|
The year...2007.
The setting...my room, after doing my daily routine of traveling the city in temperatures excess 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
The point...to subliminally fill your mind with my pompous propaganda.
Heh, I kid, I kid. I was traveling with my brother in the farther southern stretches of Norfolk when I went into a "Got It" video store. They didn't have anything of interest, except I came across an odd movie called "Shinobi: Heart Under Blade". While I wasn't interested in seeing the movie, I noticed that the famous manga creator and novel illustrator, Akihiro Yamada, had helped with it. It then made me think back on this game, and that it needed some expanded content. I will expand this one for you Yamada. Happy belated 50th birthday (1957-2007).
This game, which can also be called Ancient Magic Bazoo: Magic World or Magic Universe is a pretty mundane RPG made by Hot-B in 1993, with character illustrations done by Akihiro
Yamada. The game is nothing fancy...actually, the game highly resembles an NES game in most regards if we were basing things purely on overall presentation. The game itself is fairly traditional,
although a few cool ideas were implemented such as aging characters, whether you want the protagonist to be male or female and a special skill system for characters not well versed in
the magical arts. Graphically speaking, the game is subpar, but at least the overworld graphics are clean, the enemies and characters are just detailed enough to be distinguishable and the framerate doesn't skip a beat. The audio for the game is also...give or take, I'd say above average. The battle theme is cool, and the music that plays throughout is satisfying, though the music overall is nothing remarkable.
Besides aging characters and special skills, you should think carefully when it comes to the gameplay. The magicians must train well if they are to use powerful magic, and you can learn different magic by going to different magic schools. However, you can only learn a certain amount of spells...more than you can carry, so you should choose wisely. It's not a good idea to just grab every spell you can find from the get-go. This game does not have much of a world map, but rather, small screens that you can travel back and forth from. When you leave them, you are taken to a map with a line that shows your character traveling the majority of your destination for you. This will make navigating a little easier for Non-Japanese speakers, but I felt it was a pretty lazy move on Hot-B's behalf. Finally, I would just like to say that the encounter rate can be absurd at times.
Given all those things, I'm a bit surprised that Hot-B would make a playable RPG at all, and I guess that makes me a little lenient towards it with my evaluation. This game is certainly not for everyone, let alone the casual game player. While the game is bearable, I like it more for Akihiro Yamada's illustrations
more than anything else.
- Written by Vyse the determined - |
