YMMV / Princess Maker

• Adorkable: In PM2, the Young Dragon tries to impress with words, but is actually a pretty cute, slightly timid one. Especially noticeable if Olive defeats him.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Cube from PM2 proved to be so popular that he appears in the anime, PM4 and PM5 as well as in the Korean mobile game, and in the latest Slavemaker game.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Inverted: the Princess of Darkness ending is regarded as terrible stats-wise and the Gods will seriously scold the player... but the fandom considers it as a good ending story-wise since the Daughter achieves it by killing Lucifon with her own hands and ends up getting lots of power in return.
  • There are some endings in Princess Maker 4 that seem to be happy endings but then are followed by a Downer Ending to the counter side (either human side or demon side) when The Stinger was shown before the word “Fin” showed up, especially when you got an ending as a princess or some jobs and anything that are parts of only one sided kingdom (human side only or vice versa). Depends on what side did you want to choose (human side or demon side). Also it’s worth noting that Patricia (the daughter that you’ve raised) is actually a human and demon hybrid whose long lost mother is a human while her biological father is a Maou / demon king. They have no problems of their private issues despite both sides of their kinds often being enemies.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Has a strong Korean fanbase. In fact, Princess Maker 2 is the only Japanese game available to Korea’s exclusive and extremely rare homebrew handheld console named GP32 (by GamePark) in 2002, and the newest game in the series, Princess Maker for Kakao, was Korean-made and didn't come to Japan until three years later! Presumably this is why, when the games were finally given an official English release, it was at the hands of a Korean publisher.
• Heartwarming Moments: Many of the endings. Special mention for the PM2 one where the girl marries Cube.
  • In Princess Maker 5, if you have a good bond with your daughter she will talk about her parent at school and give you flowers on Mother's Day/Father's Day.
• Hollywood Pudgy: The daughter cannot wear the more fancy dresses when she is 'overweight'. In PM4, she counts as overweight when she weighs 50 kg (110 lbs), regardless of what age she is at.
• Narm: As a result of some games being translated... imperfectly.
• Narm Charm: The original SoftEgg translation of PM2 is often seen as a lot more amusing than Refine, with gems like Wendy's obsession with "Magician Girls!" that are less funny in the more faithful retranslation.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In the fifth game, it’s impossible to the daughter to have all of her friends and maintain their bonds till the end, thanks to jealousy system (and relationship end system which causes the daughter gained lots of stress).
  • Also in the fifth game, guns and any better long-ranged non-magic weapons aren’t available in stores and the daughter can’t use them, despite living your world where guns exist and the weapon technology is much more advanced. Possibly because underaged weapon possession is strictly prohibited. However, there are Weapon Jr. alternatives like catapults and baseball bats.
• Sequel Displacement: If it wasn't for the obvious "2" in the title of the second game, most people wouldn't know the original Princess Maker even exists. Princess Maker 2 is, in fact, the one that almost everyone thinks of when they think of the series (hence the reason it's the page pic for the main page), although this is admittedly largely because it was the only one to ever get an English language release until Princess Maker Refine 1 came out in 2017 (and the Refine version of Princess Maker 2 was still released in English first).
• Squick: There are two major cases of this. In the Father ending, the daughter marries her adoptive father, who has been taking care of her since she was a small ten year-old child and the endings where she marries the king, who is said to be old enough to be her grandfather. Yuck.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Thanks to Video Game Caring Potential, the 18th year. The player gets attached to the daughter, and then they are sad, either because they're wistful that they'll have to leave her behind, or they're happy about how she's turned out, or sad for her...
  • If the player allows the daughter to succumb to illness and die, they will get chewed out by her patron deity, and if the player has any kind of soul, they'll feel as though they'll deserved it.

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