Aladdin’s route has some good parts, a few amazing parts, but some parts that are so problematic I don’t even know where to begin.

The Premise

You are a princess. What’s different about We the Girls is that instead of a single girl with a harem of men, you are a princess who is looking for her prince after uhh, well, you see, my phone messed up during the prologue and so I didn’t actually finish it. Official site to the rescue!

Happily ever after? So they say.
Your life as a princess of fairytale land becomes extremely boring once you marry the prince that you literally live the life of a couch potato.
Thanks to moody Hurricane because she sends your prince to another world!
When your luxury lifestyle is at risk, you decide to embark a journey to find your prince…!

Not that makes any more sense either… Anyway, your prince is gone from Fairytale world and you’re in the Real world to find him.

As of right now, you can be Ariel, Snow White, Jasmine, Rapunzel, or Tiana. I MEAN, Sirena, Blanche, Yazmin, Rue, and Ines. They are thinly veiled clones of the Disney counterparts. For my first playthrough, I picked Yazmin, who has a Spanish name despite everything else being set in Agrabah-clone. ~~But there’s not a Hispanic princess movie to steal wholesale from, but you want the Hispanic money from American readers, so brown skin is brown skin, right?~~

Yazmin Garcia

There are many things wrong with Yazmin’s story, but she is not it. She’s smart, sassy, assertive, and not afraid to stand up for herself and those she loves. If she doesn’t like it, she doesn’t obsess over it, you’ll know, oh honey, you will k n o w.

Likewise, when she’s certain she’s found Aladdin, she lets him know she’s interested and enjoys playing their game of courtship again. She rarely lets her emotions get the better of her. She is a woman who knows what she wants, and is willing to do anything to get it.

She was pretty fun to read through. Sadly, when Aladdin shows up and plays a bigger part, she transitions to more of a damsel role than setting her own story, but the theme of all this seems to be “retelling the same story” so once they start converging back to the Fairytale world and keeping to the same Fairytale, we end up losing some of Yazmin’s moxie.

The game makes it pretty clear that they’re not trying too hard to do anything unique with the princess premise, even though with the “Find Your Prince” premise, they had every opportunity to turn the story into something of a reversal of the standard hero story — the princess saves the prince.

Imran/Aladdin

Aladdin is your everyman. A bit bland, the sort of perfect flirty protagonist that’s fun to read, but his lack of faults make him less compelling as a character.

He does everything right at exactly the right time. Yazmin adores him, and we can see why. He’s both fun to read and boring to read. That sounds like an oxymoron, but all the fun flirty lines in the world can’t make up for the fact that he just has no real faults or conflict.

The Supporting Cast

Whoa, boy. Here we go.

First, let’s talk about Yazmin’s girlfriends, Blanche (Snow White) and Sirena (The Little Mermaid).

This is a conversation they have for an entire ticket’s worth:

WHAT SORT OF GIRL TALKS LIKE THIS?! Girls don’t put each other down like that. We build each other up. And how in the hell are any of those sprites “fat”? They’re all drawn with perfect bodies of varying degrees.

And second of all YOUR BELLY DOES THAT BECAUSE IT’S BASIC ANATOMY. We are not paper, we do not just fold in half when we bend. Just what in the fuck?!

At this point, I sent this conversation to Strawbarely There and was like “Girl, THIS GAME”. And then I made a comment about it having to be written by a dude and she said she thought the same thing, haha very much funnies had, good times.

And that’s not the worst part of this conversation. Our villain, Ludwig, had forced a kiss on Yazmin. Yazmin is confiding in her friends about how horrible it made her feel, and how disgusting it was.

Her reaction directly after the incident.

Their reaction?

O M G like isn’t it SO HOT when a guy does that?

Is there going to be a love triangle between you three?

You should sample all the men you can before settling down!

Like what in the hell! Yazmin is telling you about how she was assaulted and your response is to play off her concerns and act like she should consider the guy as a love interest? After she’s clearly stated multiple times that she only has eyes for Aladdin?

If getting kissed like that floats your boat, that’s your business. If you want to have fun with multiple men, that’s your business. But if someone clearly is not into the same things as you are, you respect that and you don’t push your personal preferences onto them! That is just plain common courtesy!

This part truly incensed me! I was ready to throw it down and stop with this BS game but you know, I decided to come back to it because, well, it’s been almost a year since I last posted.

As the story goes on, Blanche’s blunt attitude towards sexuality does provide some good laughs, particularly at the very end where she goes all in on dissing the villain, Ludwig. I went from disliking her to liking her a lot.

Sirena remains weird and a bit too airheaded to be interesting. I don’t have any inclination to play through her story because she’s the dullest tool in the shed.

The other side characters aren’t worth commenting on. They exist to move the story along.

The Villain

Ludwig is the villain, this isn’t spoiling anything because it’s obvious. As the center of the conflict, he’s not very interesting. His motives change all the time. First, it’s the company. Then it’s the palace. Then it’s because he actually loved Yazmin ~so much~.

His reasons for doing what he does changes with the convenience of the narrative and don’t reflect any grand master plan you would expect a villain to have. In fact, his “master plan” is so lame I spent the arc rolling my eyes at it.

Final Thoughts

I know I usually go into the plot itself, but to be frank, it’s kinda boring and I pretty much covered it talking about the characters. It hits all the notes of a typical 3 heart story, but I can’t feel like it’s actually worth three hearts.

My heart scale is defined as follows – 5 hearts = a story everyone will fall in love with, regardless of preferences; 4 hearts = a well-done story that people who love the concept will adore, and people who don’t may end up liking it; 3 hearts = if you like this type of story or this type of hero, then you will enjoy this, but those who do not like either of those things will probably not; 2 hearts = it had potential, it squandered it; 1 heart = just a waste of time from the get-go; 0 hearts = why was this made?