A Little Lily Princess by Hanako Games and Ratalaika Games is a visual novel based on a novel published in 1905. Find out if it’s worth your time in our A Little Lily Princess review!
In A Little Lily Princess from Hanako Games and Ratalaika Games, the story begins with Sara arriving in England to attend a new school. Most of her life she had spent with only her dad because her mother died after giving birth, so he’s pretty much the only relation she had. Most of their time they spent it reading books and playing games. The game starts with you arriving in school and being presented to a few girls in the class, with the objective of building new relationships with the limited life experience you have.
Being a visual novel, the vast majority of the game is spent reading the dialogue between Sara and the different people she will meet. At the start of a week, you’ll also get to choose an activity from a list for each day of the week. Each of those activities has three possible outcomes in terms of the changes they will give to each of the starts of your character. At the end of the week, based on the activities you selected, you will see changes to the following stats: Knowledge, Artistry, Patience, Sympathy, Grace, Belief, Vigour. Depending on how things played out, your attributes will increase or decreases.
Once the five days have gone by, and you’ve received your updated stats for the resources, you get to choose between the characters you met to have a special event with them over the weekend. Each of them will have requirements in terms of resources values that you will need to have in order to play the event (having, for example, six for Vigour), and some events will only stay there for a few weeks, so you have to try to plan your activities to be able to see them.
I found this visual novel’s concept interesting because you have to plan things if you wanted to be able to see all the events of each character throughout the game’s limited number of weeks. The fact that the icons given are random made me reload my saves a few times in order to reach the total of resources I wanted, but nothing too painful to drag you out of playing the game.
Since each of the six characters can have special story events, with a few events for each one, you can’t get everything in a single playthrough, so you’ll have to do a few playthroughs. That was probably the aspect I liked the least because once you’re at your second or third playthrough, it gets a bit annoying to replay the same events over and over, even if you can skip all text to speed up the process. If you can make a couple of saves at the right time, you might be able to cut down on the total amount of time you’ll have to play A Little Lily Princess.
In terms of trophies, the list is relatively simple, so you’ll quickly gain access to a new Platinum trophy. Almost all trophies are for playing through all events for all characters and reaching their respective ending. The other trophy you can get will be for maxing out all your stats at any given time, which is relatively easy to do once you know which activity raises which resources. Since this is a cross-buy release, if you own a PlayStation 5, you can get two Platinum trophies for the price of one.
A Little Lily Princess is a good visual novel for fans of the genre, although it can feel a bit repetitive during the final set of additional playthroughs if you’re aiming for getting all endings and the Platinum trophy.
Disclaimer
This A Little Lily Princess review is based on a PlayStation 4 copy provided by Ratalaika Games.
