A high-fatality action-platformer where you play as a demon penguin with peg legs charged with recovering the stolen panties of your succubus master? Prinny 2 delivers quite the wacky premise and seems to promise a fun time. Actually playing it, though, falls short of expectations. 

Challenging platformers like Super Meat Boy, N+, VVVVVV and The Deep Cave share a common quality that Prinny 2 lacks: good jumping mechanics. It’s practically expected that when you go into one of these games, you have tight jumps that both work and feel right. You’re given great tools to try and beat the game with, so it comes down to player experience and skill.

Prinny 2‘s jumping mechanics instead work much like Ghosts ‘n Goblins and the NES entries of the Castlevania series: you can’t move in mid-air. If you jump while holding right, you’re stuck going right. Make a slight error? You’re dead, or at least taking damage. This frustrating mechanic is somewhat alleviated by the player having a thousand total lives for the course of the game, but only seems to bandage the situation instead of remedying it.

The jumping mechanics were the only real negative thing I could find about Prinny 2, though. Each of the stages are very detailed and look great, with the time-of-day system giving a ton of variety to each of them. The music is incredible, and alongside that is superb voice acting. It set my expectations high with what it advertised, but only met them partway.

Prinny 2 is a great game in every area except the most fundamental of gameplay mechanics. That jumping style can make or break the player having a good time, and I spent too much time being frustrated at missing jumps that could have been made in many other platformers. While everything else about it is easy to digest, that core mechanic is a very bitter pill to swallow.