even terms with eg Boss fights. My last Hard mode run had maybe another couple of levels worth of experience lying about the world, if that, and it took me eight tries to beat the final fight, even though this was an Orcs on the March Mage taking advantage of some of the honestly overpowered Spells Orcs on the March provides. My Impossible Mage in The Legend, by contrast, completely stomped the final fight of the game in one attempt having barely touched the fights in the Orclands, ignored the majority of the Black Dragon fights in the deathlands, and not bothered to complete a few fairly major Quests.

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this particular point, as one of the strengths of The Legend is that a player has substantial ability to tune the game's challenge to their tastes: if the game isn't challenging you enough, play on a higher difficulty. If it's still too easy, go one higher. If Impossible by itself is still too easy, grind less. If things are still too easy?... well, honestly, maybe consider not abusing the most abusable mechanics? Which itself is part of why my feelings are mixed: Armored Princess does little to close off the player's ability to abuse various Spell mechanics, AI stupidity, and other such bits to generate arbitrarily large armies of arbitrary troops, whittle literally anything down with Invisibility used on Emerald Green Dragons, and otherwise make the game overly easy by just sidestepping the entire notion of how the game is intended to be played.

On the other hand, one of my biggest frustrations with so many other series is how obvious it is that the developers either don't know how real players play their game or deliberately ignore reality and keep designing the game around their internal notions of how the game 'should' work, and I've said before one of the big positives of the King's Bounty games for me is how obvious it is that the devs learned as they went. So in the end I think I have to place it as an overall positive.

The preferred version of Armored Princess is Crossworlds, which adds in an editor and three new campaigns: Orcs on the March is the base game, but with new units, further tweaks to old units, a new Skill for each class, new Spells (Mostly based on Rage skills from The Legend), Military Academies that let you upgrade units into other kinds of units, and with the Orcs in particular forever redefined with their distinctive Adrenaline mechanic. My posts are based primarily on Orcs on the March, and I don't necessarily mention whether a unit has been modified relative to the base game, and I certainly don't document it in detail, as honestly there's very little reason to play the base campaign if you can play Orcs on the March.

The other two campaigns added by Crossworlds basically serve to show off what the editor can do, and operate using the base rules of the original game. (eg Orcs won't have Adrenaline in them) Champion of the Arena is a Boss rush first and foremost, the centerpiece of it being fights against essentially every Boss from both The Legend and Armored Princess (No White Kraken, but that's the only exception), with some mildly interesting stuff like novel Companions made just for it and a few other things like that. Defender of the Crown is a series of gimmick battles, with the primary appeal being that it heavily randomizes the forces available to you and the forces you'll fight. Both of these campaigns are designed to be potentially playable in a single afternoon, and are, again, really more about showing off what the editor can do than proper game modes. I won't be covering either of them in detail: Defender of the Crown is honestly boring to me, and while Champion of the Arena is more nuanced and interesting it has poor replay value. I played through Champion of the Arena three times, once per class, and I ended up feeling like I was doing essentially the same thing all three times, rather than tweaking my strategy based on which class I was playing, let alone adapting to the technically-randomized unit lists. Consider giving Champion of the Arena a spin if you've got an afternoon to burn, but don't expect a lot out of it. If nothing else, the fight against the final Boss is genuinely a far different fight from the base game or Orcs on the March.

Next time, we'll get started by returning to the beginning: the Human forces of... er... oh, right, Armored Princess takes place in Teana, so the Humans aren't Darion folks. Hm....

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