Mado Monogatari: Fia and the Wondrous Academy

Genre: Action-RPG / Dungeon Crawler

Players: 1

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Review:

Sometimes, a spinoff series takes off in a way that eclipses the mainline franchise. Shin Megami Tensei isn’t anywhere near as popular as the Persona franchise, even fans of the Nier franchise may not have played the Drakengard games, and the Dynasty Warriors series has grown well beyond the Romance of the Three Kingdom games that preceded them. In a similar manner, many players will be unfamiliar with the Mado Monogatari series, even if they’re fans of the spin-off it spawned, the Puyo Puyo franchise of Puzzle games.

Starting in 1990 in Japan on the MSX2 game console, the Mado Monogatari series has puttered on over the years even as its cute slime enemies have stolen the spotlight with their spin-off. Mado Monogatari: Fia and the Wondrous Academy, released in 2025 on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch and ported in 2026 to PC, is the seventh mainline entry in the series, and only the second to receive a North American version in its original release. Like other games in the series, Fia and the Wondrous Academy is a Dungeon Crawler, with this game combining that game structure with Action-RPG gameplay.

This game’s presentation combines colorful anime-style character art with chibi 3D versions of those characters in simple 3D environments, backed by a synthesized soundtrack that’s honestly kinda’ forgettable and joined by Japanese- language voice acting that can get pretty grating. Overall, the presentation here is nothing special.

Sadly, that “nothing special” also applies to the story, which is a lighthearted and frequently-silly tale about a young girl starting out at a magic academy. The characters are all broad stereotypes, dim-witted, and in many cases annoying. I make an exception here for Professor Rivan, the school’s teacher who gets stuck with the school’s problem students (yourself included), and worries about getting into trouble because of them while sometimes getting carried away with her passion for acting and dramatic narration. Unlike most other characters, Professor Rivan is delightful.

Sadly, I can’t say the same for the gameplay. Combat here feels clunky, drawn out, and unsatisfying, and the game’s pacing is horrendously slow as players are dragged through countless “funny” story sequences over the course of the game’s agonizingly glacial tutorial section. What’s more, while there appears to be some depth to character progression, a lot of it is gated off by in-story requirements.

The result of all of this is that it’s pretty obvious why Mado Monogatari never took off the same way the Puyo Puyo games did. There’s very little here to recommend this game – the visuals are unimpressive, the music unmemorable, the characters mostly pretty annoying, and the gameplay is unsatisfying. fans of Action-RPGs and Dungeon Crawlers have numerous better options on Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Mado Monogatari: Fia and the Wondrous Academy is a game that combines Dungeon Crawler and Action-RPG elements in a game that does very little worth recommending it – the visuals are unimpressive, the characters and story are both simple and often annoying, and the gameplay is unsatisfying with terrible pacing. While there may be some enjoyment to be found here, you have numerous better options on Nintendo Switch.

Grade: C-

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