I wake up extremely dry. Much drier than usual. As I wait for the Britta machine to fill up, I note I have an inkling of a migraine coming on. Undeterred, I pop a naproxen. It’s not my ideal first line of defense, as I don’t like how it dries me out, but CBD oil stores are low. There is no way I can make more if I get a migraine.
I drink a glass of water.
Another glass of water.
Things will be fine, as long as I don’t overexert myself today and take it easy on that.
That, of course, being the internationally renown mobile game Time Princess, which I had just picked up again two days ago after an over a year long break.
Free-to-play games are landmines. Have you ever played with a Skinner box that feels like it was made just for you? The glory! The terror. The b o r e d o m . The need.
Knowing that society prioritizes implementing gambling science into your little phone apps over mitigating the effect constant worldwide web exposure has on our brains doesn’t make it easier. Knowledge is one thing, but the world of feelings is quite another.
In order to preserve one’s funds and sanity while maximizing fun, one must become an enthusiastic enjoyer of the Free to Play Metagame. Otherwise, what’s the point?
As with all games, Time Princess is two games — the game they present to you, and the game of how you engage with it.
The game presented is a genuinely unique hybrid of dress up games and visual novels. You can customize your avatar’s skintone however you want right out the gate (a rarity in East Asian games :/) along with their facial features. The graphics are lush and gorgeous, and the best stories are K-drama level entertaining. Every flavor of femme beauty power fantasy, they got covered. If you’re feeling like a twee Disney princess that day, go right ahead! You want something more edgy and spicy? They’ve got that too. The love interests are fairly attractive, and IGG imbues them with a good sense of charm in the more developed stories. And of course, the clothes are cute. This the type of game I dreamed of as a teen, and it hits just the right spots.
This is all offset, however, with the most blatant money grabbing structure this side of Love Nikki. Every single tried & true hook a free-to-play mobile game can implement, Time Princess has that and more. Incessant notifications, in-game currencies, and gachas. The way they bombard your little reptilian brain with constant “gifts” paired with light shows. The drastic turn in how stories start out easy and breezy and turn into massive resource sinks the moment they know they got you. They ask for a lot of money, don’t give you much in-game resources in exchange for it, and do everything in their power to burrow their way into your brain. The psychological warfare aspect of the game is just as well crafted as the artistic side of the game, and they don’t even try to hide it.
If we play the game IGG wants us to, inevitably we will lose — lose our money, lose our reason, lose our sanity. In order to have the most safe and stable fun, we must define the game on our own terms.
Fundamentally, the free-to-play metagame is the power struggle between the player and the developer. If you do not understand what you want from the game and what gratifies you, your thoughts and desires will be supplanted by the will of the game devs. What IGG wants is what every online service game dev wants — that perfectly pliant white whale that never wants to leave the app ‘s sparkling gilded walls, and drops $$$ like nothing for the privilege of living there forever…or at least until the game shuts down.
So the first thing we must define is, how much are we willing to spend?
Some people want to spend absolutely zero dollars, and I’m rooting for them. Some people don’t care if they spend thousands, and well….if it’s something they can truly spend with no hardship and from a place of calm, then…. that’s fine, but that’s a level I don’t understand and don’t want to understand.
The second, most immediate question then is, how much time are we willing to spend?
Time is money, as we all know, and if you’re not spending money, you’re spending time. The Dress Up Time Princess reddit has a lot of great guides, tips, and event explainers so you’re not just stumbling around this overwhelming app blindly, leaking resources everywhere. This does take up some bit of time, and it does increase your amount of emotional investment, making the game harder to drop.
Those two things considered, we must then ask ourselves, what is this game worth to us?
Worth is subjective and no one else can dictate it to you unless something has gone very, very wrong. In games and in life, it’s up to you to decide what your time and money is worth. So I can’t tell you what this game, any game, or anything, is worth to you, nor do I want to.
For me personally, I really like this game, I think it’s a lot of fun. I think if you get into it, putting 2-5 dollars in the game is worth the quality of life features that come with it, because if you care enough about the little minigames and sweetening up the companions love levels, then it’ll save you a lot of clicks and tedium in the long run.
Obviously, it’s hard to separate the craft of the predatory money snatching practices from the craft of the artistic side of the game — they are inextricably linked. I’ve put in about $40 in the ~170 days I’ve put in the game (which the game lovingly tracks, or else I wouldn’t know). Not all of those dollars came of a place of calm and fairness, some of them definitely came from the need to have it NOW.
But for what it is, and what I’ve gotten out of the game, I think that’s a fair price. It’s about the cost of a comparable 3DS game, and it’s been interesting to see the game go from hardcore stinginess when I was playing last to being much more reasonably generous in 2022. I don’t see myself putting anymore money in the game, but I can still see myself playing it from time to time.
Which brings us to the last point — what do we want from the game?
Of course, since I am playing a game called Time Princess, I want, cute clothes! Cute boys! Cute stories with thrilling twists and turns.
On a practical level, this is knowing what kind of clothes I like and focusing on that, getting all the makeup you don’t have to pay real life $$$ for, and making peace with not getting every single outfit in the game. However, I also want to cultivate, my ideal free-to-play game state:
My ideal free-to-play state is a state of near indifference. I log in, I do the dailies I want to do, and get out. I am neither pissed off at the devs or on edge because I want to get to the next part of the story or the current event outfit NOW. I am simply amassing resources. Time is not of the essence, there is no tick-tock-tick-tock get this NOW type of pressure. If I want to wait things out, I’ll wait things out, and that’s exactly what I’ll do.
Because, if I bide my time and amass my resources, something wonderful can happen — an event or story will come out that’s just to my tastes! And then, and only then, will I open the floodgates and get everything I want without waiting, without paying, without that scratching feeling of desperation and failed will.
It’s a feeling that only free-to-play games can give you, and I very much enjoy it.
Of course, people are not perfect, and by our very nature we do not live up to ideals. I passed out last night to the very fun ghost-seeing idol story after feeling the need to finish the Cleopatra story NOW. The ghost idol story affected my dreams, and I need to pace myself if my diamonds and my dopamine are going to make it to the Louvre event in a few days (the reason I re-downloaded the app to begin with).
So do I recommend Time Princess? No. No. A thousand times no. There is no way I am responsible if you, the reader, download it and end up losing thousands of dollars.
But do I like it?
Yeah. Hell yeah.