A Witch's Tale for Nintendo DS Reviews by Gamers

So, I only played through the first three worlds, but I couldn't play any more.

The good: Creative, visually appealing worlds. Fairy tale spinoffs (I'm a fan of this!). The rune "drawing" feature was fun... until you have to do it 6+ times for a boss battle. Fun character designs. The music is nice.

The bad: Repetitive, drawn-out, random battle system. There's not enough variety for it to be fun... magic spell, doll #1 attack, doll #2 attack, rinse and repeat. Lack of diverse PLAYABLE characters. Story isn't strong enough to motivate boring gameplay.

I give it a 5/10 because, while dull, is still nice to look at and I was hooked in the first world, until I realized all the levels were simply variations on that first world. You play as a young human... witch? I honestly couldn't tell, since I was under the impression the witches were evil and underground to keep them from the human world, yet the main character knows magic, lives in a very "witch" looking town. It just seemed to me like a human wouldn't be learning magic and live in a cutsey nightmare before christmas world.

One of my main problem was the lack of playable characters you can actually interact with. Characters are an important part of a RPG for me, and all of your battle companions are dolls that specialize in an element. From what I could tell, you never get any unique skills for them and they never do anything other than... be attack-dolls. Their magic tends to be variations of your own, so there's not even different attacks to choose from. When you beat a world, you get a sigil from the resident princess that unlocks a new rune magic (which is really just giving one of your already learned elemental magics a more powerful option) and then you can go get a doll that is in the likeness of the princess. Maybe it IS the princess, since she vanishes after you save her. I just found it irritating since there's plenty of fun characters around, they just don't do anything!

I'll admit I didn't play that far in the game but I played far enough to get tired of a game that was neither an exceptional RPG or dungeon crawler. There's a lack of focus in the game; the story isn't really strong enough to carry it and the fighting is turn-based and not above-average.