f13.net forums - 4/26/06 - Lost Magic (DS)

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July 27, 2025, 07:13:11 AM

we're back, baby

Action-RPG where you draw your spellcasting stuffs. I, unfortunately, have not played it yet and will not have my copy til it hits retail (like with 99% of the games that come out). But I've been looking forward to this one for a while.

Been considering putting this on my queue. The description I read made the game seem a bit...childish, but we shall see, eventually.

Almost every Nintendo game is at least slightly childish. If you own a Nintendo you pretty much have to be able to see past that.

Some people are comfortable enough with themselves to openly admit they like the childishness of Nintendo.

Oh, don't get me wrong - I love Nintendo. I just meant that I didn't believe there would be enough to the game from what I had read.

And actually, it was already on my queue anyway, heh.

Voodoolily needs to buy this game. Oh, and it's pretty badass, btw.

Does it have fairies and girly shit? I thought she was still in that phase.

Perhaps I will bump this up in my queue.

No, she'll still enjoy it. It's simply a solid game. I like it about as much as AOE: Age of Kings - which I think is just stellar.

On something on a whim, I picked this up on Friday.

1) It's awesome. The basis of the magic interaction system seems to come straight out of Quest64, though I'm not sure why I feel that way. What would have been a mediocre game if you simply selected spells from a list has been turned into a Fan-Fucking-Tastic game with the use of the DS stylus.

2) It's hard. I'm not Too far into the game yet, but some of the maps are legitimately hard; either they have a short-ish time limit, or the mobs/boss you have to fight packs one hell of a punch.

Even at my early point in the game, I have access to a LOT of spells....but I don't have to Remember them all, as the way the magic systems just makes spellcasting intuitive once you get the hang of it.

It is nice to be talked about. Uh, I don't know if I'm still in the cute fairy phase, I guess I always like that shit. I've been playing Super Princess Peach these days, just 'cuz I can pick it up for 15 minutes or 3 hours and just put it back down. I can't wait to play the new Chibi Robo DS and everything else that's coming out just makes me say FACE! Nintendo is doing just fine, thankyouverymuch. I am HELL OF BUSY these days (in the field/out of town four days last week), so I would appreciate a game that is worth the while. I like using my stylus. That is all.

Follow up review? It seems like an awesome idea, but the professional reviewers seemed lukewarm about it, lots of complaining about clunky control of minions, laggy network play, and general lack of polish pulling down the nifty magic mechanics.

I'm actually pretty lukewarm on it. I made it about...well, let's assume given the number of spells about 30% of the way through the game, maybe 40%. It's goddamned frenetic. Just like Trauma Center, the difficulty jumps through the roof very quickly and you have to be a precise bastard with the stylus. I dunno, I sorta of like that difficulty, but this setting doesn't really firt that sort of gameplay.

I beat the game fairly quickly...I think some time last week, I forget exactly. I'll just post some points.

-It takes awhile to get the hang of targeting spells on specific creatures in a crowd. Especially Heals. Quite a few times I healed the wrong pet until I got the hang of using the little targetting triangle.

-The required precision on the upper-tier runes gets to be a bit annoying, ESPECIALLY the damn tier 3 fire rune. I don't know how many times the game told me I fucked that one up. Yes, it could get a bit crazy al la Trauma Center, but that's fun to me. I liked spamming spells when I needed to.

-The pathing is downright AWFUL. Awful awful awful. I don't even think there is any kind of "pathing" in the traditional sense - you have to painstakingly move your people around every little object. Maps with moving quicksand were easily The most annoying maps in the game.

-The rune system was fairly intuitive, and I grew to love it. Sure, there were something like 320+ spells in the game, but you didn't have to actually know them all. What you Did have to know is the way the different runes interacted. For instance, a tier 1 fire rune + any other tier 1 rune would produce a beam attack aligned to the element of the second rune. A LOT of the spells worked in this fashion.

***Possible Tactics Spoiler***

- The summoned monster system is reminiscent of Pokemon, in that you need to collect many different monsters aligned to different elements to have success. Going up against an enemy mage with monsters that are weak against his magic type is entirely pointless. The game gives you a huge heads-up to this usually; you have to go through about 2-3 maps of Earth-based creatures before you get to the Earth-based boss. If you're smart, you'll pick up some Earth-based monsters to use, as they'll take hardly any damage from Earth attacks.

******

- The time limit can really get in the way in some of the earlier missions.

Overall, I thought the game was fairly awesome - a perfect example of how what would have been a mediocre game at best if it used a "normal' menu-driven game was made awesome by the implementation of the stylus.

Oh yeah, and I level-capped...somewhat dissappointing, as my capability to control more, bigger monsters did not increase after about lvl 30 or so.