Review of The Magi Chronicles – Part One

In an earlier blog post I did an interview with a developer, Drassray. I’m now reviewing the game he’s currently working on, The Magi Chronicles. I’ve actually completely run through the demo before, but I’m going to be doing something a little different with this. I’m running through the game in Twitch Streams and doing a review of it as I go.

At this point I’ve done two twitch streams and played the game for about two hours and twenty minutes. Before I get into the meat of this, The Magi Chronicles is an RPG, and is created in RPG Maker VX Ace. For some people that’s an automatic negative mark against it, but not me. I’m a huge fan of the genre of RPGs, and I’ve been playing games developed in RPG Maker since there was a translation of RPG Maker 2000 for the PC. It’s an amazing tool, and it lets us see games and stories from people who might not otherwise be able to make games as easily. It’s also been a stepping stone for a number of developers, but I digress. This is about the game and not about using RPG Maker as a tool, I’ll likely do a blog post on that itself later.

In the game you start off as Daryl, a young man who lives with his father and attends a magic school in his village. Daryl’s the top student despite being particularly lazy himself. Now right off you might be saying that’s not all that original, but at least for me it’s not about how original an idea is, but how a developer can take that idea and make it their own. The relationship between Daryl and his father is presented very well right away and there are some amusing conversation options with him and other people around the town when you’re on your way to Magic School. I won’t give away too much of the game itself, but there’s plenty of character development and humor to come after that.

At this point I’ve been introduced to two other characters in the game, Corran and Naomi. Corran is a more serious character himself and a friend of Daryl’s father. As well as the reason why Daryl ends up leaving his hometown. He’s more than just a plot-device though, as you get an introspective into his character fairly quickly, his opinions and even see them changed through the game. Naomi is one of those few times where I’ve seen a cat-girl done well in a game. Often times they end up more fluff and just there for laughs. Naomi definitely adds more humor to the game, but even at this point being just introduced to her you can see some depth from talking with her. That’s a nice feature that they added into this game, being able to talk with some of the characters and have multiple conversation options which give you a deeper look into the relationships between the characters.

On a more general note as the gameplay goes, the battle system is really well developed. The fights are not too hard and you can easily move through them, but they’re not so easy that you get bored and just tap attack through them. There’s some small strategy to it, and the amazing soundtrack to this game helps you stay interested. The songs blend well into the battle, the maps, and keep up well with the pace and emotions of the story.

Now with that said, I’ll go over the one negative I find in the game right now. Now admittedly this is a demo and I’ve already spoken with the developer and he plans to balance this soon. As of now it’s difficult to obtain money early on, which makes buying items or equipment difficult. Since you can really only buy one or the other unless you grind against enemies for money. There is a synthesis system in the game, where you can create your own items. Which is a system I really like and enjoy from a number of the other games I’ve seen it in, but as of right now you can’t really find enough items for synthesizing.

I’m really looking forward to seeing more of this great game, it’s definitely worth watching and waiting to see what they do with it from here. I’m actually still far from the end of the demo that’s available now, so there’s a lot to enjoy if you want to check it out yourself. I recommend it.

For anyone interested in looking at Drassray’s game themselves, here’s a few links to where you can find the game and more information on its development:

RPG Maker Web Forums

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Original Soundtrack

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