Artist: m-eine
In the past, I have been wary towards licensed video games for the fact that most of them produced in the west are notoriously bad. However, I have never played any licensed Anime games before. In the next few months, I am going to cover three Anime licensed video games over the course of several months. With that, I will share my first impressions thoughts on Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica The Battle Pentagram.
Before Madoka Magica Portable came out in 2012 for the PlayStation Portable, Gen Urobuchi worked on the project with Bandai Namco Games along with some of the people who worked on the production for the show. It combined a rogue-like RPG (due to the limited power on the PlayStation Portable) with visual novel elements. While I haven’t played the game myself, I heard it was pretty good. Of course, with the PlayStation Vita being 4x more powerful than the PlayStation Portable, the game got an upgraded sequel. It takes most of the elements from the portable game and turns it into a hack and slash game while having a tie in from the first two movies.
If you play visual novels, the game follows this format for events and daytime activities. Depending on what events you view during the day can determine what stages you can play at night,
The game has two cycles, a day and night cycle. The day cycle is focused on the girls increasing their relationship with each other in a visual novel format. After viewing an event, their relationship meter will raise depending on the participants and the event. You can also increase the relationship meter after clearing a stage at night if you have a partner accompanying you. The results determine how high it will raise.
The actual gameplay follows mostly a hack and slash game. The message at the beginning of each floor shows the objectives.
As for the action part of the game, while it took me some time getting used to, I admit that the gameplay is very satisfying for the fact that you can beat up witches and their minions as a magical girl. There are various attacks that you can use such as melee/aerial attacks, magic attacks, and combination attack/magic. In my experience, the game will become brutally difficult as you progress and I can admit that I came close to failing a stage. At least there is a mode that allows you to replay stages that you already beaten in order to raise your party member’s levels. As you would expect, you can play as any of the five magical girls (Madoka, Homura, Sayaka, Mami and Kyouko) after beating the prologue.
After playing nearly 14 hours of the game and being almost halfway done with it, I can admit that Madoka Magica The Battle Pentagram is very enjoyable thus far. While I won’t spoil much since I want to leave it for the final review, it obviously has a lot of yuri undertones as the girls’ relationship with each other increases. With that, I will share my final thoughts on the game once I have finished my first play through of the game, which will probably be in another few more weeks or so.
Gameplay Video (Charlotte, contains spoilers)
If you are wondering, the footage has been recorded from a Playstation Vita TV. You can see my thoughts on the micro-console over at my side blog. ¶
As soon as I read “yuri undertones” I got mad for obvious reasons “coughnowesternversioncough”. Anyway I’d like to play the game at some point.
It’s kind of disappointing that Bandai Namco will never localize this like they do with most Anime licensed video games even if the franchise is popular in the west. Still, I find it surprising that Sword Art Online managed to get a localized release despite having similar popularity. Maybe because the Asian release had an English translation or something.
SAO is a mainstream sweetheart. Simple as that really. Meduca may be popular but I highly doubt it is as popular as SAO.