Magna Carta: Tears of Blood

"A very pretty disappointment."

Magna Carta: Tears of Blood is a beautiful, complex, lengthy, and utterly pointless RPG for the PS2. Ordinarily, I'm a fan of RPGs, from old-school Final Fantasy to the Lunar Series to Shadow Hearts. Magna Carta had all of the elements of a good RPG game...but still managed to be pathetically subpar.

STORY - 3/10

The story gets about a 7 for concept, and 0 for execution. The tale about world ripped apart by war between two races and a band of mercenaries who must struggle to bring peace to the land...well, that part isn't so bad. A synopsis of the plot, complete with halfway decent twists and an acceptable amount of backstory, would lead one to expect that this is a decent game. Don't be fooled. The strength of a plot lies not in the synopsis, but in the execution.

For some reason, the writers seemed unable to make the story flow smoothly. Instead of one event leading logically to another, you'll often end up scratching your head as the characters announce their intentions to do something completely counter-productive to their goal. Need to help someone not get arrested? Don't use your authority to call off other pursuants--throw a big hissy fit and storm out of the temple so they want to arrest you, too. Someone's threatening to kill an important NPC? Don't bother checking whether that NPC is in danger--just accede to the enemy's megalomaniacal demands.

It's even worse when the events of the game clearly don't match up against what they want the plot to be. Quite frequently throughout the game, you'll find yourself in a story battle that ends after a certain point with your characters' surprised gasps of "He's too strong! We must run!" Unfortunately, more than likely, you were winning the fight up until then. Other games give these unbeatable villains abilities like taking 0 damage or dealing absurd amounts of it. This game makes them pansies, but it also makes you run away.

The 'other' side of the story--the comings and goings of the villains--is also very poorly told. Most of the time, you see a map background with dialogue boxes on top of it in which the baddies discuss their plottings over and over and over and over. You see so much of the bad guys that they become boring inside of ten minutes, especially with the constant posturing.

If I had to describe the story in one word, that word would be 'contrived.' It's not that the plot couldn't have been a masterpiece of epic proportions. It's just that the writers completely failed to get anywhere near the complexity of the plot of Pokemon.

CHARACTERS - 4/10

Let's see. We have the big strong manly man and the innocent little girl he has to save; the cranky but soft on the inside fire witch; the meathead with fists of doom; the geeky engineer and his mute babydoll sidekick... what part of this sounds fun? And those are only a few of the characters. They're all cliches, or, worse, the concepts that evil cliches rejected as too boring.

Most of the characters get a decent amount of backstory. Unfortunately, most of the backstory is lame. The main character had a mysterious childhood friend. One of the women is looking for her husband, who up and left her for silly, plot-contrived reasons. Another guy is bent on revenge for his dead girlfriend. Whatever. Most of the time, they're portrayed so flatly that the plot could reveal that the main girl is secretly the evil queen of the bad guys, and not only do you not care, but you saw it coming a mile away.

They say you really make or break a story by the villains, and, in this case, they'd be right. The story is definitely broken by the villains. Sure, there's some petty politicing going on between the mysterious queen, her Napoleon-complexed loyal guard, the porn-star bubblehead evil warrior, the evil clown, and the prototypical succubus, but it's never more than that. They bicker and banter and chase you around, and the game high-handedly prevents you from dealing with them even when a confrontation erupts, but most of them can only dream of being a Kefka or Magneto. The sole exception is the mysterious Neikan, who is introduced way too late in the game to make a difference in how much you care.

The NPCs are nothing to shout about, either, especially in the brains department. They single you out for attention because you're the group of PCs, nobly insist on going to their completely optional dooms, or betray you because their inner megalomaniac just can't help himself. Or, if they're not important story-wise, they shuffle about their lives and never have anything more interesting to tell you about than a new item combination. Gag me.

GAMEPLAY - 2/10

The most agonizing part of this game isn't the insipid dialogue or the nonsensical directions the plot jaunts off into, but the running around with bad camera angles and getting into endless random encounters with the crummy battle system.

The battle system is sort of a mixture between Shadow Hearts and Star Ocean 2, but different in all the wrong ways. As has become the trend with newer RPGs, you have three characters in battle. In Shadow Hearts, the system was turn-based, so everyone got to act. In Star Ocean, you got to control one person and run them around the field while the AI controlled everyone else. Magna Carta combines the free movement aspect of Star Ocean with the hit-the-buttons-in-sequence attack system of Shadow Hearts. Not bad so far, right? Well, I haven't gotten to the part where the characters you're not controlling just stand there like morons. Instead of each character having an ATB gauge, you have one for the party. Your entire team gets one action each time it fills up, and running around at all keeps it from filling up. How much the characters like each other determines how long it takes you to get your turn, and having a character dead or paralyzed seriously screws you over. Essentially, you end up using a single character for most fights, while the other two stand in the background and scratch their heads.

Sometimes, the battle starts you off at the top of the battle screen...unable to tell where the monsters are. You have to waste time running around to find them. This is especially annoying if you manage to get a surprise attack, because you waste your surprise round trying to figure out why the game designers couldn't just put everything where you could see it.

The Chi system is also irritating. There are eight kinds of chi, and different areas have varying amounts of each kind of chi. In order to use an attack, you have to have chi of the same type available for consumption. Without it, you can't act. Unfortunately, the monsters are not similarly burdened, so they can suck up all of your chi and then keep using it to whale on you until you switch to another element.

These two aspects of the battle combine into one larger frustration should you miss during your attack sequence. Ordinarily, each character has around 3-5 attacks that they can build up to in order during the battle. Missing starts them back over at the beginning, uses up their turn, does no damage at all, sucks up chi, and adds a penalty to your 'leadership', which determines the party's ATB gauge.

Fortunately, there are no mini-games in Magna Carta. Item creation is the closest you come, and that only involves combining items you have in pre-determined combinations to make new items. This is a little tedious and unimaginative, but it's a cheaper way of getting good items than buying them, if you know what you're doing.

Worse even than the battle system (which gets repetitive but doable after you get used to it) is the extreme linearity of the gameplay. If the game wants to send you one way, then, dammit, you're not making any side trips for item-buying or monster-hunting or anything else. Furthermore, random encounters don't regenerate, so once you've fought, you're done. Random encounter levels are determined by the party's average level, as far as I can tell, so the only reason to 'level' is to learn new techniques or make money. The real part where the linearity hurts is with the blacksmith's quests, which you go on to obtain items in order to make new weapons and armor. Once you undertake one, you can't undertake another, but the game often refuses to let you backtrack to areas you need to explore in order to get the items. The real way to handle that is to keep a mental note of what items you're looking for and undertake the quests only when you've completed them already for some instant gratification. Of course, by the time the game lets you backtrack to the blacksmith you have the items for, you already have a much better sword.

MUSIC/SOUND EFFECTS - 4/10

Aside from the battle theme, which isn't too bad, most of the music in this game is bland, boring, and better suited for an elevator or dentist's waiting room. Sound effects are likewise. Swords smash things, etc., but nothing special.

During battles, each character has an inane set of things to say when they act, in addition to the names of their special combos. "It was over before it started." "Eat fist!" "Is that all?" Things like this are cute at first, or in moderation, but not every other time they attack.

It's the voice acting that really takes the cake in this game, and I don't mean that in a good way. Did you think Richter Belmont's lines were overdramatized? At least he said them with some spirit! The dialogue in this game suffers from poor reading. Sometimes, the lines are spoken with an intonation that's clearly inappropriate to the situation and that gives a different meaning to the words. Most of the time, the lines are spo...ken...ve...ry...slow...ly to the point that you wish you could find the voice actors and smack them. Lack of emotion and overdramatization are both common problems, depending on which voice actor is currently failing at life, but almost no one nails even a single line.

GRAPHICS/ART - 5/10

When I picked up this game, I thought it was going to be another Final Fantasy X-2 because of the two attractive and scantily-clad women on the box. Then I realized that one of the women was a man. Looking through the instruction manual, I then realized that the character on the front who I thought made the prettiest girl was, in fact, an adolescent boy. On the flip side, at least this game isn't one of the ones that sexualizes women by putting them in scanty clothes because chain mail bikinis have the advantage of added "mobility." No, Magna Carta dresses everyone in as little as possible.

The FMV sequences in this game are beautiful. You'll see one when you put the game in and watch the opening, and another one near the beginning of the game, and another one about 30 hours later. Seriously, what's the point of having beautiful cut scenes if you're never going to employ them?

The normal graphics in the game are fairly good. The character movement is generally okay, even if their facial expressions suffer. An awful lot of attention is paid to realistic texture, shape, and movement of breasts. Backgrounds are boring, but pretty. Doors that never opens, paths that can't be explored, and other flavor elements of the backgrounds are here in abundance. Nothing too bad, but nothing too good, either.

As previously mentioned, most of the dialogue takes place with a stationary backgrounds and character portraits, which is an extremely lazy mode of storytelling. I can't even remember the last RPG that did this.

Camera angles are another problem. There's a single dungeon in the game that lets you rotate the camera angle. The rest of the time, you're stuck with what they give you, and it ain't pretty. You can't see into corners, can't tell what's in front of you in the path...and when the angle changes suddenly, you end up getting stuck on walls until you figure out how to maneuver around the corner.

DIFFICULTY - 2/10

Aside from the game randomly screwing you over sometimes...there's nothing hard about this. Punch the buttons, figure out which attacks are cheap and use them, resort to an item or two in really dire straits...and you're done. Ordinarily, I don't score difficulty, but this game is so easy for something that's also so much work that I feel that it really detracts from the game.

FINAL SCORE - 3/10

This game probably isn't worth your time or money. Borrow it from a friend if you can't control your curiousity.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 10/30/06