Princess Maker 2 (1996): Gainax's Daughter-Raising Sim With 74 Endings

Year: 1996 · Developer: Gainax · Platform: DOS · Theme: Fantasy, Anime, Unique

What happens when a game asks you to raise someone, rather than control them? Princess Maker 2 hands you a daughter as a young child and then steps back, letting years pass through a calendar of choices: enroll her in school, send her on an adventure into the wilderness, put her to work part-time, or push her toward high society. None of it is scripted toward a single “correct” path. The game tracks 74 distinct endings, and which one you land on depends on an accumulation of small decisions rather than one dramatic choice near the end.

That range is the whole appeal. A daughter raised on discipline and combat training ends up somewhere completely different from one steered toward etiquette and academics, and the game is honest about the fact that outcomes can go badly. Survival itself isn’t guaranteed; poor choices compound the way they would in an actual upbringing, which is a bolder design decision than most life-simulation games of the mid-90s were willing to make.

Gainax, the studio behind the game, is better known internationally for anime rather than PC games, but Princess Maker 2 sits comfortably inside that same house style, right down to its art direction. What complicates the history here is language. The version most Western players encountered wasn’t an official localization at all. It circulated as a fan-made English translation, distributed as freeware, years before Gainax ever authorized an English release of anything in the series.

That gap eventually closed, just not for this exact build. Gainax and the Korean publisher CFK brought Princess Maker 2: Refine to Steam in 2016, a remade version based on a 2004 Windows edition, fully voiced and rebuilt in color rather than the original’s 16-color palette. A further 30th-anniversary edition, Princess Maker 2: Regeneration, followed later still. Both are real, sanctioned products. Neither one is the 1996 DOS original this article covers, and the fan translation of that build has never had an official release of its own.

It’s a strange kind of legacy: the game people actually played in English for years was never sanctioned, while the versions Gainax did sanction came out under a different name, on a different engine, more than two decades after the fact.

How to run it today

The DOS original needs configuring before it runs cleanly. The game’s own technical notes point players to run PM2WINST.EXE first if launching from Windows, or DOSINST.EXE for a pure DOS setup, with pure DOS explicitly recommended for the most reliable result. DOSBox handles that configuration step well on any modern system, and no additional emulation layer is needed beyond it.

Compatibility: DOS (via DOSBox, follow the game’s own installer notes) · Controls: Keyboard and mouse menu navigation · Setup difficulty: Medium

Legal status

The 1996 DOS original, and the fan translation that carried it into English, were never sold through any official channel. The Princess Maker franchise itself did get later official life on Steam through Refine (2016) and Regeneration, but those are separate, remade products under Gainax’s own name, not a rerelease of the game covered here.

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Little Computer People takes a similar “watch a life unfold that you only partly control” premise and applies it to a housemate instead of a daughter. SimAnt swaps the human-raising angle for an entire colony to manage, with the same underlying interest in emergent, choice-driven outcomes. Oden Todo Fish shares the anime-inflected, thoroughly unusual tone that Princess Maker 2 trades in.