Princess Crown

There are games that never got to meet their era — and yet later become legends. Princess Crown is exactly such a case. When it launched exclusively for the Japanese SEGA Saturn in 1997, few suspected they were witnessing the first steps of creators who would one day found one of the most beloved studios in the industry.

The team that would later give rise to Vanillaware showcased its unmistakable signature here for the first time: fully hand-drawn 2D graphics, fluid animation and a fairy-tale artistic poetry that looks more like an illustrated book come to life than a video game. If you played the later Odin Sphere or Muramasa, you'll recognize it instantly — the same curves, the same love of detail, the same sense of color and composition. Princess Crown is literally the genetic ancestor of these titles.

As for the gameplay, it's a side-view action RPG that blends real-time combat with elements of management and exploration. The heroine, Princess Gradriel, hacks her way through enemies, collects gear and progresses through a story split into several narrative branches with different playable characters. The combat system is surprisingly tactile for its time and combines the speed of an action game with the decision-making you'd expect more from an RPG. All of this is rounded out by storytelling with its own charm and humor.

It's only fair to be honest: Princess Crown was never a mass-market hit, and due to its Saturn exclusivity and staying in Japan it long remained more of a secret for connoisseurs. But it was precisely this inaccessibility that turned it into a cult artifact — a piece of history that collectors and fans of 2D aesthetics still seek out today. To understand where modern Vanillaware's artistic DNA came from, it's a mandatory stop.

Today we look at the game differently than the reviewers of the time. We know, after all, what it led to — and that makes it a fascinating study of how an artistic style is born. It's not just an old Japanese curiosity, but the beginning of a story that continues to the present day.

Why play: To see with your own eyes the birth of Vanillaware's hand-drawn style before it even had a name — a beautiful, rare and historically important 2D action RPG.