It is my very sincere pleasure to welcome a brand new Okazu Guest Reviewer to our ranks today! Happy Guest Review Wednesday and welcome to @NetbrianT, a long time Yuri-fan and all-around hoopy frood.  This seemed like a perfect way to celebrate the opening our our new Yuri Games& Visual Novel page on the Yuricon store. ^_^

So please give him your attention and take it away, Brian!

Note — this review has spoilers for The Little Princess:

The VN A Little Lily Princess is a Yuri adaptation of the 1905 novel The Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, put out by Hanako Games. Before playing this game, I was not familiar with the original story (I’ve since read the book) — my first exposure was the anime Souko no Strain, a rather broader adaptation involving giant robots and time dilation.

The main character of A Little Lily Princess is Sarah Crewe, a refined British girl sent to a boarding school, but is forced to work as a scullery maid for the school when her father dies and leaves her with nothing. Part of the game is a verbatim retelling of the original, and then it’s expanded on by adding in fleshed out arcs for the original characters. Each character has their own set of scenes, which are chosen via a time management mini-game (the minigame is easy enough that you effectively choose the desired result.) After you view enough of their scenes, you’re locked into that character’s route and ending.

The game works as Yuri in interesting ways. Some of the character routes develop romantically, though the majority time you spend is on the friendship side of the relationship. More uniquely, the Yuri genre as a whole was heavily influenced by fiction of this era, such as Secret Garden or Anne of the Green Gables. In fact, this was my favorite element of the game — it tickled me pink to see how much of the book was practically Yuri already! The original story, which the game brings out wonderfully, functions as a Yuri prototype — between the foundations of the genre in things in “a place meant only for us” or specific enduring tropes like secret tea parties, it fits perfectly.

One of the best points of the game are the character-specific routes, and how well the VN added real depth to the foundations the book gave. Lily Princess does an excellent job reworking the story, and is especially good at matching the prose style of the original. The tone, too, is carried over — visual novels are well-suited for the introspective style that emphasizes an inner monologue. The melancholy of the second half almost works too well, as my tastes are firmly in the camp of the happier and more upbeat. The artwork was adorable, and the soundtrack fits the story perfectly.

The game’s biggest flaw is in the time management mini-game. It works fine during the first half, but once you have locked in a route, there’s no further decision-making, so it’s just busywork. After the first playthrough, it’s even more cumbersome, which hurts in a game that assumes you’ll replay to see different routes. Storytelling-wise, the area I’m most torn about is the ending — the game compresses much of the buildup from the source material, so it ends up overly abrupt.

You select activities for each week, which raise different attributes. Those attributes are spent viewing individual character routes

Overall, I liked the game quite a lot — if you’ve read the book, your enthusiasm for that will almost certainly carry over to the game! The game took me about three to four hours to complete for a single route, and six hours total for all six routes.

Art: 7
Story: 8
Characters: 8
Service: 1
Yuri: 4
Overall: 7

Erica here: Thank you Brian for the excellent review. I’m so pleased you enjoyed the VN. 

And thanks to Hanako Games for providing us a review copy. We’re much obliged!