Isekai again! (And again and again and again.) Here, our protagonist is nominally a young businesswoman, who finds herself kidnapped into another world by Navi, a small fluffy creature who is her spirit guide of sorts. Luckily, the world should be fairly familiar to her, as she's secretly a Princess who was ejected when she was a child.(None of this plot matters, except for two minutes when they go to the kingdom with smartphones.)
But now she's summoned back to help save the world. It's been invaded by "dream eaters", whose cruel actions put people into a dream-less coma, from which they never wake. The only people who can fight these monsters? The Princes of the title. According to Navi, they're all trapped in rings, and the Princess needs to pray to each of them in order to summon them to her side and allow them to fight to save the kingdom. Naturally, she's a bit surprised by this.
Fortunately for all involved, this doesn't actually involve her spending 12 episodes walking around and praying at eight and a bit pieces of jewellery. Only the first Prince (Avi) happens to be stuck in a ring. All the others are metaphorically stuck, either in jobs they don't enjoy, having fights with family members or with secret personal demons which they let smoulder menacingly from the shadows. Our Princess wanders around all the different kingdoms basically offering a bit of emotional support, and sometimes the fighting skills of Avi and also Kihel, the other prince who journeys with her.
The three are vaguely guided by Navi, but he's mostly useless, looking like a small stuffed animal and getting very annoyed every time someone mentions this. There's a whole range of Princes for them to "collect" though, such as the Robin Hood, the three brothers who are jealous of each of the older ones in turn, the chap who just cares too much, and prince Corail, the Prince of the Coral kingdom. He has coral hair. There's also the pirate princes, mermen princes (who have to do some sexy underwater kissing to save her life) and snow princes (who have a warm heart really).
This is the bizarre thing about this show. If it had done it straight, it would have been mostly forgettable and not terribly exciting. But it's so stupid. The Princess is here mostly as a plot point, and really it's the Kihel and Avi show. They are utter dicks to each other, Navi, and pretty much everyone they meet. And everyone else is a dick back. This show has more passive aggression than the rest of the season put together.
Half the episodes are also weirdly food obsessed, with one of the main motivations of a villain early on being to keep the kingdom under his thrall until he can taste his brother's pancakes again. No, really. And then the pirates have a ghost problem, with the problem mostly being that they keep cooking (and tidying up!) for the pirates and it's kinda spooky. This is best epitomised with each episode having a "What if?" section, which is mostly the Princes of the week working (or not working) in some sort of shop.
The show also has the weirdest villains going. I'm honestly not sure if they're really evil or not, having a tendency to be evil mostly by playing an ominous organ and sometimes setting easy monsters on the heroes. You get the impression they're not really trying. It's all good fun, though. It's not an excellent spectacle by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a very enjoyable thing to watch while shouting at the screen.
Tagged: Anime Comedy Isekai Supernatural Friendship Hidive Subbed