Girls Book Maker: Grimm to Sannin no Ohime-sama 3 (ガールズ・ブック・メイカー ～グリムと三人のお姫さま～3) Review

Girls Book Maker announced a series of cash-grab DLCs half a year after the base game shipped.

Cash-grab, sure, but honestly this is standard practice by now. We’ve seen too much of this over the years. This DLC is called ガールズ・ブック・メイカー ～グリムと三人のお姫さま～, which translates to Girls Book Maker: Grimm and the Three Princesses, so naturally it’s about the world-famous Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Since Grimm’s Fairy Tales is itself an anthology, you can’t really sum it up with one character, so they just carved out the princesses and split them into three volumes sold separately. Sound familiar? Yeah, classic milking scheme. The three princesses are Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella.

There isn’t much to say about the premise. Same worldview as the previous game: the protagonist is a “book librarian” who enters the world of books and works with the original author to solve problems in the story. Only this time the request is a little different. He’s invited into Grimm’s Fairy Tales and finds the problem isn’t the usual “bugs” this time, but rather…

The “prince” is missing!

At first the protagonist assumes the prince got killed by bugs, but after investigating he finds out there’s only one prince in the entire Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and every story’s prince is played by the same guy. The prince says he’s fucking exhausted, clearly not paid enough overtime, living a life worse than 996 every single day, his body can’t take it anymore, so he just up and quit.

So the authors of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the Brothers Grimm, ask the protagonist to stand in as the prince and put out the fire. Naturally, he becomes the “male lead” for all three princesses.

The game has three volumes, but the quality of the princess routes varies wildly. Personally I think Snow White’s is the best, and that has absolutely nothing to do with her CV being Natsumi Koto. If it did, I’d immediately make Miss Wang crossdress. Snow White’s story spends a lot of time on her cuteness and her “I’m always right” attitude. That overconfidence isn’t annoying; it actually comes off as adorably dopey. She even gets upset when the protagonist reacts coldly to her:

“It’s me, Snow White! You know, the… the Snow White everyone knows! Aren’t you going to react?”

I’d bet every guy except the protagonist and Jiniao, those two homosexuals, would have some reaction to her.

The second half of Snow White’s route gets a bit nukige-y, but that’s the whole point of a DLC like this, so I can’t call it wrong. Fortunately the story wraps up nicely and leaves you satisfied.

Snow White’s story poured all the resources into making her cute, so naturally I had high hopes for the other two princesses.

But things change fast. Maybe I just don’t get it, but the Sleeping Beauty chapter is genuinely boring.

So boring I couldn’t even tell you what it’s about. Maybe Sleeping Beauty just doesn’t have much room for expansion. Most of it is the protagonist and Sleeping Beauty living together, the whole thing is just cohabitation life, they flirt a bit, fuck, and then it’s over…

After the hypnosis that was the Sleeping Beauty chapter, this month we got the eagerly awaited Cinderella chapter, Miss Wang’s favorite.

Everyone knows the Cinderella story, especially the midnight carriage and the glass slipper. But it’s worth noting that in Grimm’s Fairy Tales it’s not a glass slipper but a golden one. The Brothers Grimm were basically “fairy tale movers” anyway; many stories weren’t written by them, they just collected and edited. The game respects the source material pretty well, even though the Brothers Grimm aren’t women!

The Cinderella chapter turned out to be surprisingly short, and it doesn’t really cover the source material. It’s mostly Cinderella mopping floors at home and occasionally practicing dancing at the castle, with none of the plot progression Snow White had. Right when the game is about to get to the point, Cinderella starts masturbating at home, then there’s sex, then the ball, then a rollercoaster of developments, the protagonist puts the golden slipper on Cinderella, and then it’s over…

I don’t know if the game ran out of money for proper DLC right before the officially licensed mobile game launched, which is why quality drops with each volume. I don’t know if the dev team originally planned something grand and then got lazy by the later DLCs and just shipped the last volume to meet the deadline. But looking at the game itself, the budget really can’t be called high.

The game doesn’t use the fancy engine from the original but a generic one, the otherworld transition effects are gone, the mouse sparkle effect is gone. A lot of backgrounds are reused from the original. Everything screams minimum cost. What’s most sincere about this DLC is hiring new artists, and the most stacked lineup is only in the Snow White chapter: Kagome + Natsumi Koto, basically top tier. That’s why the first volume is so well received and the latter two are so mid. Another highlight is Sanma’s dual voice work; she voices both Brothers Grimm, one soft girl and one female pervert, which is a real selling point.

As far as game DLC goes, having one volume worth reading is already decent. If you like Snow White as much as I do, we’re friends.