A Magical High School Girl

Genre: Dungeon-Crawler / RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

A Magical High School Girl is a Top-Down Dungeon Crawler RPG with an interesting hook – every time your character learns a new magical spell, you get to name it, and the name you choose determines the type of spell it will become.

The presentation in this game is simple, combining some basic pixel art graphics with low-detail polygonal environments. It’s not impressive at all, but still manages to be visually appealing, although I will say that the environments get repetitive really quickly. The same goes for the game’s music – it’s okay, but highly repetitive to the point of getting annoying quickly. The story here is also a mix of good and bad – it’s a cute idea of a normal schoolgirl basically tricked into becoming a witch and hounded by monsters, but as cute as the story may be, it’s hampered by a pretty poor localization.

While this game’s presentation is not very impressive, I have to give this game’s designers credit for making a solid attempt at doing interesting things with the gameplay.

Firstly, I’ll say that the health system in this game is pretty clever – players’ life and magic pull from the same statistic, with HP (“Happiness points”, we’re told in a nicely tongue-in-cheek manner) determining not health, but the speed that the magic bar automatically regenerates. This is a really clever system that will have players weighing the usefulness of their spells against the drain those spells will place on their magic.

The other clever system here, as I mentioned earlier, is the magic-naming system. Players gain new magic spells by finding crystals strewn throughout the randomly-generated levels. When used, these permanently add a new spell to your list, and it prompts you to name this spell, generating the spell’s power, range and effect based on your description. We’ve seen game systems sorta’ like this before in games like Scribblenauts, where the game has a dictionary of words that determine the properties of what you end up making. However, this doesn’t work quite as well as usual, since the game doesn’t indicate what words it recognizes or what it means – you either have to figure it out yourself or look it up on Google, and the former can make for frustrating guesswork while the latter kinda’ detracts from the fun of discovery this sort of system brings to the game.

All told, A Magical High School Girl is a decent Dungeon Crawler with some very original ideas, but also with some problems that make the execution of those ideas not quite as successful as they could be. The environments and music are a bit too repetitive, and the game’s centerpiece magic creator is a great idea in theory that could have been a game-changer, but needed a bit more work to make it more user-friendly. Overall it’s still a decent entry in the genre that doesn’t quite meet its full potential.

tl;dr – A Magical High School Girl is a Dungeon Crawler RPG that has players generating the spells they use against enemies when they name the spell. It’s a clever system, but it could have used a bit more work, and the game’s simple, repetitive environments and music can be a bit tedious. The game still has some charm, but it doesn’t quite meet its full potential.

Grade: C

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