Did you forget what the professor said?
You wouldn’t survive long out there.
You see, sometimes the ghost of a scary witch stalks these halls.
On a quiet night, just like tonight….
A man met the witch in the hallway…
The witch took him away. The professors couldn’t do anything to help him.
But here’s the scary part, three days later, he was found, cruelly tortured.
- Gaff to Lillet in the Prologue of the Game
I have had this game for a while now, however only recently managed to finish it after getting stuck in the second part of the game. The game is overall different from most Nippon Ichi games you would have played before, however overall you will find that they make this new gameplay style work, and they do not deviate and make it too an ambitious game. The storyline is summarised in the game manual as this:
Lillet Blan was very excited.
She had been invited to a Magic Academy where only talented youths were accepted. The school was led by the famous wizard, Gammel Dore, who had once defeated the Archmage. The campus on which they study, the Silver Star tower was once the destroyed Archmage’s castle. The tower was still full of unsolved mysteries and dangers and this attracted many who had their own personal reasons in mind.
Lillet opened her first grimoire and began her studies. But only five days later, a terrifying disaster threatens the academy and all lives are lost.All except she, who travelled back through time without knowing why…
This at first may sound like a cross between the storyline of Harry Potter and Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, but you do not get the impression that it is either of those two after you finish the first 5 days of the game. There is no psychotic murders of the characters each day, with the storyline slightly getting more intense as it goes along, it is not too kiddy friendly but at the same time it does not lend itself to being too bloody and gorish that would make adults weary of it, instead it holds a rather good balance of the elements, if you know what I mean. The storyline is delivered to you in visual novel style, which is the text at the bottom of the screen with character artwork overlapping a pre-rendered background image. Before and after every battle there is a significant addition to the plot and besides the first few battles, there is no real filler content in the story, with each scene lending to the storyline in some way. The storyline is split up into five parts, each ending with the bloody murder of everyone in the tower and Lillet being sent back in time. Unlike other similar series, the storyline does not repeat itself except in the beginning, with each chapter having different primary supporting characters such as one chapter having Bartido as a main supporting character whilst the next chapter would have Hiram as his replacement.
Character development of the characters within the storyline start off slow however as the chapters progress, every character gets development which overall all sums up nicely in the end. There is a nice variety of characters for a game like this, with characters being added to as each part progresses. You start off with the lower rank witch Lillet Blan whilst as the story progresses, you meet several other more powerful mages such as Bartido and eventually learn more about the mysterious entities of the school and your teachers, with all relationships being wiped at the end of the week and with differing information being added the next week. Overall, character development is pretty good in the game, however I would prefer to have a bit more development for more minor characters that dont take a role in each week but are present in them. The ending of the game does a good summary of the characters after the events.
Graphics in this game are average. I do like the art work of the characters and how the characters mouth’s are lip sync’ed during the storyline scenes. There is various character designs ranging from a normal human, to a Dumbledore like figure to the more innovative such as a talking frog and Lionman. What I find interesting is that none of the character designs really lead you to believe that they are a good or evil person, since if you were to look at them, you could think that they were a good person, however the storyline portrays them as evil, or vice versa. Emotions are also portrayed on the characters and they are not just one image with a moving mouth occasionally, instead if they are flustered they will show it, and one of my favourites, in the prologue, Gaff when telling Lillet the story at the start of this review, he will act as if he is telling a really scary story, with an evil grin on his face. As well, the background designs are well done and well detailed however I would have liked a better variety since some of them were overused a bit.
Battle related however, I would say it was a bit disappointing. The summon designs are acceptable and understandable if you were to have so many on the stage at one time, however the battle field itself is really drab and consists of the same design of a corridor stacked multiple times on top of each other with very little differentiation. From a game like this, I was expecting each level to be individually designed to have a bit more detail.
I really enjoyed the voice acting in the game, and each characters voice accurately matches the characters personality and upbringing whilst not sounding irritating to the ears or overacted. The music track of this game on the other hand feels limited at times, with the same tracks being used multiple times in a short period of time, however it doesnt really matter if you are being attacked from all directions and it isnt that distracting that it would cause you to lose focus of the battle itself.
Gameplay takes place on a battlefield as viewed on the image to the left. Storyline characters are not viewed on the screen and except summoned monsters are the only ones to appear, where they either take harvesting/collection roles or battling roles against enemies that appear around the map. Monsters are classed into four categories:
- Glamour – Not fashion based but instead the apparantly oldest form of magic involving summoning fairies and elves. Strong against necromancy and weak against alchemy.
- Necromancy - Self explanitory, weak against glamour and strong against sorcery.
- Sorcery – Summons rebels of god, weak against necromancy and strong against alchemy.
- Alchemy – More scientific then summoning. Strong against glamour and weak against sorcery.
You start out the game with only being able to summon glamour summons, and later on as you get classes with the teachers, learn how to summon improved beings. Each class has multiple beings it can summon which range from collection, flying past multiple levels, ranged attack and close range attack. This adds a diversity of options to your strategy, since you have to take into account what magic your opponent has and how you can counter that, since you might want to go all offensive, but if you don’t have defensive summons, you may perish anyway, especially with some missions require you to endure enemy onslaught for 30 minutes without a stop to save.
With such a variety of options, it will not get repetitive, however the main problem is that there are only so many levels that you have to play on. Unlike other Nippon Ichi games, there are no randomly generated maps which leaves you with around 25 storyline maps as well as a number of bonus levels to deal with. This is a lot, and will take you a long time to play, but I would have liked a random map generator to add a bit more of a variety to my gameplay and strategy required.Despite there is no random map generator, this game will provide you with several dozen hours of complex gaming and strategy. The game will also allow you to replay scenes of the epic storyline by choosing the corresponding book in the games interface without requiring you to replay through the whole game again which is a nice touch.
In my personal opinion, it did take me a while to get into the game, however after getting through the first few maps, I was able to get into the game and really enjoy it! It is Nippon Ichi’s excellent attempt at crossing several game genre’s into one and adding their own touch to it. I would recommend it to any gamer. Within Australia for the Aussies that are into it, it is relatively difficult to find a copy of it, however I have seen a number of copies in EB Game’s stores in both their new and pre-owned sections going out for something like $20, making it a cheap buy for such a long gameplay time.
Overall Score
Storyline – 9.0
Characters - 8.5
Graphics – 7.0
Music / Voice Acting – 7.5
Gameplay - 8.0
Replayability - 8.0
Personal Opinion – 8.0
Total Score – 8.0
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