I won’t say “review” because I dropped it after about 3 hours. Magical Houshin is a Japanese GBA game very loosely based on Chinese novel Fengshen Yanyi (Houshin Engi in Japanese).
The game tells the story of a young boy named Sora who goes up a mountain to study to become a hermit. On his very first day, he and his friends break the seal leading into a cave with a magical item that allows people to make super-weapons known as ‘paopei’. When the chief hermit finds out, he asks them to go defeat the demons currently rampaging through the lower world and off they go.
Gameplay/battles aren’t anything too special, just your usual Dragon Quest-inspired first-person turn-based combat with random encounters. Your MP refills a little every turn, so you can use special attacks somewhat freely. The encounter rate isn’t too high and the monsters aren’t too powerful, so I was never in danger of being wiped out while playing.
The only slightly unusual thing about Magical Houshin is Paopei synthesis, which you perform by gathering synthesis ingredients from all over the map, tossing them into the golden paopei-maker and then chanting a mantra in real-time to synthesize them.
Of course the GBA isn’t sophisticated enough to know whether you actually said the mantra or not, so what it measures is the amount of time you would normally to say that string of words. E.g. you should take about 1.5 seconds to say “つきよにわらうからす” so the system measures the amount of time taken between presses of the A button. There’s usually a wisp around giving a sample ‘chant’ too, so you don’t have to guesstimate too much. Get it right and you get a new weapon. Fail and you’ve just wasted some ingredients.
The few paopeis I was able to make don’t have much effect besides giving you some new special attacks. And the special attacks aren’t much more powerful than regular attacks this early in the game, so it’s just a lot of trouble for no tangible reward.
Unfortunately “A lot of trouble for no tangible reward” also sums up the general feeling I got from Magical Houshin, which just wasn’t that much fun to play. It’s just one turn-based RPG among many others, and my game backlog is long enough right now that I don’t have to settle for anything that doesn’t wow me after 3 hours. It’s only worth playing if you’re really into medieval Chinese settings/literature or if you’ve already played everything else the GBA has to offer. Neither of those cases apply to me so I’m moving on.
