"A Little Magic is Needed in Life, Even If It’s Marginal"

Magical Starsign was released when there were not a lot of (Turn-Based) RPGs for the DS, so suffice it to say, I was really looking forward to this game. Its uniqueness intrigued me, as I had never played an RPG that took Democritus' elements and combined it with space before. Nintendo had advertised this game as a cute unique game (that started in a school setting), so I decided to take the jump, refuse to read the magazine/Internet reviews and buy it.

Story and Characters: 6/10
In Magical Starsign, the player can play as either a boy or girl blessed with the ‘element' of light or darkness (you pick and name, and whatever you pick does not drastically change the game). You are a student going to a magic school (Will-O-Wisp Academy), learning magical combat along with your five companions (who are, in a rather comical fashion, named after foods and drinks) who possess other elemental powers (plus one of those ‘out there' ‘elementals' a la Captain Planet).

The game pushes the player into the battle mechanisms right away (which relates to the story). Through these practice battles, you learn about how unique your supporting characters are in relation to their personalities and corresponding elements. Your supporting characters are, in short: Lassi (the carefree bunny) with a Wind affinity, Mokka (the robot) with an Earth affinity, Chai (the lizard-thing) with a Heart – I mean, Wood – affinity, Pico wielding Fire, and Sorbet wielding Water.

Also through these introductory practice battles, the player is introduced to the game's universe. Without going too in-depth, the planetary system is composed of five planets (each consisting the five elements your party members are aligned to: Earth, Water, Wind, Fire and He- I mean Wood) which are on elliptical orbits (with parts of the ellipse corresponding to a particular element) around the Sun (which exhibits Light/Dark characteristics).

The game begins on the planet Kovomaka (outside of that planetary system described above). Apparently, your character goes to the best magic school on the planet, with the best friend set-up in the world (come on, you have a group of friends that each conveniently possess powers of all five planets, and just so happen to be in all your classes), and is being taught by the best teacher in the world (who just so happens to be the best magician in the universe). Your dear teacher, Miss Madeline, after teaching you and your friends the basics of battles is called by the school's headmaster to journey to stop the evil magician Kale. Through you and your friends' spying abilities, you learn of this and decide to nose around the school and find a conveniently-placed ‘forbidden' room with six conveniently-placed one-man rocket ships to find your beloved teacher.

In a time-honoured cliche, each character ends up crashing on a different planet. Therefore, because your character is so responsible, it's up to you to reassemble your friends, find Miss Madeline and help save the universe. Is that surprising?

Okay. The story is made up of cliches. I didn't expect the story to be extravagant anyway, since Nintendo basically advertised the game as cutesy. The unfortunate thing is that your characters are very… flat, and I'm not talking 2-D flat. The dialogue between them and you isn't that bad. At times, it's hilarious. However, I didn't feel like I ‘knew' them. Unfortunately, flat characters usually assist in making a flat storyline. Also, the attachment to your teacher isn't exactly explained, and since the basic objective is to save her… you kind of don't know why you're running around the solar system to look for her. Why is this initiative set in place? The game didn't provide a very good reason for this.

Basically, the subplots in the entire story are the same. Creatures populating the five planets have problems and you need to fix them to keep going through the galaxy to find your teacher. The different creatures inhabiting each planet are rather interesting: spiny moles, robots (yes, an entire Earth planet with a robot population), felins, otters, lizards, dwarves, luminites, humans, and the strange ‘potfolk' give the Magical Starsign universe some interesting variety of NPCs. The problems you solve on each planet can be critically relevant to the plot, or not relating to the plot at all.

The length of the game was okay. I mean, it's a rather linear game (with a few awesome sidequests) with a generic plot, and it doesn't take long to beat. Much of the game is pretty predictable and the scenarios are short. Most of the subplots are essentially the same: go to planet, find a friend, fix planet's problem, leave, rinse, repeat. The story isn't that satisfying. It's a good game to play through if you have nothing else going on at the moment.

Controls: 7/10
The DS stylus tries to forge a friendship with you in the duration of this game. This means that the stylus is used for everything in the game, from moving your character to combat to conversations to selecting things in the menu. This type of control is annoying to me, personally (considering I'm left handed and tend to push the stylus with my hand covering the screen most of the time).

The directional buttons (and oddly enough, the ABXY buttons) were used for movement, but since stylus use was heavily emphasized for everything else, why would you switch back and forth from the D-Pad to the stylus? I'm not particularly used to using the ABXY “left-handers' friendly directional buttons” as directional buttons. I'm used to using them for attacking and mashing. Thus, we're stuck using the stylus for nearly everything and then tucking it away in a fist while moving the character around. Or possibly using the stylus for everything. Not fun. I'm pretty sure that if you're right-handed, this didn't pose much of a problem. However, playing this game was like finding a left-handed desk in a lecture hall to me. The fact that the developers really tried to configure this for left-handers was really nice (without asking if you were right-handed or left-handed), but it didn't work out as well.

The developers truly flaunted the DS's stylus mechanisms. The entire game can be played using the stylus only. As I said, menu navigation is pretty much stylus-only, so is selecting battle commands. A neat part of battles, ‘timed attacks' (which I will elaborate on later) also takes into account your timing in tapping a character while they cast a spell to power it up.

I simply wished that the menus and conversations were reserved for the buttons, but since the developers were trying to make it friendly for both left- and right-handers, the ABXY buttons were used as directional buttons too. The stylus-only controls took a lot of getting-used to, but eventually you get the hang of it. Though at times, you need to re-teach yourself what you can and can't do with the buttons. I just wished this game had more button-play than stylus-play.

Graphics: 8/10
I believe that Magical Starsign was one of the first DS games that included FMVs. The FMVs are scattered about the game, but unfortunately, you don't get gold here. Sometimes you get low-quality blurry images happening on both DS screens. The characters have an anime design, but since everything else is put on a low-quality CG background, it just looks okay. Nothing spectacular. Some of the cutscenes were enough to put a smile on my face at times.

This game makes me very happy with the 2-D animation. It shows that it's okay for a game to consist of all 2-D animations and still look awesome with some creativity attached. I loved the bright colours used in the game. It completely went with the ‘cutesy' element that the developers were shooting for. Though sometimes, when you're in a perilous situation, yet you're surrounded by happy colours, you don't feel like you're in a perilous situation. It's a bit comical, actually.

The battle animation was done very, very well. The developers seemed to put everything they had into the battles. The planets are busy revolving on the top screen, while your party is fighting the monster on the bottom. The change from night to day is demonstrated on the top screen and bottom. The night effects are seen on the battle field; same with the day effects. If special attacks need to be used, the top screen changes to account for the props needed for the special attack. (For example, if the boss needs to jump off a mountain or something, then the top screen changes to reveal a mountain that the boss jumps off of just to land on your party on the bottom screen.) Very creative stuff from the developers.

Sound and Music: 5.5/10
Knowing that Tsukasa Masuko (early Shin Megami Tensei) composed the score for this, I was pretty excited. Unfortunately, most of the music going consisted of simple repeated melodies with nothing being really stellar, except for maybe some battle themes. Standard town themes, event themes and battle themes. I don't recall hearing any character themes (in an age where many characters in RPGs have his or her theme). The music can be pretty at times, but mostly, it's just really bland. Also, the tunes tend to be really happy-go-lucky when they shouldn't be. I understand that the game is supposed to be rather light-hearted, as demonstrated by the high colour tone of the backgrounds and characters, but really – if I'm in danger, playing a happy tune does not suffice in making me feel frantic in my gameplay.

The sound effects are pretty nice when you cast a spell or when you're doing something in the environment. However, the minor voice-acting was just laughable (or embarrassing on the developer's part). The occasional grunting or screaming during battle is just really bad, and out of place. In fact, the VA didn't even need to be there in the first place, even if it was for a ‘next-gen' feel.

However, sound was an integral part of battling so you could know when to touch the stylus to the character for powering up attacks, so it was well-executed in that fashion. Unfortunately, due to the fact that I would want to play this game without the sound up and listening to another game soundtrack, called for inadequacies in the sound department.

Gameplay – Field: 7/10
This game can be described using two words: fetch quests. Tedious fetch quests, mind you. Basically, you need to do something for someone and go get the thing they need from a perilous dungeon otherwise they won't tell you what you need to do next. So you go to each planet pretty much doing the same thing (some planets don't require you do these things, though).

The game also incorporated a warp system to save the player from wasting time going from Point A to Point B and then back to Point A. It allows the player to go from one side of the seemingly non-spherical planet to the other side. However, you need to have talked to and given a random item to some guy named Pizza. Also, I never really found the need to use that many restorative items on my party out of battle because there were HP/MP pots everywhere (though, I believe you had to give them something for them to do something for you). The save feature, allowing you to save anywhere you wished, was rather excellent too.

Because I couldn't put this anywhere else: font size was a bit too small. It's understandable, since the environments were small, the sprites were small, and the DS screens were small. However, the font size was just microscopic, especially in the Menu and the Battle Screen. When you need to do some reading in the battle screen and menu, players would rather not suffer from eye-strain.

Gameplay – Battle: 9/10
Just to reiterate, at that particular time, there were not a lot of Turn-Based RPGs on the DS. Magical Starsign did what some other ‘Turn-Based' RPGs (a particular one is coming to mind right now) at that time could not: get most aspects right.

The battle party can consist of up to six characters (and story-wise, you usually gained one party member per planet). Depending on a character's agility, each character takes his/her turn with minor interruptions by enemies. There are 7 commands your characters can execute (and most are obvious depending on how many RPGs you've played).

Magical Starsign brings something new to the mix: melee attacks are often discouraged. The melee attacks are often used when three things happen: a) the character is out of MP, b) the character's spells don't hurt the enemy, or c) the monster's element is the same as the character's element (thus going back to b). The player is encouraged to use magic for the entire battle. As someone who normally exploits magic in a RPG, I should be happy, but I'm not. There is such a thing as using too much magic. There are lots of problems with this. First, the list of spells each character can learn is too restrictive. Each character can learn five spells exclusive to their element, or element-neutral spells to reduce the character's uselessness in combat against a monster of their own element.

Included in the new battle mechanics are row alignment. Arranging your characters in rows is nothing new, but it should be brought to attention that this helps the player strategize for combat. If characters are in the front row, magic is stronger (and focused mainly on single enemies in the front row), and physical attacks can be used. However, the back row has stronger defense (in my experience, they rarely got physically attacked), but can't use melee attacks at all. The back row's spells can also either hit a group of enemies, or hit an enemy several times.

I suppose the developers of the game did not entertain the fact that many people can over-level at the beginning of the game, and thus reducing the difficulties one can experience while fighting enemies, even with or without handicaps placed on your party (which I will get into below). The level system is pretty easy to manoeuvre around. It's 100 EXP to gain a level, and EXP is determined by the level of the enemy/enemies you defeated. Thus, it's not that hard to level up at all.

Magical Starsign offered something very interesting and very different that challenged the player a little bit: Planet Alignment. As I said earlier, on the top screen, the player can see the five planets on an elliptical orbit around the Sun. The top screen map is divided into fifths, and each fifth corresponds to one of the elements. So, for example, if the Earth planet Erd is in the Earth elemental portion of the map, all Earth characters (party member and any Earth elemental foe) get powered up attacks, and do double damage to their targets. In addition, if you're fighting an enemy opposite to the powered up element (Earth, again, for example), you do quadruple damage (to Water enemies in the example – weird, I know, but it's the way they set it up). By the way, Light and Dark are mediated by the Sun, so during daytime, if you picked your character to be a Light elementalist, then their attacks are powered up during the day, but weakened at night. This feature can be a pain in the butt if you're fighting a hard boss (which calls for some strategizing on the player's part).

The game also brings back the feature of ‘timed attacks'. Some may probably recognize this other games, others may not. Basically, the ‘timed attack' lets the player get a boost in attacking power (or in this case, magic power) when he or she hits a button when the attack is being carried out. In this game, however, buttons are not used. The player is given the tricky task of tapping his or her character the exact moment before the spell is cast (it's easier said than done). I've learned to master it using the tones of the sound effects, or timing how long it takes for the particular character to cast the spell. Once you get the hang of it, the battles become much easier to get through. In fact, if your planet is in the proper alignment, and you time this attack properly, you could take down a few monsters in one hit.

Wi-Fi: 3/10
The unfortunate thing is that many people did not use Wi-Fi for this game since many had not heard of it. It is very hard to find another person in a lecture hall (or a classroom or workplace) with Magical Starsign, meaning that the special Amigo Dungeon is rarely used. However, after much searching, when someone is finally found, the Amigo Dungeon can be used to find, raise and hatch some sort of eggs yielding different characters that randomly show up during battle to help your team. The game isn't really that difficult, so the extra character isn't really needed. No matter how much advertising was done for this game, it didn't seem like you could find anyone else with this game, and thus the multiplayer Amigo Dungeon is rendered useless.

Replay Value: 5/10
Unfortunately, due to its poorly manufactured story, it's hard to find a reason to play this game again. The sidequest and bestiary are perhaps the only saving graces this game has in order for someone to play it through again. Even so, you can possibly beat the game at a low level, then go back to play through the sidequest dungeon and level up on the same file.

Final Score and Summary: 6/10
Magical Starsign was not a total letdown, but it really could have been executed better. All the elements were there, but they could have executed a much better story. The story just seemed like it was thrown in there at the last minute, and what's an RPG without a good storyline? The graphics were pretty decent for an early DS RPG, and the creativity on the developers' part went a long way into making the battles very, very enjoyable. The stylus-only controls were rather annoying, but less annoying as you get used to them.

In short, it's a pretty decent for a handheld RPG, but nothing magically memorable.

Should I Buy or Should I Rent?
I suggest renting first. To be honest, this isn't the type of game where all would agree that they completely enjoy. If one is truly not sure about the game, then don't bother buying it. It likely wouldn't be something you'd enjoy if you're sceptical about it. It really depends on one's tastes.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 05/20/08

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