Lord of Magna: Done and dusted

After roughly 68 hours of play, I am finally done with Lord of Magna. I cleared nine playthroughs in a row, whose durations ranged from 16 hours for the first one to a little more than three hours for the last one, each playthrough being shorter than the one preceeding it. My whole crew boasts levels above 95, which will make any subsequent playthrough a complete walk in the park. If there is one, that is.

Despite the fact that I spent an uncanny amount of time on that game and cleared an ridiculously high number of playthroughs, I definitely wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I had tons of fun with it, but this is in no part due to the game itself being good, because Lord of Magna is a shallow and unfinished game bristling with flaws. The truth is that despite recognizing the crapiness of that game, I desperately wanted to love it. I wanted to love it because I imported a physical copy, with shipping and toll fees involved, and I always try to recoup my investment in such situations; and I also wanted to love it because my last endeavours with the 3ds were disappointing, and my relationship with the handheld—and with Nintendo in general—is growing tense. I thus needed a positive 3ds gaming experience, lest my love for the system become precarious or even grow cold.

Loving that game was no easy feat, mind you. I managed to wring some fun out of it only by trying my hardest to break the game, which was done by choosing the lowest difficulty setting and by grinding like crazy to make the whole crew overlevelled. For me, this was the only way to make battles enjoyable at all. These fight that were primarily designed to be long, drawn-out engagements, with minions respawning as you kill them and bosses taking 20 or more hits to die, suddenly became flowing displays of power and swiftness in which I could give in to the exhilaration of destroying foes en masse and slicing bosses dead with one neat hit. The enjoyment I derived from these battles was immense, and well worth every hour spent grinding for it.

That being said, my hard-earned love for Lord of Magna didn't extend much farther than the red-hot, thrilling battles provided by my breaking of the game. Granted, I was also very fond of the graphics and the soundtrack, but the rest left me with feelings ranging from mild annoyance to open dislike:

—The narrative is weak overall and the pacing is terrible. It takes far too long to get the first three girls in your party, yet the last four girls come way too fast and with little pause between them. There are way too many cutscenes and the characters speak incredibly slowly, even with the fastest text speed selected. It's so horrendous that had the fast-forwarding option not been available, I wouldn't have replayed the game even once.

—There is literally no gameplay apart from the fighting. The crafting mechanics are a pitiful joke, because the game doesn't provide you with any sort of recipes and lets you figure out everything through trial-and-error. The "romance" is only another dose of fighting with cutscenes added, and the rest... Well, there is no rest. This game is nothing more than an endless stream of battles intercut with cutscenes, period. And although I deeply loved these battles, the absence of other gameplay elements was seriously stinging.

—The fan-service is cringing. I have a massive issue with the fact that the game tries to present a squeaky clean image yet sneaks in some fan-service elements. Having to witness displays of maid uniform fetishism, sexual innuendos and that bath scene after beind fed all that talk about the girls being family and the inn being a shelter for them made me feel seriously unclean. What sort of family is that, seriously? I'd rather have a game that is upfront about its titillating content and goes for it full force than an hypocritical proposition such as Lord of Magna, because the latter makes me feel ten times more uncomfortable than the former.

—The characters are quite unlikeable as a whole. The Artemisias are charming, granted—albeit a trifle cliché—but the rest of the cast is less than stellar. Luchs is painfully transparent, Amelia is your token annoying goody-two-shoes, and Bart... The less said about this perverted moron, the better. He is easily the worse character of the bunch, and I would have killed him with my own hands if I could. As for the rest of the cast, they are either too transparent to be memorable or totally unlikeable. And playing the game nine times in a row certainly didn't help alleviate my dislike for them.

I have to admit that despite all my efforts to love it and squeeze some enjoyment out of it, Lord of Magna left a sour taste in my mouth. My ultimate celebratory playthrough with the whole overpowered cast was curiously anticlimatic and not nearly as fulfilling as I had hoped, which may deter me from replaying the game in the future. My relationship with the 3ds is still strained, and the next 3ds game I play had better be really excellent to mend the growing gap between me and the system. Until then, thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!