Genre: Action Adventure Indie Casual Platformer
Developer: Broken Desk
Publisher: Sekai Project
Release date: Dec 20, 2016
MAGICAL×SPIRAL is a platformer with RPGish elements from Broken Desk and published by Sekai Project. Even though it’s not tagged as such on Steam, I feel that it’s most aptly described as a platformer because of how you transverse the levels. I will go ahead and get this out the way; the base graphics for the levels and intermissions is absolute shit. Everything else is amazing right down to the voice work, the music, and the character sprites. The only other thing I would have to say is the character movements are kinda clunky. The gameplay is solid otherwise, especially the boss fights. We will however get into that in detail later on. Firstly I would like to discuss the actual story for the game.
Once upon a time Midgard and the magical kingdom in the sky Celestria enjoyed a mutually beneficial existence sharing magic. Until one day, magic ceased to exist in Midgard and all contact was lost with Celestria. As with all things, Celestria eventually fades from the minds of the denizens of Midgard and magic is all but forgotten. Enter Medianne, a normal highschool girl – except she believes Celestria is real and has done countless research on finding it. She found the Phantasmal Tower during her research as a way to reach Celestria, and has embarked to the tower to find out. Upon arriving at the tower, she finds out there is an exam to get into Celestria from Salamander, one of the spirits in the tower. An exam to find out if you are a proper magic user.
That is the core and base story at the start the game. However, that is not all to the story because it is split between four routes. You begin only with Medianne’s route, and after beating Sobel in a duel (you meet him at the end of Medianne’s route) which opens his route. In turn, after beating Sobel’s route, you open up the ‘true’ routes for both characters. The base routes are split into 5 levels and 5 intermissions. The levels, except for the final, are split into three parts: The first two being sections filled with enemies, traps, and platforming. The third is a boss fight upon which finishing, you are granted a score sheet and shown your gold earned for the level. The intermissions are where you can spend the gold you earn to level your stats and gain new magic spells.
The cool thing is you can revisit previous levels, minus the boss fights, to grind out more gold to better your stats. The magic is granted to you by spirits who you encounter in the tower based on the four core elements of fire, earth, wind, and water. Each element has offensive and defensive magic of which you can only have 2 selected per spirit. You progress through the levels by using your magic to destroy or even avoid the enemies til you get to the boss fight. As you traverse each level there is plenty of jumping between platforms and avoiding traps such as falling platforms. An important note about the two base routes, besides the story being slightly different for both, is the levels are in a different order as well.
As I stated before the graphics are amazing except for the levels and intermissions. It is like they put all their eggs into the story, audio, and gameplay. Speaking of the audio, the best part of it is the voice acting for the characters especially the spirits. The opening theme is absolutely outstanding to the point it seems like the opening to a great anime. The music for the levels make the graphics for them bearable. It brings that much quality to the game. I would love to score this higher, however the level graphics are a negative that cannot be ignored.
BoxCatHero gives MAGICAL×SPIRAL a Drastik Measure 7.0 out of 10 (70).
Pros:
- Amazing opening
- Amazing voice acting
- Great story
Cons:
- Level graphics pale in comparison to everything else
MAGICAL×SPIRAL is available on Steam for $14.99.
