Sorry for the triple post, but I just got done playing one game I always wanted to play:
It's Madou Monogatari Tower Of The Magician, the one that stars Schezo as the main character!
I have expressed an desire to play this game (or any Madou game) way earlier in this thread, but was intimidated by the potential language barrier, while it's a bummer that I can only understand the story bits via fan translations, Puyo is easy to play and menu navigation becomes second nature after a while, Madou on the other hand is not only sparse on fan translations, but also a dungen crawler RPG, so I kept a video playtrough on stand by, in case that me not understanding anything could interfere with my progression. In the end thought I was very plaeasently suprised by how I really only needed it once near the beginning when I had to use the ice spell on a certain kind of door, other then that it was very smooth sailing, for reasons I will elaborate on. Like with Paper Jam I will write in categorys, because thats just easier for me.
Story
This is the one part I can't fully judge for obvious reasons and I do wish I could understand the dialog, but the basic story works well enough.
Basicly Schezo is on another quest for power and heads to the titular Tower. As it turns out the Tower is owned by Wish, wo turns out to be Witch's grandmother, Witch tries to find her and meets up with Schezo several times, as it turns out a villain under the name of Dark Matter defeated Wish , infiltrated the tower and Schezo needs to stop him in order to prevent inpendending destruction.
Again, it works well enough for me, especially since I always love to see these characters in action.
Graphics
This is one of many titles that came with Compile's Discstation magazine and for those standards I think it looks quite nice, the enviroments are a bit repetetive, but that comes with the genre and the character sprites are pretty good, particulary in battle, where the get to show some very fluent animations, special mention goes to a little baby Elephant that Schezo befriends after defeating Incubus, since he actually cheers Schezo on during battle, in all kinds of funny and adorable ways,
The biggest plus for the visuals for me, is that they visualize a ton of things, for instance, instead of plain text every attack and item has an icon, meaning that you don't have to memorize how let's say: Areiado is spelled in japanese and where it's located on the grid, which makes for a very user friendly interface.
Music
The music is quite good, while it doesn't hit thr catchyness of a typical Puyo Puyo song there are some very memorable tracks, such as the final boss theme, which is essentially a somber rendition of the main theme and the song that plays whenever Witch appears will forever be stuck in my head for all the right reasons:
Gameplay
The game is a first person dungeon crawler and orientating myself took a bit of time to get used to, thought even then the map system was a big help in that it not only shows the layout that you already explored, but also the direction you are facing, which made it easy to travel around, until I eventually was able to do it myself with ease, but even later on the map proved itself to be useful for many puzzles.
Speaking of which the puzzles were the one part where I was really afraid that I would have to constantly consult the playtrough, becaus again: language barrier, but outside of that one example solving puzzles wasn't a matter of reading and understanding hints, but rather observing your sorroundings and studying the map in certain cases. Starting with floor 3 all of the floors have one specific gimmick and it's up to the player to learn that gimmick in order to get through, one of my favorite examples is floor 4, which is essentially broken off in two halfs, ín the first one you collect three black orbs and in the second half you put them into three broken fountains and color them in specific ways that are shown on the walls within that specific half, with the map proving its worth by putting the fountains in the same order as the wall drawings. That's how puzzles work in this game, as long as you pay atttention you should have a good time solving them, I personally had a blast.
The battle system is pretty standard RPG fare for the most part, one unique thing is that Schezo's health isn't displayed via numbers, but rather his facial expressions and animations during battle, which is charming and something that's been a thing since the first Madou Monogatari. Other then that you fight enemies with your offensive and supporting magic, level up, find treasure chests, buy items from ''shops'', all that good stuff that you expect from an RPG.
So yeah, I have been looooooong overdue to jump into Puyo's parent series, but overall my first venture into Madou Monogatari was a very pleasent one and I'm eager to catch up on the rest of the series.
