Wherefore Art Thou, Princess Prin Prin?
Princess Prin Prin is the damsel in distress in the Ghosts ’n Goblins games. In each of them, she awaits rescue from the clutches of whatever regent of the demon realm has most recently taken her captive. Were she to have self-awareness, I’d like to think that she’d spend her time as a hostage wondering why she got saddled with the name Prin Prin. If she learned that other princesses in other video game series had more normal names, I think she’d be a little jealous, especially with Princess Zelda getting her own game this past year. Maybe with a better name, this princess’s video game career would have been different.
I’m joking, sort of, but I meant it in the previous post when I said Prin Prin had one of the dumbest names in video game history. That said, I was genuinely curious to see if I could figure out why anyone at Capcom decided that this should be this character’s name, and what started out as a few sentences in the miscellaneous notes section of that previous post grew into what you’re reading now. In researching this, however, I stumbled onto a sort of controversy that maybe exists only in Japan. And while it does involve this character’s name, it also brings together sexual politics and graphic design and the tricky intricacies about what one nationality presumes about another — in short, everything I like to write about on this blog.
Who knew Princess Prin Prin would contain multitudes?
According to a few sources, Princess Prin Prin didn’t always have this name. Released a few weeks after Ghosts ’n Goblins debuted in arcades, the October 1985 issue of the Japanese gaming mag Micom Basic states that the character was named ギネヴィナ, which most people interpret as Guievere. (Not everyone, though — more on that later.) The four-page spread by Micom Basic writer Akira Hibiki — which you can see on Twitter, posted in 2021 by user @arc_hound — seems to be the source most often cited as proof that Prin Prin’s name was changed sometime before the release of the sequel. She is not named on screen in the first game at all, in either the Japanese or English version. The closest you get to any acknowledgement of her is the suggestive-seeming text you get in the game’s epilogue. And given where this story ultimately goes, I would say that hint of innuendo is not wholly out of left field.
The credits in the sequel explicitly give her name, however… and also her measurements. Again, more on that later, in the miscellaneous notes section at the end.
Confusingly, in the English manual for the next game in the series, Super Ghouls ’n Ghosts, the character’s name is given as Guinevere. I presume this happened because whoever was in charge of the English localization found the name Prin Prin to be unpalatable to western gamers and picked a new one that matched the main character, Arthur. There’s a chance that whoever made this decision knew of the character being called something other than Prin Prin early on and was attempting to “restore” that original name, but I think it’s more likely that this call resulted merely thinking that an Arthur should have a Guinevere. Whatever the case, the in-game text refers to her as Prin Prin in Japanese and in English, regardless of what the manual says.
She’s remained with this name ever since, and to me this begs the question of why Capcom ever settled on this when other options existed.
My first guess is that someone just doubled the first syllable in princess and then took the rest of that day off, and while that might be the case, there is some more going on here. The katakana for her name would be プリンプリン, and if those characters look familiar, it may be because they show up in the Japanese names of other video game characters. Most notably, Jigglypuff’s Japanese name is Purin (プリン), but it’s also one of the names given to the Princess of Moonbrooke in Dragon Quest II. (It’s the one assigned to her in the Super Mario crossover game Idataki Street DS, which has led to some perception that this is her official name, though Dragon Quest IX calls her Princess Princessa, which is both curiously close to Prin Prin but also possibly an even dumber name than Prin Prin.) Seeing as how all three characters represent some combination of softness, sweetness and femininity, it may not surprise you to learn that in Japanese, purin means “pudding,” though more specifically the dessert that English-speakers would know as either flan or crème caramel, depending on their side of the Atlantic. The dessert is readily identifiable in Japan to the point that there’s even a Sanrio character, Pompompurin (ポムポムプリン), who is a yellow dog designed to resemble it. Noting that there’s nothing about Prin Prin’s design to suggest flan, Fatimah guessed that it might be what I presumed: the beginning of the katakana for “princess” (プリンセス or purinsesu), doubled to convey a sense of cutesiness. And that, I suppose, might mean that the name seems less dopey in Japanese, but it sounds no less dopey to me, an English-speaker.
There is a pop cultural connection that might help explain this name a little more, however. Between 1970 and 1982, NHK aired a puppet series titled Purin Purin Monogatari (プリンプリン物語), which focused on a different Princess Prin Prin, who traveled the world in search of her homeland and birth parents. In all, 656 episodes were produced, which is substantial enough to make me think this was probably what the Ghouls ’n Ghosts team was nodding to in naming their heroine, despite the difference in tone and setting. That’s not to say that Purin Purin Monogatari wasn’t weird — just not “demons from hell”-level weird.
However, in asking Fatimah for a translation, she pointed out that the original name for this character might not have been so specifically Arthurian. In the Micom Basic article, it’s not written as グィネヴィア (Guinevia, the Japanese approximation of Guinevere) but rather as ギネヴィナ, whose final character would make the name something more like Guinevena. This seems like an odd choice on Capcom’s part if the desire was to lend Ghosts ’n Goblins the air of Arthurian legend. It might even be a mistake, but looking into it further, I’m not sure if Capcom ever intended for this character to allude to Camelot at all. In fact, getting into who came up with what name and why and when just got me more confused than ever — and maybe even led me to a kind of odd early video game sex scandal, depending on who you believe.
In reading Japanese fans’ takes on the history of Ghosts ’n Goblins, I kept encountering the theory that some controversy motivated Capcom to change the princess character’s name from Guinevere (or something thereabouts) to Prin Prin. Granted, these are people posting on blogs and social media rather than writing in some more formal context, so I’m not sure how credible any of these theories are, but sites like this one and posts like this one specifically allege that outcry from western territories forced the name switch. I’m fairly certain that this outcry did not happen, because as easily as Americans can get all hot and bothered, I don’t recall anyone in the U.S. paying enough attention to Ghosts ’n Goblins to warrant an uproar. For some Japanese fans, however, not only did it happen but also the source of the alleged outrage was sexual in nature, and it had to do with the first game’s opening scene.
If you’ve never seen it before, the sequence could imply that the demon who kidnaps Prin Prin is specifically interrupting a romantic interlude. After all, why else is Arthur off alone with a winsome maiden at night — and in his boxer shorts, no less?
If you think about this scene in the context of Arthurian legend, there’s even more reason to find it suggestive. Queen Guinevere famously had a love affair with Lancelot, one of the knights in service to her husband, King Arthur; for better or worse, it’s one of the defining things about this character. And this video game scene is showing a kind of private meeting between a Guinevere character and a knight who’s taken off his armor. The argument against this reading is that Capcom was just trying to offer the barest of introductions before the gameplay begins, doing so using the limited visual assets that had already been made for the game. Arthur is in his boxers because that’s how the game tells you he only has one hit remaining; his armor has popped off, and he’s now especially vulnerable.
In that Micom Basic article, Hibiki says the opening scene is quite wholesome, depicting an act of chaste service between Arthur and the princess; she’s nursing the wounds he’s incurred the war against the demons.
Translation: Arthur leaped into action to save his dear princess when Satan suddenly attacked. While he obtained a map in battle, the losses were great with many dead and injured. I was one of those who survived but my wound from battle was deep and I was being treated by Princess Guinevere.
But I’m not sure Hibiki is correct in his analysis of the opening scene, however. In 2011, Capcom celebrated the thirty-fifth anniversary of Ghosts ’n Goblins with a new game, Ghost ’n Goblins Resurrection. The title paid tribute to milestone moments from the series, and included among them was the opening scene, but it’s definitely not showing the princess giving Arthur medical care — and if Capcom wanted to show that, video games had achieved the graphical prowess needed to make that clear. I suppose it leaves it open to interpretation why the Prin Prin is happening upon Arthur in his underwear, but I don’t think it takes much to read it as suggestive.
This is not the only indication that Hibiki’s take may not be correct. In February 2011, Polygon interviewed Tokuro Fujiwara, director of the original title in the series, about its development. Fujiwara revealed an odd and surprising detail about Arthur’s boxer shorts.
Here’s one very important detail I need to share with you that people might not know: The pattern on his underwear is actually strawberries. Arthur has this air of ruggedness when he has his armor on, but on the inside, he gets a little fancy and wears his favorite boxers. However, his underwear isn’t simply just something that he likes to wear. It was actually a gift from the princess and acts as a “charm” to protect Arthur in battle. It’s probably safe to say the strawberry design was something the princess was fond of.
I don’t know the customs of underwear-giving in Japan, but in the west, generally speaking, underwear is intimate enough that there’s a romantic if not outright sexual implication — and all the more so if this particular pair bears a symbol of something dear to Prin Prin. I actually can’t imagine that this would be lost in any culture. Underwear is where your privates go, after all.
So does this mean that Hibiki’s article, which accidentally became the source of a lot of deep Ghosts ’n Goblins lore, was wrong? It’s possible. It’s also entirely possible that Capcom staffers became aware of the memes and jokes about the game’s opening scene and decided to lean into the innuendo as the years went by. That interpretation is, after all, fairly widespread online, and in fact I found @arc_hound’s posting of the original magazine article in response to someone else summarizing the opening scene as “making out in a cemetery is such an affront to God that Satan himself shows up to cockblock you.” But for what it’s worth, there are a few people who have posited online that perhaps the Micom Basic account of the game’s backstory was accidentally grandfathered into the series canon because people mistook creative flourishes as official backstory coming straight from Capcom. Tweets like these — this, this and this — actually wonder if Hibiki interjected his own creative vision into his article, and both the innocent reading of the graveyard scene and the notion of Prin Prin ever being named Guinevere originated in this article. And this one even speculates that Hibiki may have been the one to name Arthur, and that Capcom simply ran with it.
There is a precedent for this sort of thing. I wrote about it in my post about Pac-Man and the hockey puck urban legend. In that case, one person’s faulty etymology of Pac-Man’s name occurred in print early enough that it’s been repeated and repeated to the point that it’s difficult to convince people it’s not true, even if evidence exists to the contrary. In this one, Akira Hibiki may have included some minor fanfic in his write-up about Ghouls ’n Ghosts, which consequently become the patient zero for some similarly persistent misinformation. And I suppose it would be easy enough to prove that this were the case, if it truly were the only place this information shows up at this point in time.
So is it?
Well, there was a strategy guide released in June 1986 that, according to this tweet, states that Arthur and Prin Prin were on a picnic at the time she was kidnapped. But that’s long enough after the publication of the Micom Basic issue that the writers of the strategy guide could have been expanding on ideas Hibiki created.
And then there’s an issue of the Japanese gaming magazine Beep that also allegedly makes reference to at least a non-sexual explanation for the opening scene, if not to Prin Prin being named Guinevere as well. A scan of the issue exists at the Internet Archive, but it’s missing the pages in which the Ghosts ’n Goblins feature appears, so as of yet, I can’t corroborate anything. What’s most interesting about this issue of Beep is that it’s also the October 1985 issue, meaning it would have been unlikely for it to repeat anything that Hibiki originated in his article about the game. If that’s the case, it’s possible both may have been relaying information that truly did come from Capcom and that is therefore part of the series’ official lore. But until someone comes up with a full scan of that issue (or at least the pages cover Ghosts ’n Goblins), I suppose this is going to remain a video game mystery.
This was an interesting and highly unexpected research hole to fall into, I should say. This truly grew from a single sentence to a single paragraph to the meandering mess I’ve laid out for you. I hope you enjoyed it as well.
Miscellaneous Notes
The Micom Basic article that identifies Prin Prin as Guinevere also names the big bad in this game as ゴンディアス, which you could render in English as Gondias, Gondiath, Gondiaz and the like. I can make any sense of this name, however, and it has similarly stumped Legends of Localization, which notes that it’s oddly prevalent in Japanese media discussing the series even though I’m not sure it’s been used in-game. Was it? And it doesn’t seem to have originated squarely with the Micom piece, either, as that name also shows up in Gamest’s review of the Famicom port.
Before the Ghouls ’n Ghosts ending identifies Prin Prin by name, it refers to her by another name that I can’t place for the life of me: “the Princess of Hus.” Can you make any sense of this? Let me know if you can!
Though it doesn’t mention her name in the English version of the game at all, the instruction manual for the Master System version of Ghouls ’n Ghosts gives the princesses name as Tamara. I think it’s the only instance of her being given a name that’s not Prin Prin or Guinevere.
According to the February 1989 issue of Gamest magazine, Prin Prin was modeled after the Japanese actress Reiko Hayama. I see it in the art shown in the Gamest spread but less so in every other depiction of Prin Prin. This information, BTW, comes from the Tumblr kept by the same person who shared the Micom Basic issue on Twitter, which has some interesting commentary on a lot of old video game media.
Fun(?) fact: The measurements given happen to be the same as those given years later to Chun-Li in Street Fighter II.
But since Ghosts ‘n Ghouls came out first, it’s more than Chun-Li has Prin Prin’s measurements rather than the other way around. Unless there’s a significance to them before these two instances? Was Prin Prin the first?
And finally, are people aware that the name Guinevere is basically the same name as Jennifer? It sort of takes the medieval majesty out of the former to realize that, but yeah, Jennifer was once the Cornish variation on the name before becoming popular in the United States. Both Jennifer and Guinevere comes from the Welsh Gwenhwyvar, meaning “white-cheeked.” Arthurian allusions were even more plentiful in the 1980s than you may have realized.