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Princess Crown and the Forgotten Legacy of Vanillaware

Published on Fri, Feb 2nd 2024 Gaming Rectangular HD

Odin Sphere and Muramasa: The Demon Blade, even the prototype of Dragon's Crown, owe their existence to Princess Crown. You know, that George Kamitani game nobody played that functionally kickstarted Vanillaware. Here's the story.

Princess Crown was released for the Sega Saturn in 1997, and that title, while massively destructive for Kamitani's career, was preserved and iterated on with his later games. To maintain narrative flow, I've divided the Vanillaware titles; we're just looking at the sidescrollers today, but don't let that scare you. Romantic and Victorian era art, Aestheticism, Decadence, and the cyclical nature of artistic movements play a large role in the video. In case you thought it was all combat and cleave.

This is the first video in a 2-part series looking back at Vanillaware's origins, aesthetics, game design, influences, etc., all in anticipation of Unicorn Overlord, releasing in early March.

If you'd like to help support these kinds of projects, hit me up over on patreon!
https://www.patreon.com/kbash
I also have a Ko-Fi page now, as a tip jar...
https://ko-fi.com/kbashshow
Channel memberships have been made available, as well, if you like the TWEWY pins LOL

https://youtu.be/wi3Z7gCun7E The sequel!

Special thanks to my guest readers, who are, in order:
@Stumblebee
@GCVazquez
@ZacFrazier
@culIen
@TheCrawl
@couchmoba
@maraganger

!The music is simply whichever covered game's OST.
!Sampled footage comes from official trailers.

The Princess Crown series by IPAT (highly recommended if you want to play through)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMDGlAbFyuk&list=PL8FDD2D76AC513B25

The Princess Crown Translation by Anoop:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080304171404/http://www.andriasang.com/princesscrown/pcrown/translation.html

0:00 The History
4:20 Princess Crown
24:45 Odin Sphere
50:50 Muramasa
1:15:02 Dragon's Crown

#vanillaware #odinsphere #muramasa #dragonscrown #retrospective #videoessay