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IGN Review of A Witch's Tale
A Witch's Tale casts a spell on your senses right from the start. Its animation, character design and environments are a feast for your eyes, impressively capturing the same kind of twisted Halloween aesthetic as films like The Nightmare Before Christmas. Its soundtrack lends support, too, keeping your ears engaged with both haunting melodies and energetic anthems that help to set each scene. Yes, the sensory experience of A Witch's Tale is certainly there from the start, through its sights and sounds -- but, when you get to its feel, the magic begins to fade.
This latest DS role-playing game from NIS America wasn't meant to be just an RPG, originally. It was first put into development as an action/RPG, a hybrid design that would have married the exploration of the game's fairy tale environments with an active, stylus-controlled battle system. The game was delayed for over a year, though, while the development team reworked the entire design and took out all that active action. I'm guessing it was problems with the stylus.
It feels a little off. Unfocused, imprecise. You try to tap on things in the environments surrounding your young witch-in-training hero Liddell, and she only manages to make contact with them about half the time. Her movement is entirely commanded by the stylus, too, so you have to tap around on the ground to where you want her to go, then lift and tap on objects to interact with them, or characters to begin a conversation. It's an all-touch control scheme of the sort that worked well in games like The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. Here, though, it's just a bit too rough.
The developers must have had a tough time getting Liddell to properly target her enemies for attacks, as even in this finished product her strikes with her main weapon (an umbrella) often miss their mark against just stationary targets like destructible rocks. So the enemies are all taken out. All the active combat is gone. Replaced, instead, by much more traditional turn-based battles.
These encounters (which trigger at random as you explore each dungeon, cave and kingdom) are of the same sort you've seen in countless other RPGs -- unanimated enemy sprites appear on the top screen, portraits of Liddell and her allies are placed on the bottom and it's all selecting commands from menus to win the day. You can attack, use items, run away. The standard stuff. And you can cast spells, of course, since your character's a witch.
Spellcasting gets more of an emphasis in A Witch's Tale, too, because of that being Liddell's occupation -- it's rare for an RPG's main hero to be the one so focused on abilities that drain away Magic Points, but that's the case here. Fire, Lightning, Poison -- all the expected standards appear in her repertoire, while supporting party positions are taken by Doll characters that you come across in your travels. They have a variety of different specialties, as supporting party members in RPGs always do. Some of them are physical bruisers, some focused on healing powers. You've seen it all before.
And that's the great disappointment with A Witch's Tale -- for a game that starts off so strongly with its excellent theme, characters, visuals and audio, it just completely falls off in the critical category of actual gameplay. You can explore this intriguing, fanciful world and come across some interesting literary inspirations -- characters from classics like Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Arabian Nights and Grimm's Fairy Tales are all interwoven to create one cohesive and compelling whole -- but getting to see and interact with any of the interesting elements means slogging through a whole lot of sluggish battles that really feel like the Plan B option we know they were.
What's worse, most all of the worlds in A Witch's Tale must have already been completed by the time the decision was made to turn enemy encounters into random turn-based battles instead of active, in-environment fights -- you can tell that, too, because the places Liddell explores are vast, with way too much open space. These locales were certainly mapped out with the intention of populating them with deadly creatures to either combat or run past -- but now they're all just empty.
It's like playing a Zelda game where Link is the only living thing in the overworld, walking around, finding no foes to oppose him because they're all already dead. It's not too much fun being a hero when there are no dragons left to be slain.
©2009-10-21, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This latest DS role-playing game from NIS America wasn't meant to be just an RPG, originally. It was first put into development as an action/RPG, a hybrid design that would have married the exploration of the game's fairy tale environments with an active, stylus-controlled battle system. The game was delayed for over a year, though, while the development team reworked the entire design and took out all that active action. I'm guessing it was problems with the stylus.
It feels a little off. Unfocused, imprecise. You try to tap on things in the environments surrounding your young witch-in-training hero Liddell, and she only manages to make contact with them about half the time. Her movement is entirely commanded by the stylus, too, so you have to tap around on the ground to where you want her to go, then lift and tap on objects to interact with them, or characters to begin a conversation. It's an all-touch control scheme of the sort that worked well in games like The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. Here, though, it's just a bit too rough.
The developers must have had a tough time getting Liddell to properly target her enemies for attacks, as even in this finished product her strikes with her main weapon (an umbrella) often miss their mark against just stationary targets like destructible rocks. So the enemies are all taken out. All the active combat is gone. Replaced, instead, by much more traditional turn-based battles.
These encounters (which trigger at random as you explore each dungeon, cave and kingdom) are of the same sort you've seen in countless other RPGs -- unanimated enemy sprites appear on the top screen, portraits of Liddell and her allies are placed on the bottom and it's all selecting commands from menus to win the day. You can attack, use items, run away. The standard stuff. And you can cast spells, of course, since your character's a witch.
Spellcasting gets more of an emphasis in A Witch's Tale, too, because of that being Liddell's occupation -- it's rare for an RPG's main hero to be the one so focused on abilities that drain away Magic Points, but that's the case here. Fire, Lightning, Poison -- all the expected standards appear in her repertoire, while supporting party positions are taken by Doll characters that you come across in your travels. They have a variety of different specialties, as supporting party members in RPGs always do. Some of them are physical bruisers, some focused on healing powers. You've seen it all before.
And that's the great disappointment with A Witch's Tale -- for a game that starts off so strongly with its excellent theme, characters, visuals and audio, it just completely falls off in the critical category of actual gameplay. You can explore this intriguing, fanciful world and come across some interesting literary inspirations -- characters from classics like Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Arabian Nights and Grimm's Fairy Tales are all interwoven to create one cohesive and compelling whole -- but getting to see and interact with any of the interesting elements means slogging through a whole lot of sluggish battles that really feel like the Plan B option we know they were.
What's worse, most all of the worlds in A Witch's Tale must have already been completed by the time the decision was made to turn enemy encounters into random turn-based battles instead of active, in-environment fights -- you can tell that, too, because the places Liddell explores are vast, with way too much open space. These locales were certainly mapped out with the intention of populating them with deadly creatures to either combat or run past -- but now they're all just empty.
It's like playing a Zelda game where Link is the only living thing in the overworld, walking around, finding no foes to oppose him because they're all already dead. It's not too much fun being a hero when there are no dragons left to be slain.
©2009-10-21, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved