Game 39 - Wondrous Magic wrap-up

The main thing that stands out about this game is the real-time battle system. While this does set the game apart from the other cookie-cutter games coming out around the same time, it has some problems. It tends to be very hard to tell what's happening in the battle, especially since you have 3 AI-controlled units and then enemies on all sides. It's difficult to know who is hitting you, who is causing the poison, etc. Healing can also be tricky. The controls for using magic and items are unintuitive and I felt like I never really got used to it.

Maybe this is why so many games fall back on the cookie cutter AMID system -- it's not great, but at least the designers and players know what to expect and it's not very risky.

The story sequences have good artwork to go along with them. I wish a lot more games did this rather than just sticking with the sprites. It gives you a lot more feel for what the characters look like. The rest of the graphics are fairly decent as well.

The game requires too much grinding for my taste. Most of it can be done while exploring the areas, but especially at the end, I had to grind quite a bit to finish the game.

Overall the game is somewhat worth playing. Here's my ranking system again:

A - These games were truly enjoyable, I had fun playing them just as games, not for the blog.

B - These games were average. I found them boring at times, and it was mostly the fulfillment of completing the game for the blog that carried me through. My overall experience with the game wasn't terrible, it's just not a game I would have finished all the way through for fun.

C - These games were painful to finish, to the point where I wanted to give up despite the blog, and had to force myself to play through (sometimes using cheats) just to move on to the next game.

I would give this game a B or maybe a B+.

Next up is the PC Engine version of Ys IV, a game I've wanted to play for a long time. I'm currently playing a real-time strategy RPG for the Super Famicom on my other blog, Hiouden: Pact With the Monsters.

Game 39 - Wondrous Magic (Finished)

I finally succeeded in getting what I needed in the ruined town. At the bottom, we find Kurisu's father, but he's dying. He was trying to stop Irion from reviving the evil god Ivas, but he dies. He does give us the item we need to kill the vampire, though.

The next dungeon is harder because you can't warp out of it, so you have to be a lot more cautious in exploration. I had to move up a few levels while exploring until I reached the vampire lord.

He's tough; he separates into bats and then poisons us. Kurisu mostly had to do healing duty, but eventually I won. Now we have the last part of the staff we need to revive the goddess.

Time to do the ritual!

But no, Irion comes in and destroys the staff, also hurting Kurisu.

Now the remaining members have to go out and find a way to restore Kurisu, which actually just involves repairing the staff. The Dwarves send us on a few fetch quests to do this, one of which involves going to a Hobbit village (the Tolkien lawyers can't read Japanese). One of the Hobbits wants a lottery ticket; you can't solve this subquest until very late in the game and all it does is give you an item that increases your XP by 1 when you use it.

So let's just take the staff, go back and restore Kurisu, and continue on. Now that we have the staff, we can finally bring the goddess Shurel down.

  Unfortunately she doesn't have much power, so all she can tell us is go seek out the Elves to fully restore the power of the staff. This involves going to an island, with the help of mermaids.

The mermaid sends us on a fetch quest for a flute to calm the seas so that we can go out on a ship. The tower isn't too tough, but once we go out in the ship there's a hard octopus boss. I had to level a bit to beat him, but finally we're to the island. The island holds an illusionary garden where only magic users can go, so we lose Soldick for a while in favor of a useless elf. This dungeon also required a lot of grinding and leaving the dungeon.

Eventually, though, we recover the power of the staff, and it's time to head to the final dungeons to defeat Irion and prevent the evil god from returning.

At this point I used a cheat code to level a bit because it was clear that I was going to have to do at least 10-15 levels of grinding to beat the game. There's an optional dungeon that has some useful equipment in it that I cleared next, and then it was time to go to beat Irion.

We also learn here that the one who was going to revive Ivas was not Kurisu, but the other character I have (Fredia) who is actually Kurisu's brother. Irion stole his arm (!?) to weaken him, but having beaten Irion he gets his arm back and is back to full power.

Unfortunately beating Irion is not enough because Ivas has already returned. So one more dungeon to go.

Ivas himself appears in two forms -- a human form, which is not very hard, and a demon form, which is. Fredia has to keep one part of the demon form occupied while the rest of us take on the boss.

I leveled to 50 (max) and still had a hard time beating him. Using items is very awkward and so it was hard to keep people healed and revived, but I did win after many tries.

Ivas is destroyed, the goddess' power comes down, and we win! Kurisu heads back home to be a local healer. Fredia seemed to have died, but...

In the end he survived.

This is a pretty average game, wrap-up will be next and then Ys IV for PC Engine.

Game 39 - Wondrous Magic

Wondrous Magic (ワンダラスマジック)

Released 12/17/1993, by Ascii

There are three more games to go for 1993 (plus one PC Engine game). This is another minor game with no translation patch. 

The story opens with a child, Kurisu, wanting to go find her father and bring him back to her village. He left when she was very little. Her grandfather persuades her to wait until she turns 16 and then she goes with him. Meanwhile there's a general backstory that the Demon god was defeated by humans with the help of magic, but then she vowed to return in the 100th descendant of one of her minions.

The story sequences have good graphics; I'm always surprised that more RPGs didn't do things like this, since the quality of the sprite graphics was so limited.

Neither the towns nor world map are explorable, you just choose a location and go.

The forest outside the town is the first dungeon area. In the areas you can hold down Y to run, and press B to jump (or hold it down to keep jumping); as far as I know the jumping has no actual effect, it just looks funny if you continuously hold it while moving.

Encounters are random, and the battles take place in real time.

The green bars on top are the HP of Kurisu and Linkel. The middle shows the monsters (you use L and R to switch, sort of like Aretha). The grey box to the right shows the last action the character took, and will turn brown when they get to act. You act with the buttons -- Y attacks, holding down A brings up the magic menu when you can then cast with B, and holding down X brings up the equipped items (you can see the bread in the picture) and then B uses it. The large green bar on the bottom is the total HP of the enemies. The system works OK, but I feel like even having played half the game, I'm still not fully used to it.

You can put your characters on AI, which I did -- they don't always make good decisions but I can't imagine trying to control all four characters in realtime (using select to switch between them).

You can also run away from fights with 100% chance if you have a way you can go that is not blocked by an enemy. Losing all characters results in a game over and you reload from your last save.

Of course given the title of the game and the characters, it's obvious that magic is a big part of the game, although Kurisu only starts with Heal. There are two types of magic, one that uses your HP, and another that uses MP. You can equip 9 spells at a time for use in battle. The spells level up sometimes when your character levels up.

When you defeat a monster, you get XP and Onyx. There are two forms of currency -- Onyx, which the monsters drop, and then Bezera which you get from selling things and from chests. This part of the game confuses me because there seems to be no purpose to the two currencies. At least in the half of the game I've played, every shopkeeper accepts both currencies and you can change them freely, and there's a set 10 bezera = 1 onyx rate. There are even expensive items that change all your bezera to onyx. It makes me wonder if this was something that was intended to work differently but they ran out of development time or changed their minds.

In the next town we meet Shira the magician who teaches Kurisu some magic and then puts her on a test to become a real magician --  recovering a stone from tower.

Kurisu has to fight by herself in this dungeon. You often enter dungeons very underpowered, but levelling goes pretty quickly, and I mostly found that simply exploring the dungeons to find the chests and using the escape items/spells when I was too damaged provided enough level gains to proceed. So far I've only had to spend a slight amount of time running in circles fighting.

This dungeon itself isn't hard but once we finish it, a dragon appears when we try to leave the city.

This required some grinding, but at least Linkle joins the fight. Kurisu's frost magic can freeze enemies, so switching back and forth between the heads and freezing them is a good strategy. Once we return to Shira's magic school, she's gone. Linkle suspects that it was actually Shira herself who summoned the dragon to attack them. After questioning the king we move on to the next town to follow Shira. A knight named Soldic joins -- he's 54 years old and Linkle is in his 60s; this might be the oldest RPG party I've seen.

In the next town we encounter the mage Zaifon, who reveals what's actually going on. It turns out that Kurisu is the 100th descendant of Ivas, the demon god. This is why Shira tried to kill them. Zaifon gives them a chance, though -- if they can find three parts of a wand they may be able to stop Ivas from awakening, in which case Zaifon won't kill Kurisu. We get a fourth party member, a magic knight (who dies a lot); he's only 16.

Off to find the first staff, which is in this town. The dungeons are increasingly mazelike and confusing.

The spellcasting menu

Afterwards we have to take an underground passage to the Dwarf village. They agree to let us into the place with the next staff piece as long as we defeat a big crab in the desert.

After that, we get the next staff and move on. At Zev, there seems to be a Baron (who might be a vampire) who destroyed a local town and takes sacrificial victims. The first thing we have to do is go to the ruined town, and then take on the castle to beat the Baron. This is where I am now. As I said, it seems to be around halfway through the game, so this isn't a very long game. The ruined town had tough monsters but I've moved up 4-5 levels just exploring the area so hopefully I can get through it next time.