The Maid's Story

The Maid's Story (actually, it should be The Maids' Story, since there are three of them, but never mind that now) can be seen as an adult version of Princess Maker 2. If you have played the latter, you will recognize many elements, from the daily schedule over the stress meter and chronical lack of money down to the travelling merchant that turns up now and then.

In the game, you play a guy who has been out of luck for a while but now with the help of a friend landed a dream job: be a supervisor for a school of maids. This school is in a mansion somewhere in the country. Your duties are to assign the maids their jobs, cooking, washing, shopping, and cleaning, to inspect them and either scold or encourage them (scolding is usually more efficient, but puts more stress on the maid), and to give them special training at night, fort a good maid must be able to please her master sexually.

All the while you must be careful not to put too much stress on them, and keep an eye on the money. If they have too much stress, they will hate you (too intense night training is the main culprit here), or they might even have to undertake treatment, being unable to work for a whole day. Both the condition of the house and the maid's training will suffer. The more they like you, the more efficient they are. Money is an especially tricky subject: the less experienced in shopping a maid is, the more money she will spend, but you have to send the less experienced ones shopping, else they won't learn it.

I started out by comparing The Maid's Story with Princess Maker 2, let me finish by pointing out the main differences. First, this game is longer, but has far less replay value. With some practice, you can raise a daughter in four hours or less, but there are so many choices and endings that you can do it dozens of times before it becomes repetitive. Raising your maids, however, is more or less the same all the time. There are five different romantic endings (with one of the maids, the secretary, or your kinky ex-girlfriend, who visits regularily), but they are hardly worth checking out.

Reviews and Links

• A very well done training-raising sim, Hentai Neko thinks:

  The graphics and art are fun, and it's amusing to watch the girls do their chores during the day. And, if the merchant comes by, and you purchase a house upgrade, the pic of the manor increases. Lastly, you can get a good idea of how the house looks by how many piles of garbage or cobwebs are around, or how low the vegetables are by how empty the kitchen looks.

• This is not a review, Craxton warns us:

  One must have finished a game to review it accurately. I have not finished The Maid's Story. Well, I've *finished* it, but due to a critical miscommunication, I didn't get a successful ending, and I disliked The MaidStory so strongly that I'm reluctant to go back through it. So this is, then, not a review. Instead, let's call 's it a highly restrained and (hopefully) intelligent rant.

• English Bishoujo World has screenshots, reviews and strategy guides.