Hello there pretty little princesses of Roblox, WoodReviewer here, and if you are are on a lower end device, I highly suggest you don’t read the entire review because it is very picture heavy. For those of you who are new here and don’t understand how wood grain works, I highly suggest either reading a normal review of mine, my very outdated and basic guide to wood grain, or just look at some real wood because this review will not explain why the wood grain is wrong because I only have so many ways to say “VERTICAL WOOD VERTICAL GRAIN, HORIZONTAL WOOD HORIZTONAL GRAIN” which is like 95% of the problems with wood grain. Even on my shorter reviews I run out of ways to say that, hence the awkward transitions in many of my reviews, especially when most reviews have multiple of the same asset and I just treat them separately to pad out the review about. But today I am reviewing Princess Castle Tycoon by Banana Bunch, and I will run out of ways to keep repeating myself. Instead, this review is a mostly unhinged rant because the wood grain is so bad with pictures showing some of the bad wood grain, because oh my God there is a bunch of bad wood grain.
The bad wood grain starts as soon as you spawn into the game, where the only thing in your tycoon is a mailbox to collect money, and that post for the mailbox has bad wood grain.

One of the first things you then buy is the gatehouse for the castle, which guess what, it has bad wood grain on the gate.

Then moving on around the wall of the castle, these diagonal support beams also have improper wood grain.

Also outside the castle is some wooden trim, which is bad.

As is the wood grain on these benches.

And this chair and table set.

And the planter for this tree.

And this archway, with some more bad wood grain along the floor behind the arch way.

And then the final example of bad wood grain I’m showing around the castle is this table thing.

Well, that is all the bad wood grain outside of the castle, and this review is fairly long already, so that is it, hoped you had fun, the wood grain sucked, be sure to come back next week for more, until then be sure to tell GollyGreg he should feel bad, and so long.
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Wait, that was just the outside of the castle, and I skipped over every specific example of bad wood grain trim on the walls, along with the numerous different windows that all have bad wood grain. That is because even though there was already enough bad wood grain here to write a decent review, this is just the beginning of all the bad wood grain.

Of course I could slow down and go more in-depth like I did for the 2018 Egg Hunt, but honestly the only reason the egg hunt review is so long is so that I can annoy Beeism and BuildThomas, combined with the fact that because those new parts are spaced out a year between each part it doesn’t get too tiring to go over every different chair that is just a bit different that has bad wood grain.

But that won’t work here. Atleast with egg hunt there were entire words that were separated into parts, but this game has enough bad wood grain in some rooms to write entire reviews on, and I am not spending the next several weeks doing that.

Also I could show every example of proper wood grain like I do in some reviews to help pad out those reviews a bit more, like for the shelf above or the drawer front faces below, but I am not doing that here because there is no padding needed.

In fact, aside for some monumentally stupid examples of bad wood grain, like the diagonal wood grain on this desk below, most of the rest of this review will basically just be a normal blog with pictures of all the bad wood grain while my thoughts slowly become more and more unhinged.

Honestly if more games were like this I would actually consider making YouTube videos since the main reason I don’t is that I could probably cover most of my reviews in like two or three minutes, but this review, that would be a perfect Technology Connections-esque 45 minute minute follow up rant to a 20 minute follow up rant to a 3 part, 30 minute each series of videos on obsolete lamps.

“Wait, WoodReviewer, you watch Technology Connections?”
Yes, of course I watch the guy who is extremely pedantic, I have been pedantic over wood grain for almost 15 years now, I love nothing more than watching some guy spend an hour and a half deep dive into the proper use of dish washer soap.

Back on topic, yes, I did seriously consider making a YouTube channel, or rather making content for my abandoned YouTube channel, but aside for the short length of videos the biggest reason I never got around to that is that I never bothered to learn any video editing software. I did have some bigger plans, but I don’t want to make those public since those plans aren’t completely dead yet, just mostly abandoned.

Anyway, let’s get this review back on track for a second, but we are now 1/3rd of the way through all the reference pictures I have for this game. Yes, 1/3rd. I told you this was going to be a long one.

One thing you may have noticed by this point is that the images look a bit smaller than my normal review, and this is because I purposely cropped them smaller so they would take up less space, but even then the entire folder I have for all these images is a good 75 MB, so hopefully this web page loads.

Another interesting behind the scenes thing about this review is when I make my reviews I take my screenshots and then paste them directly into my image editor, where I then edit/crop them as needed before saving them.

Usually I can have about 15 images open at a time, maybe 20, but I got up to 30 at a time as I was working on this review, and seeing as this review is 60 images total, I had to do two separate sets of screenshots.

Another thing I had to do was turn off my second monitor while taking screenshots, as that extra screen area and GPU usage having it just running would have made my computer cry even more than having 30 images open at once in an image editor.

Just going back to the game for a second, I would like to shout out the wooden crates here. I mean, not sure why I’m surprised they were here since the game has literally every other major source of bad wood grain, but just glad these aren’t missing out.

Now I’m sure if you are paying attention to the images in this unhinged rant review you would have noticed a bunch of repeating items, all with bad wood grain, such as chairs, counters, shelving.

This isn’t really uncommon in my reviews, what is weird is how drastically different all the assets are, but they still have bad wood grain. Normally a game has a few base assets, with a few modified versions that have the same bad wood grain, but here everything looks unique. Terrible, but unique.

One particularly terrible thing is the beveled floor boards that are in the second story of the castle, which have bad wood grain, and I just don’t get it. Why not just use a texture.

Granted I don’t think performance was really paid attention to with all the unique meshes, but still, use a texture for the floors, it helps.

That being said, the fact the game had so many assets and still ran so well for me is just a testament to how far Roblox has come from the Angel of Truth, an old statue with like 20,000 parts that used to crash PCs on Roblox back in 2007/2008.

One thing I will say, though, is when I grinded through the tycoon I was in a server for like 6 hours and I think the game had a slow memory leak that built up over those 6 hours that eventually bought my FPS to single digits, but once I quit and rejoined it was fine. Not sure if it was due to the length of time I was in-game or the fact I bought basically the entire tycoon in the time, but I doubt many other people are grinding Princess Castle Tycoon for 6 hours straight.

So I know I just spent a bit of time talking about how the game wasn’t seemingly optimized, but one this that probably should have been worked on more were the spiral staircases.

Yes, the wood grain looks terrible and the castle is a bit maze like with a few weird quirks like a spiral staircase ending and then directly above it being a regular staircase.

Or another spot where the spiral staircase doesn’t line up with the floor so there is just a ramp to the floor, but the spiral staircases just seem really low detail.

Like all the normal staircases have railings and stuff, while around the spiral staircases are just gaps since they are round pegs in square holes, there is no lighting, and just no other detail, while the cabinet above has multi part door handles, corner trim, and the fact there are so many different chair and table assets.

It just feels like the spiral staircases were programmer are, while the rest of the game is artist art.

Honestly, if I didn’t decided to go with the unhinged rant style that I did decide to go with for this review, I think a good alternative style would have been to just review like the chairs in here.

Just going by a quick count, 16 of the images here have different styled seating furniture in them, with another few images having non-wooden chairs, and that alone would be enough for a review, if I could find enough ways to go “VERTICAL WOOD SHOULD HAVE VERTICAL GRAIN.”

Honestly one thing I want to get back into is for different reviews to have different styles, with some parodying some way of talking, others focusing on one this more than others, rather than what most of my recent reviews have become of me just yelling at devs in a similar tone.

Granted I have had some ideas on how to do that for some reviews, but the ideas usually just come really late in the writing process and I don’t want to have to rewrite the review, or I have an idea that is good for a few paragraphs but I can’t do it for the entire review.

I mean unhinged ranting is one of the things I am best at in life, and even doing that here I am only 2/3rds done with all the preference pictures I have, and the first 10 or so were done in a slightly different tone, and I am almost out of stuff to be unhinged about.

Granted this review probably won’t be my longest review, since Egg Hunt has a bunch of parts and my 2020 Material Update post was like 4,000 words, but this will definitely be up there. In terms of pictures, though, this one will be the longest, by far.

Although, one thing to note is those reviews are long because I did try and pad them out a bit, especially with the Material Update post, while for this one the fact it is just one post for this castle actually makes it shorter since I am not talking about every piece of bad wood grain.

Just take this desk picture, for example. The desk legs have bad wood grain, the floor is wrong, the desk top is wrong, the planter is weird but probably OK, and the shelf off to the side has bad wood grain on the top and sides. Normally I would break that up into three separate images to discuss and it each one would have a longer discussion than this discussion on the discussion.

That’s before I even would bring up the bad window frames that sneak into almost every image of this post.

Or any examples of proper wood grain I am just glossing over, like the dress holders. Granted they are just cylinders and you have to really try to give bad wood grain to cylinders, but I’ve seen it done.

One thing I feel like needs to be said is usually when doing reviews I talk about how simple it would be to fix wood grain and how quick it is, but for this game? Good luck.

I’ve mentioned before how it is usually easier to fix wood grain when you first use it rather than fixing it later, but there is so much bad wood grain here in so many meshes/unions that is probably nestled in so many different folders/groups that the tycoon system uses that it would probably be just as quick to rebuild the castle from scratch rather than to try and fix it.

I mean sure, you can reuse the non-bad grain assets, other various things, but good luck with that Banana Bunch, you should have just made it right from the start.

So I was out of my house today and while I was out I started to come up with ideas for this unhinged rant review, and I think I covered most of my major points I wanted to hit, so just a fair warning that the rest of this review will become even more rambling than the previous 2,300 words.

For those who know me a bit better by being in various Discord servers with me, you’ll truly understand how much bad wood grain is in this castle if I can’t even going on unhinged ranting for as long as it takes me to post all the bad wood grain in this game.

The best part is if you are in one of those servers is you never know what my unhinged ranting will be, but I always manage to bring it back to wood grain. A few days ago I was going off on a tea rant and it surprised some people because they didn’t realize I drink tea.

That was until they realized that tea literally grows on a tree, when I bought it back like that I could hear their facepalm through the internet. The same thing happened when people figured out why I love birch beer so much.

For those of you who don’t get why I like birch beer so much, is made from birch bark. Also, it isn’t a beer as in beer, but like ginger ale or root beer. That always messes with people.

Now that were are getting towards the end of this review, I’m going to try and bring it back a bit. While yes most of the wood grain has an obvious fix, some of it just doesn’t make sense. Like why are these paintings that are just rocks mounted to the wall with large wooden racks.

Or this thing. Like, what is this, it doesn’t feel deep enough to be a shelf, but I’m not sure what it is, or why is there a spa in the top tower of this castle.

Oh, that’s one thing I wanted to talk about, the layout of this castle is mad. There are like four dinning rooms, but I only saw two small kitchens, and only one bathroom, but no toilets.

And that is before the fact the children’s bedrooms are all at the top of the castle towers, because if there is one conveniently place to keep an infant child it is at the top of a staircase on top of a staircase that you have to get to from a spiral staircase that starts on the second story that you need to access from the main staircase.

I’m fairly certain I missed a few things just from how mazelike the castle is, but that isn’t a big deal, the other 60 images I have are more than enough. But with all that rambling being over, I bring you to one last piece of bad wood grain, the top crown of the roof.

Yes, I parkoured to the top of the roof to check this, despite the fact there was no need to since there is plenty of other wood grain to say this game sucks. But with that being said, this castle is done being reviewed. Yes, just the castle, because the game actually has a second area, a garden, and guess what that garden has?

If you guessed bad wood grain, congratulations. If you want more details be sure to come back next week for part two, which won’t be a massive unhinged rant. Hopefully.