, also known as ''Vanguard Princess: Senjin no Himegimi'' (ヴァンガードプリンセス先陣の姫君) is a Japanese

dōjin In Japan, is a group of people who share an interest, activity, or hobby. The word is sometimes translated into English as "clique", "fandom", "coterie", "society", or "circle" (as in "sewing circle"). Self-published creative works produced b ...

fighting game A fighting game, also known as a versus fighting game, is a video game genre, genre of video game that involves combat between two or more players. Fighting game combat often features mechanics such as Blocking (martial arts), blocking, grappli ...

for

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and

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, developed by a single programmer and illustrator Tomoaki Sugeno nicknamed Suge9. The game was created using Fighter Maker 2nd was released for PC on June 26, 2009, and April 10, 2013, for

OnLive OnLive was a Mountain View, California-based provider of cloud virtualization technologies. OnLive's flagship product was its cloud gaming service, which allowed subscribers to rent or demo computer games without installing them on their device. ...

Gameplay

''Vanguard Princess'' is a 2D

featuring an all-female cast. The player selects both a fighter and a support character, who follows the fighter and can assist her.

Plot

A mysterious woman with supernatural powers (the game's boss) is captured by the government. Her powers are accidentally unleashed, bestowing various young women with magical powers.

Development and release

''Vanguard Princess w''as fully developed by Tomoaki Sugeno (or Suge9), an ex-

Capcom is a Japanese video game developer and video game publisher, publisher. It has created a number of List of best-selling video game franchises, multi-million-selling game franchises, with its most commercially successful being ''Resident Evil' ...

sprite designer who worked in games like '' Resident Evil 3: Nemesis'' and made character sprites for '' The King of Fighters EX: Neo Blood''. Sugeno uses ''Fighter Maker 2nd'' for his work, a popular graphic engine for Windows by

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...

. Sugeno designed and illustrated the game by himself, but the music was taken from "nash music library", a royalty-free library of songs. Sugeno also used

voice actors Voice acting is the art of performing voice-overs to present a character or provide information to an audience. Performers are called voice actors/actresses, voice artists, dubbing artists, voice talent, voice-over artists, or voice-over talent ...

to record the voices for all the characters. Sugeno planned a future update called ''Vanguard Princess Prime'' which would introduce a new character named Rikako but has since ceased development on it. An English version was released by

eigoMANGA eigoMANGA is a comic book publishing company that produces original Japanese-influenced comics and digital media. eigoMANGA has been underway since its conception in 2000. The company is based in San Francisco, California. History eigoMANGA ...

in February 2013 on

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to North America and Europe. They released a cloud version of the game on the

Onlive OnLive was a Mountain View, California-based provider of cloud virtualization technologies. OnLive's flagship product was its cloud gaming service, which allowed subscribers to rent or demo computer games without installing them on their device. ...

game service in April 2013. A notable difference in the English version is that the game edits the explicit content in the original Japanese version. The English version also unlocks Hilda as a playable support character. A downloadable PC version of the game was released via

Steam Steam is a substance containing water in the gas phase, and sometimes also an aerosol of liquid water droplets, or air. This may occur due to evaporation or due to boiling, where heat is applied until water reaches the enthalpy of vaporization ...

on March 3, 2014, after being Greenlit by the community. This version comes with the original English release, plus a free, optional ''Director's Cut'' add-on, which returns previously removed content to the game.

Reception

After the official release, ''Vanguard Princess'' was initially picked up on by video game websites such as Daiken,

Kotaku ''Kotaku'' is a video game website and blog that was originally launched in 2004 as part of the Gawker Media network. Notable former contributors to the site include Luke Smith, Cecilia D'Anastasio, Tim Rogers, and Jason Schreier. History ...

and ''Siliconera''. Later it was reported by ''

Famitsu formerly ''Famicom Tsūshin'', is a line of Japanese video game magazines published by Kadokawa Game Linkage (previously known as Gzbrain), a subsidiary of Kadokawa. ''Famitsu'' is published in both weekly and monthly formats as well as in the fo ...

'' and ''IT+Media''.

References

External links