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If you’ve spent any time playing online slots in the last few years, you already know the drill with Pragmatic Play’s “pay-anywhere” mechanics. Starlight Princess is an undeniable classic. Now, they’ve taken that familiar 6×5 anime-inspired engine, bolted a four-tier progressive jackpot to the top of the screen, and called it Starlight Princess – Oranje Jackpot.
But whenever a studio slaps a progressive jackpot onto an existing hit, my first question is always: What did they sacrifice under the hood to pay for it?
I sat down for a session to find out if this jackpot edition is worth your time, or if you’re better off sticking to the original.
The Vibe & Base Game Rhythm
The core gameplay remains untouched, which is a good thing. You aren’t worrying about paylines here; you just need eight or more matching symbols anywhere on the grid to trigger a win and start a tumble sequence. Winning symbols explode, new ones drop in, and the chain continues until no new wins form.
The paytable is top-heavy. The Sun symbol is your premium, paying 50x your bet for a cluster of 12 or more, followed by the Winged Heart at 25x. But the bottom of the paytable is incredibly stingy. The Blue, Green, Teal, and Yellow gems won’t even return your base stake if you only land the minimum cluster of eight.
During my session, the rhythm of the math became obvious pretty quickly. Roughly one in three spins paid something, but the base wins are mostly just there to keep you afloat. My best base-game hit was a cluster of eight Winged Hearts that paid a whopping 2.5x my bet. I also hit a cold streak of about ten dead spins, broken only by a classic “near miss” where three scatters teased me, failed to drop the fourth, and paid nothing.
Multipliers: The Real Chasers
You quickly realize that you aren’t actually chasing a board full of premium symbols. The real leverage in this game sits entirely with the winged multiplier symbols.
These land with random values ranging from 2x up to a massive 500x. However, they don’t do anything on their own. If you land a 500x multiplier on a dead board, it just sits there looking pretty before disappearing. But if you land multipliers during a tumble sequence, they are added together at the end of the spin and applied to your total win. If you want anywhere near the game’s 5,000x max win, you need the free spins and their running multiplier, because in the base game a multiplier only counts for the one sequence it lands in.
The Free Spins Bonus
Landing four scatters triggers 15 Free Spins, and this is where the game’s true potential unlocks.
Inside the bonus, the game builds a running, persistent multiplier. When a multiplier symbol lands on a winning spin, its value is added to a global counter. But here is the downside that always frustrates new players: that global multiplier only applies to a win if a new multiplier lands on that specific spin.
If your global multiplier is sitting at 50x, and you hit a win with no new multiplier on the board, you just get the flat payout. But if a 2x drops, it adds to the 50x, and your win is multiplied by 52x. It’s a highly volatile setup that can lead to massive payouts or incredibly disappointing bonus rounds.
RTP vs. The Jackpot
Here is where we need to talk about the math, because this is the defining feature of the Oranje Jackpot edition.
The jackpot is a progressive pick-game that can trigger randomly at the end of any base-game spin (note: it is completely locked out of the free spins). Having a shot at a progressive jackpot is always exciting, but it comes at a steep cost.
The original Starlight Princess is a highly volatile game with a solid 96.50% Return to Player (RTP). To fund the progressive pots in this version, the studio has softened the volatility to “Medium” and slashed the RTP down to 92.10%.
As a reviewer, I have to point out that trading over four points of RTP for a random jackpot screen is a massive tax on your regular gameplay. You can toggle on the Ante Bet for 25% more per spin to double your chances of hitting the free spins naturally, but given the lower RTP, this can drain your balance quickly.
If you just want to play Starlight Princess for the free spins and the multipliers, do yourself a favor and stick to the original non-jackpot version. Your bankroll will thank you for the 96.50% RTP.
