Magical Starsign - DS

[Kotatsu Neko]

I didn't see a thread for this so thought I'd do a quick write up.

This is a 2D RPG from Brownie Brown, and a sequel to the original Magical Vacation on GBA. (never released outside Japan)

I've been playing this for a few evenings now (inbetween lengthy sessions of Phoenix Wright 2) and it's slowly growing on me after initial poor impressions. It's turning into a pretty solid SNES style RPG, with no real innovations but enough solid gameplay to keep me interested. I believe Brownie Brown (when they were still Squaresoft employees) did the excellent Treasure Hunter G on the SNES, so they know their stuff.

I do have plenty of niggles with it though, chiefly being the control. It's all on the stylus (although a few things can be done on the d-pad, it's clunky and incomplete) using the familiar Animal Crossing style point and follow system. Sadly the characters can only move in 8 directions though, and at a few fixed speeds.. making it quite crude and needlessly so. Menus and battles do work well on the stylus though.

Also in the negative column are the visuals. The sprites are absolutely TINY, as are all the fonts. Really can't fathom why and it makes it all look quite 8-bit and unimpressive. The style of the backgrounds is very much in the painterly Disney type mood, but done with a tiny colour palette so you get masses of Sega Genesis type colour banding everywhere. Again, it's really not what I would expect from the DS. Animation is very simplistic and there are almost no special effects other than a bit of simple sprite scaling here and there. The battles also run at a disturbingly low frame rate. (the rest is all 60fps though)

Sound is good though, very SNES-like and does an excellent job.

So far I'm thinking this is a good buy if you're a real RPG fan, but if not, probably give it a miss.

[Bleeders]

Nobody playing this? Read the review on Eurogamer, completely forgot about it.

[Kotatsu Neko]

I gave up on it. It's not bad, it's just that there is much better stuff on the DS, such as Phoenix Wright 2, Hotel Dusk, Final Fantasy 3, Children of Mana etc etc.

I guess I should revisit it sometime, but I have a feeling that won't be for a good while yet.

[Kimberz]

I bought a DS Lite finally yesterday and one of the games I bought with it was Magical Starsign. I played it a little bit yesterday during my "have to play every game I have just bought session" and I'm not 100% sure what to think of it yet.

It seems very similar to most RPG/FF style games although the graphics seem very cutesy (that might just be cos I'm not very far through the game yet, I'd have to play it more to give a better judgement). I disagree with Neko about control only being via the stylus, I found that you can navigate your character using the D-control rather than the stylus but in my opinion the stylus is easier to use, this is just my personal preference though (on second read I may have misunderstood the post with regards to controlling the characters movement, I apologise if this is the case).

I definately like using the stylus for controlling the battles, it makes selection of attacks and what have you much easier.

I have to say the music annoys me after a very short period of time though, although again this is probably just a personal preference.

So far though I've found it to be an interesting game, I hope it continues to remain interesting as I play it further.