Was it the game that failed or was it me? Lord of Magna came to a rather abrupt and unsatisfying end after 13 hours and I can’t figure out why. Is it because I was playing on Easy? Did I make a wrong choice along the way? Was I expecting too much from a harem RPG to begin with?

I’m sad because I was just starting to get into the game. It was a bit bland at first with the generic nice harem lead being generically nice to generic anime girls, but after about 4 or 5 hours the three girls started to grow on me. They got to know each other better, they started opening up to Luchs little by little and they just seemed to be having a good time. There was hope for the future.

Then it all fell apart when they actually started explaining the story. The game blurb says: “Bestowed with a mysterious bracelet called the Lachryma, Luchs is fated to trade in his days of peaceful inn keeping for chaotic combat as he reunites seven compelling heroines and pieces together their mysterious pasts.” —> The peaceful inn-keeping part was fun (though there was no actual inn-keeping). The chaotic combat was bearable once I switched to Easy. The heroines weren’t exactly “compelling”, whatever that means, but they were likeable enough. If only the story hadn’t been such a mess and the latter half of the game hadn’t been so rushed.

The pacing was okay early on. First you get one girl, get to know her better, get another girl, integrate her into the team, get to know her better, get the third girl, same process… so far, so fun. Then suddenly they dump girls #4-7 on you in quick succession, blam blam blam blam. They barely know Luchs and he barely knows them, but suddenly they’re all family and they all love Luchs to bits, like, WHAT? Huuhhhh? Already?

Then suddenly exposition! Lots of it! All the girls are goddesses! And Luchs’ power is the power of God! And the bad guy is the king who has been the king for centuries but no one has noticed that he’s immortal or… something? He wants the power of the bracelet so he can resurrect his dead wife. Why doesn’t he just snatch the bracelet from Luchs from day one? Or even better, since Luchs’ ancestor used to have the bracelet (maybe? not clear), why not grab it way back then instead of waiting centuries for the bracelet to reappear? The whole thing didn’t make much sense. Anyway, the girls decide that since they’re goddesses the most sensible thing to do is to storm the king’s tower and kill him. Which they do. It doesn’t take, so they kill him again. Then they kill him once again for good measure and then Luchs becomes a god (???), roll credits, game… over…?

The short length of the game coupled with the sheer number of unanswered questions (e.g. what are the fiends, what is this ‘God’ and why did he randomly get turned into a bunch of crystals, what was the Gargoyle’s Nightmare all about, what’s causing the earthquakes, why do the girls all have nicknames, what’s with the numbers on their foreheads, etc etc) make me think Lord of Magna is one of those games where you’re meant to replay and clear all the routes to get at the “true” ending. That must be why they put a little star by the name of the girl whose ending you (didn’t really) got and let you carry over her level to New Game+. Eventually you’ll have a party of overpowered juggernauts to go into the true endgame with. I hope.

You know what? Instead of speculating, why don’t I just FAQ it? Give me a second… Huh. There is no “true” ending. What you see is what you get. WHAT IS THIS I DON’T EVEN Okay, so it’s the game that failed, not me. Glad to get that off my mind. Lord of Magna is a mediocre game with a nonsensical story and a rushed, shoddy ending. Avoid, or at least wait for a sale. Everything after this point is me just rambling to myself. Stick around or call it a day, it’s up to you.

Battle system

I was a little worried by early screenshots, ‘cos I thought the battle system was going to be all confusing and all-over-the-place like in FFXII: Revenant Wings. I hated that game. Thankfully enough, even though Lord of Magna shares some similarities, it’s turn-based instead of real-time so you don’t feel as pressured. That makes it pretty much like any other SRPG except with more enemies dotting the fields.

It might look scary when an enemy summons like 10 minions at once, but minions mostly do only 1 damage and mainly exist to block your path. When you whack them they fly into other enemies with a little tinkling sparkling noise. It’s pretty, but it gets old quick. If you aim right you can knock one enemy into another which might knock them into yet another. If you can defeat 10 enemies on one move, you get a free move! Worth aiming for if you can, but with my wonky 3DS circle pad it was all I could do to move straight, so I didn’t try too hard.

That’s the only fun part of the system. Unfortunately like many other SRPGs, both ally and enemy movement can be extremely slow. What’s worse is the enemy leaders have extremely high HP and most fields have generators that keep spawning new leaders. Combine that with the low damage your girls do and you realize that even the simplest battles can take ages and ages to complete. That’s why I switched to Easy as soon as I could, because even the simplest battles were taking forever. At least on Easy the girls do a decent amount of damage and the enemies go down quicker so battles take maybe 10-15 minutes each instead of 20-30. It’s too much trouble otherwise.

Marvelous seems to have put more effort into making the battlefields shiny and pretty than into actually designing a fun combat system. They made a lot of fuss about special attacks in the promos, but the only way to gather the AP needed for such moves is by standing absolutely still for a turn. Can’t guard, can’t use an item, can’t attack, just sit down and let the enemy pound away at you. AP attacks do have better range, but the damage they do isn’t worth the wait. It’s just another way to drag out each battle.

Oh, almost forgot, there’s another source of special attacks: doing a girl’s heart events unlocks special attacks that are filled with the Tension gauge instead of AP. Tension fills up when you kill enemies, so you still have to spend a turn or two wiping the floor with minions before using them. Some are pretty powerful, but you still run out of Tension pretty quickly and then it’s back to the drawing board again. TL;DR the battles are going to drag out no matter what you do. That’s what Easy mode is there for.

As a personal note, my party for most of the game was Luchs, Frieda, Lottie and Trixie. Trixie was both weak and fragile, so I switched her out for Fran, who was also rather weak, but I liked her personality so she stayed. Near the end of the game I had the chance to use Adelheid and wow, she’s pretty strong. Slow, but great regular attack range and that Adnetite move is super-useful when you’re surrounded by enemies. She’s probably the only example I know of a game character who actually becomes stronger when she joins you than when she’s an enemy. I never tried Di and only used Gabbie once but a Lottie-Fran-Addie party should be enough to get you through the game.

Other reasons why Lord of Magna is terrible

– Maid fetishes are SO ten years ago. And the outfits are ugly to boot.

– Cutscenes move really slowly unless you press R to fast-forward. A character says a line, stands around for 10 seconds, says another line, smiles for 5 seconds, walks slowly across the screen for 30 seconds, says another line, and on and on and on. Extremely tedious fare.

– I feel like the pre-release hype deceived me into thinking I would really be running an inn instead of just living in one, but maybe I’m remembering wrong. The game also promised sidequests, but nothing materialized apart from Bart requesting one item. The only thing you can do on the side is grind, grind, grind. No quests, no side missions, no hidden dungeons, no visiting the town to interact with townspeople, no inn management, nothing.

– Lord of Magna is a harem game but the girls aren’t very cute. They look better on the cover and in the anime cutscenes than in the actual game. The really cute girls like Amelia and Ingrid aren’t dateable. The latter just shows up once at the inn, says a few lines and is never seen again for the rest of the game. Wotta waste.

– It’s a harem game, but it’s not very romantic. Each girl has three ‘heart events’ where she talks to Luchs then there’s a battle then bam, they’ve gotten closer. Once you get all three heart events you can get that girl’s “ending”, but what a joke that ending is. No confession of love, no hand-holding, no hugging no nothing. At the very end of the game your girl decides to become a goddess,  Luchs says No me, Luchs is a god, everyone forgets him except her. That’s all the ending you’re ever gonna get. =___=”

– There’s a crafting system but it’s not very useful. If you want REALLY good stuff you’re going to have to grind on the free battles for synthesis items or money to buy them. If you do craft, you’ll be mainly going for battle-related chips, so basically you’re grinding and grinding to make better battle items so you can grind some more? It works in games with better battle systems, but I trust I’ve explained enough why this isn’t one of those.

– There isn’t much enemy variety. Once a certain type of enemy shows up you’ll be fighting them for a long time. Crystal-summoning knights, for example. Or those fairy things. Or the bears. And no, painting them a different color doesn’t make them new.

– I can understand not being able to pass through enemies, but you can’t pass through your allies either! When fighting in the caves there’ll be a lot of cases where one or more party members can’t get through to the enemy because the others are blocking the way. That’s kinda dumb.

– Sub-missions seem a bit pointless. In theory they’re supposed to be side objectives you achieve in battle for extra rewards, but first off, almost every side mission is “Kill all enemies” i.e. no variety and secondly none of the rewards I got were particularly rare or particularly useful.

It’s not all bad though.

Let me leave on a positive note by noting the few good things about Lord of Magna:

– It’s short. Especially if you play it on Easy and fast-forward the slow bits.

– Bright, happy colors!

– It was pretty good for the first 6 hours or so. There was slow, steady character development and a sense of excitement and adventure.

– I liked some of the girls, especially Fran, Trixie and Frieda.

– For a harem game it’s pretty light on the fanservice. I hear there’s a bathing mini-game that may or may not be saucy, but I never played it so I wouldn’t know. I also skipped the event where Bart tries to peep at the girls in the bath because, dude not cool. Besides, peeping plots never succeed anyway. Apart from that it’s a normal game with normal girls wearing normal clothes. Fun for all ages.

– The battle system at least attempts to do something different. It’s nice to see people doing new things with the usual SRPG formula. If they’d found a way to speed it up maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad. If there’s a reason to play this game that would probably be it, just to get something new in your system.

That’s it for Lord of Magna. What a disappointment. *sigh*