Starlight Princess

Starlight Princess Slot Review

If you’re a fan of Japanese comics or television series, you’ll want to check out our Starlight Princess review. Released in September 2021, this 6×5 slot features a cute animated princess and her winged cat-like companion. 

Set in a cosmic kingdom high above the clouds, the concept appears to be straight out of a manga novel. However, we’re actually dealing with a Pragmatic Play slot that offers a healthy return to player rate of 96.50%. Keep reading to discover more, including all about the game’s scatter paying mechanism. 

Starlight Princess Details, RTP and Volatility

Set on a 6×5 reel grid, Pragmatic Play’s Starlight Princess slot is highly volatile, rated the full 5/5 on the developer’s variance scale. It uses a scatter mechanic rather than the traditional payline system, which you’ll learn more about later.

Play from as little as $0.20 and shoot for a potential win of 5,000x your bet. The maximum wager is $100 per spin, though the optional ante bet feature increases this to $125. 

With an above-average RTP of 96.50%, the game is potentially quite rewarding. However, do take care, as a handful of real money casinos offer lower rates of 95.51% and 94.50%.

Theme & Graphics in Starlight Princess

Starlight Princess is clearly inspired by Japanese culture, and fans of such comic books and animated series are the presumed target audience. It is the prequel to Twilight Princess, a similar-looking slot from the same developer, and both clearly draw on these influences. 

Pragmatic Play must have been aware of other successful slots designed in a similar style. It’s hard to deny the resemblance to Moon Princess by Play’n GO, for example. Either way, it’s a nicely designed slot, with plenty of color, cute manga-style touches and an energetic soundtrack.

However, for all the cartoonish graphics on the front end, this slot is identical to Gates Of Olympus when peeking under the hood. Everything from the return to player rate and volatility, to the game’s maximum potential payout and scatter pays system, is a direct clone.

Starlight Princess Slot Features

Perhaps the most important section of our Starlight Princess review is up next. In it, we’ll discuss the various features and mechanics of this slot.

Regular Symbols

Five brightly-colored gemstones make up the game’s lower-value symbols. These pay from 0.25x to 1x when you match eight or nine. However, far greater returns of 2x, 4x, 5x, 8x and 10x are paid for combinations of 12 to 30.

Four other symbols, bearing a sun, heart, moon and star, are the high-payers. These offer prizes of 10x, 2.5x, 2x and 1.5x respectively, for landing eight or nine on the grid. The most rewarding of all is the one containing the sun, as this returns 50x for matching between 12 and 30.

Scatters and Wilds

Although this slot doesn’t feature a wild symbol, a depiction of the titular character serves as a scatter. 

Hitting four or more of these will unlock 15 free spins, but there are extra rewards to go along with it. Four, five and six scatters anywhere on the reels returns 3x, 5x and 100x, respectively.

Tumbles

After every win, the matching symbols are wiped from the grid, leaving spaces for others to fall in. As new ones tumble down, further winning combinations could potentially form. This will continue until no more wins are created.

Multipliers

The Starlight Princess is as generous as she is beautiful. When you spin the reels, she will randomly throw winged love hearts onto the grid. These contain multipliers ranging from 2x to 500x, that are summed at the end of each sequence and used to enhance any winnings.

Free Spins

Landing at least four scatters in the base game activates a bonus round with 15 free spins. These can be retriggered, with an additional five free spins awarded whenever you collect three scatters during a bonus spin. 

In the free spins game, any multipliers involved in winning combinations are stored by the cat-like creature belonging to the Princess. They are then used to increase the multiplier value of future wins.

Ante Bet

Toggling the pink Ante Bet feature to the left of the reels doubles the likelihood of you organically triggering the free spins bonus. However, this costs an additional 25% of your current stake.

Buy Free Spins

An increasing number of new slots allow players to buy their way directly into the bonus feature. Starlight Princess is no exception and, for a fee of 100x your stake, you can do exactly that.

How to Play Starlight Princess Online

As we mentioned earlier in our Starlight Princess review, there are no paylines in this game. Instead, it is a scatter paying slot, meaning symbols can land anywhere on the reels to qualify for a winning combination. 

In practice, this means you need to land at least eight matching symbols on the 6×5 grid to secure a prize. The greater the number of matches, the higher the reward.

Before spinning, fix your desired bet size using the buttons in the bottom-right corner. Then, you can either tap the double arrow symbol to play a single round, or configure up to 1,000 automatic spins.

Try the Starlight Princess Demo for Free before playing for real money

We strongly suggest trying our free Starlight Princess game before heading to a real money casino. Familiarizing yourself with the game’s volatility, features and unusual scatter pays system is just the smart thing to do before risking any cash. 

Starlight Princess Review – Our Final Verdict

As online slots go, Starlight Princess is extremely playable, with plenty of features to keep you entertained. What’s more, it offers a better than average RTP, a reasonable maximum potential payout, and betting limits that will appeal to all players.

However, as enjoyable as it is, we simply have to deduct several brownie points for the lack of originality. We can perhaps dismiss the obvious similarities to older manga-influenced games as merely coincidental. But Starlight Princess is identical in every way to another Pragmatic Play title, Gates Of Olympus.

Not only does this feel extremely lazy, it’s quite disappointing to see from an industry-leading developer. Perhaps this is ultimately what pushed Pragmatic Play to release the follow-up game Twilight Princess. Although the two are stylistically similar, their features are not, with the latter offering an entirely different payout mechanism. 

Similar Slot Games

Liked the Starlight Princess demo? Why not try some of these other fantastic games?

• Moon Princess: A highly volatile Play’n GO slot which looks extremely similar due to its cute anime style. The RTP is 96.50% and a maximum win of 5,000x awaits you.
• Koi Princess: This 5×3 NetEnt title dates back to 2015 and likely provided some inspiration for other similar slots. Players can enjoy an RTP of 96.23%.
• Shinobi Spirit: Print Studios offers a maximum potential payout of 20,000x and an RTP of 96.26% in this 5×4 July 2023 release.