"Are you ready to go on an amazing adventure, see magical creatures and defeat giant enemies!?"

See that tagline? That is about as generic as this game is ironically enough. I have never seen such a bland game in my life with so many video game cliches that makes it hard to continue on. I randomly picked this game up just on the basis of it was an RPG. I love RPGs I own more than any other genre and I enjoy writing reviews on them. This game however, from a gameplay standpoint is tedious yet very original and is a mirror image of the typical RPG today. However the story takes the best from every tale told and tries to incorporate it here but only makes you want to quit playing.

Everything is colorful in Magical Starsign; whether it is the characters or the environment everything is bright and alive. While this is a nice touch it hinders certain areas of the game trying to be dark or depressing which is a common occurrence in Magical Starsign. The game also makes perfect use of the two screens by often merging them into one. Battles are displayed on both screens though most of the action takes place on the bottom. The top usually shows the sky and can be used for a few things which I will touch on later. With the amount of spells shown the camera will zoom in and enemies or your outgoing damage will be displayed on the top screen just showing how the DS's two screens can be used as one.

Speaking of spells that's the basis of Magical Starsign (hence the name). Magic is used for everything in the universe here and the outcome is quite nice visually. You take control of 6 characters each of an element and use a small (and I mean small) selection of spells in combat. However each of these spells has two different animations, one for multiple enemy hits and one for single enemy hits. These last a few seconds and look amazing on the DS though they grow very tiresome by the end of the game.

There is one major thing wrong with the game however. Everything is so small. With Nintendo combining the screens into one most of the time the characters only take up a small portion of it. They often perform handshakes or little dance-cheer-like things but you can never see any of these as every character is so small. Their battle sprite however is very well done and should have been used as the actual world map sprite instead of the small thing being used. It really is quite sad given the environment looks very nice and distinctive from planet to planet you travel on that the character sprites had to lack so much.

I was disappointed by the overall sound of this title. The sound effects are really bad especially with the Japanese voiced character screams you hear in battle. These feel entirely out of place and make it look as if the developers got lazy when bringing the game to other regions.

The music is good at some points but for the most part is poorly done. Most of the tunes will remind you of the beeps and boops back on the Atari 2600 or the NES. Some will drop this however and go to what sounds like a fast-paced rock tune, these sound nice but these types of tunes rarely play. The music also fails at setting the mood. At times you will be in near death experiences in the darkest parts of the worlds yet hear a somewhat happy jingle playing, because that's all they really are, jingles. Most of the tunes last a few seconds then loop over and over again, they grow very tiresome as the game progresses along with the fact these tunes are few and used a lot. It feels very lazy as many other aspects of the game do.

Magical Starsign is ironically one of the most original RPGs ever. It is the first RPG I have ever encountered where using melee attacks on an enemy is discouraged. There are no melee weapons and not much equipment increases your physical power. Magic is your main power source and the weakest spell will easily hit for four or five times the damage a melee attack will score for. I love this take on the RPG genre however it is poorly executed for quite a few reasons.

First is the variety. Each character only gets five spells. Each has at least one beneficial party spell, some even more. This dwindles it down to only three or four attack type spells per character. You will be spamming the strongest of these each fight only using weaker ones when you need MP. This is not a problem as melee characters do that in normal RPGs, right? Wrong. Spell animations in this game can last up to 10 seconds or more depending on the attack. Add this with normal enemy fights that last up to five minutes and you have some boring battles. I went through the game praying I would never get into random battles as there was no point. At the start of the game you can just over level a bit and not have trouble with a single enemy in the game at all.

The world map exploration is very flawed as well. There is a lot of land to travel in the game but is made far too easy by "warp points" which seem to be at every corner you turn. There is only one type of puzzle element in the game. That is using a spell outside of battle to remove an obstacle. Each character in your team has a different element and these serve the usual purposes. Earth can shake things, fire burns, water does...water stuff. While this is a nice edition once again there are a few problems. The first being the game practically tells you exactly when to use this and when it does not you can just hit all of them until one works. There is no penalty for messing up making this already easy game even easier. Speaking of elements this game's choice makes no sense. Pokemon aside (though it makes sense most of the time) think back to other games. Can you think of a single game where the earth element is strong against water? I thought water eroded rocks, how odd.

As for the battles themselves they play in a very old school manner. Turn based fights with menu pushing. What makes this bad however is the very poor control scheme in the game. The game strongly encourages use of the touch screen. You can't use old-fashioned controls for anything other than walking and talking. The touch screen controls anything else. Every button in the game is just too small and you often press the wrong command, which sometimes in battle ends poorly. You would imagine since the game encourages the touch screen they would implement the use of touch to move. This is not case, instead we have poking a direction will move the characters that way and will not stop until you make them. This leads to your characters running into walls and NPCs along with your hand covering the screen most the time.

With all of these negative things thankfully there are a few positives. The double screens are used perfectly in the game. In battles and certain cut scenes the screens are one, on the world map it can be used for a map, status screen, planet map, and so on. The planets are also a great idea that actually works out in the game quite nicely. Each element has a planet. These planets orbit around the sun and when they reach a certain point any character or enemy of that element gets a boost and does something like double the damage or so.

As bad as the game really is it only gets worse when the staple of RPGs gets thrown into the mix, storylines. The whole story and every aspect of it make me cringe. It almost stopped me from completing the game so many times. Every good thing that makes a story is here, however though instead of focusing on one major thing the game spews out everything from sacrificing your own life to a self revelation and saving the world.

The game's main story is a very simple one. You start off by picking your gender and element (light or dark) and then are thrown into the world. You are a fine young student at the best magician school in the world who just lives your normal life with your five friends/classmates. Suddenly your teacher is called in by the school's headmaster and you along with your friends decide to listen in on the private discussion. Your teacher (who apparently is the best wizard in the world) needs to go out and stop one of her previous students from destroying the entire galaxy. After she leaves you and your friends find secret rockets hidden in the school and decide to chase after her. However all of you are split up on different planets so now you must find your friends and your teacher then save the world!

This is no where near an original idea at all, nor do I punish it for not being one. I am fine with the age-old lets save the world RPG as long as it is presented in a nice way. Magical Starsign however in no way is nicely presented. The overall quality of the story is bad. As I said previously it takes every good story telling element and jams it into roughly a 20 hour game. While all of these elements combined into one can be a good thing you must expand the game for them to be effective, or you end up with a rushed story just like Magical Starsign. The characters are ironically worth mentioning, the reason being for this though is the fact all of them are forgettable. Save the emo water wizard Sorbert and the spunky robot Mokka the other characters have zero depth and creative flare. They feel like lifeless toys thrown in just to tell a tale. Your character the protagonist is a silent one who never speaks which is a complete bore in this genre as well, just adding more to the mediocre plot. The only spot in the game where we see some hint of personality from your character is the ending scene where it tells the fate of each adventurer.

Magical Starsign attempts to be everything an RPG "is" and completely original at the same time and falls on its face. While the game is in no way unplayable after a good 10 hours in you will find yourself struggling to complete it. The story and characters are poorly done, the control scheme is hard to use or be comfortable with, and while the battles are a nice twist to the RPG norm they grow far too repetitive with to few enemies and a lack of magical spells. This game shows to me why the other games in the same series as this never made their way outside of Japan and I am thankful they are not. I never want to play through this again and only suggest the most handheld RPG-starved person to play it. The game is only worth a 10 buck buy from the used bin but nothing more for most gamers.

Graphics-7
Sound-5
Gameplay-5
Story-3
End Result-5

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 09/14/07, Updated 10/01/07

Game Release: Magical Starsign (US, 10/23/06)