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Magical Starsign
I recently finished playing Magical Starsign, a quirky DS rpg made by Brownie Brown, the development team also responsible for Sword of Mana, one of my all-time favorite games. It stars a group of young wizards who leave magic school to look for their missing teacher, and end up accidentally become legendary heroes along the way.
(Let me note that I paid $5 for a new copy of the game, so I’m probably more inclined to be charitable than someone who paid full price.)
The first thing you’ll notice about the game is the problematic interface, as the tried to be too inventive with the touch screen. To that extent, you don’t actually use the ABYX buttons at all—you either move and tap things with the stylus, or move with the cross-pad and use the shoulder buttons to talk/open chests/search.
The battle system is much more complicated than it should be, because again, you’re only using the touchscreen. You can’t just hit A, A, A and have the characters do a round of combat. You need to tap the attack icon, tap the attack you want to use, then tap the enemies you want to attack (even if there’s only one or if it’s a hit-all attack). You need to confirm which physical attack you’re using for each character, which seems like a feature they never got around to fully implementing, because each character only ever gets one physical attack. (Also, physical attacking is essentially useless by halfway through the game—you regenerate MP, and your spells always do more damage.) You can tap your character when they cast a spell to "spellstrike" for more damage, or when they’re attacked to defend and take less damage...but the manual and in-game tutorial are remarkably quiet about this (I learned it from a FAQ), and it’s really essential for winning boss fights. So you’re using fairly long-animation spells for every action, which makes individual battles take a long time. Fortunately, the grinding time is actually about right—you gain a lot of XP per battle, so you need to fight fewer, longer battles than, say, a Dragon Quest game, and the time spent battling work out to about the same.
A big deal is also made about the "star sign" system, which makes certain types of magic more powerful as the planets align in different ways. Keeping track of this (and using the spells that manipulate it) is helpful for speeding up battles, but not as critical, especially when compared against spellstrikes.
The other interesting note about the battle system is that while MP are plentiful, HP are not. There are only three healing spells in the game, and they use a percentage of your remaining MP, which means they can’t be used effectively very often. They also can only be used during battle. I’m used to hoarding all of my magic points and spending them on healing spells, typically between battles, which you can’t do at all in this game.
The translation is cute and decently done, and most of the plot makes reasonable sense. It’s very cutesy Japanese, though there are a couple of "wham" moments, such as when a recurring NPC whose life obviously sucks decides to feed herself to a man-eating plant to help you get the macguffin you need. The attempt is to tell the player (and the characters) "hey, this is more serious than you thought", but it only somewhat works.
Overall, it plays like a Saturday morning cartoon that had originally been an anime. There’s a happy ending (of course) and except for those "wham" moments, it’s pretty lighthearted fare.
The fact that the healing items, the powerful magic macguffins and even some the bosses are made of gummi candy is perhaps the best example of that.
(Let me note that I paid $5 for a new copy of the game, so I’m probably more inclined to be charitable than someone who paid full price.)
The first thing you’ll notice about the game is the problematic interface, as the tried to be too inventive with the touch screen. To that extent, you don’t actually use the ABYX buttons at all—you either move and tap things with the stylus, or move with the cross-pad and use the shoulder buttons to talk/open chests/search.
The battle system is much more complicated than it should be, because again, you’re only using the touchscreen. You can’t just hit A, A, A and have the characters do a round of combat. You need to tap the attack icon, tap the attack you want to use, then tap the enemies you want to attack (even if there’s only one or if it’s a hit-all attack). You need to confirm which physical attack you’re using for each character, which seems like a feature they never got around to fully implementing, because each character only ever gets one physical attack. (Also, physical attacking is essentially useless by halfway through the game—you regenerate MP, and your spells always do more damage.) You can tap your character when they cast a spell to "spellstrike" for more damage, or when they’re attacked to defend and take less damage...but the manual and in-game tutorial are remarkably quiet about this (I learned it from a FAQ), and it’s really essential for winning boss fights. So you’re using fairly long-animation spells for every action, which makes individual battles take a long time. Fortunately, the grinding time is actually about right—you gain a lot of XP per battle, so you need to fight fewer, longer battles than, say, a Dragon Quest game, and the time spent battling work out to about the same.
A big deal is also made about the "star sign" system, which makes certain types of magic more powerful as the planets align in different ways. Keeping track of this (and using the spells that manipulate it) is helpful for speeding up battles, but not as critical, especially when compared against spellstrikes.
The other interesting note about the battle system is that while MP are plentiful, HP are not. There are only three healing spells in the game, and they use a percentage of your remaining MP, which means they can’t be used effectively very often. They also can only be used during battle. I’m used to hoarding all of my magic points and spending them on healing spells, typically between battles, which you can’t do at all in this game.
The translation is cute and decently done, and most of the plot makes reasonable sense. It’s very cutesy Japanese, though there are a couple of "wham" moments, such as when a recurring NPC whose life obviously sucks decides to feed herself to a man-eating plant to help you get the macguffin you need. The attempt is to tell the player (and the characters) "hey, this is more serious than you thought", but it only somewhat works.
Overall, it plays like a Saturday morning cartoon that had originally been an anime. There’s a happy ending (of course) and except for those "wham" moments, it’s pretty lighthearted fare.
The fact that the healing items, the powerful magic macguffins and even some the bosses are made of gummi candy is perhaps the best example of that.