The Biggest Game Project on this Planet

Magical Vacation

No, this has nothing to do with Disney.

This was a game released on GameBoy Advance in 2001 by Brownie Brown, a company that does not only sound deliciously chocolaty, but was also partly responsible for Legend of Mana on PSX. By which I mean that some people behind the original Secret of Mana games left Square, and formed their own company funded by Nintendo, and this was the first result, released only in Japan.
It is obvious from the get-go that this game was made by the Legend of Mana team, because it uses the same character and environmental design creating luscious and colorful graphics on the humble Nintendo Handheld (although of course nowhere near as detailed as the PSX game).

Do these people however have the potential to create a hit game in the same brilliant vein as the Mana games of yore? Well the answer to that question kind of depends on you and how much patience you can have with one game, but it's definitely something unique. And when I say unique, I mean annoying, in the very same sense that Britney Spears has a "unique" voice.

Magical Vacation revolves around a bunch of students at a School for Magic (hence the "Magical") who go on a trip with their teacher (hence the "Vacation"! It's all falling into place!) to a beach-side resort. Little do the snotty brats know, that this is a ploy of the Head of School to test his students in their defensive and offensive capabilities against the Dark Beings known as Enigma. Nice man.

What follows is a traditional RPG with turn based combat and random battles, lots of items to be gathered, loads of dungeons and of course, plenty of talking animals. No, this is NOT, I repeat, NOT about Disney.
What distinguishes this RPG from the majority though, is its emphasis on Elements. That is, most if not all RPG's have elements, but few of them have this many (16!) and few of them weave these elements into the story and battle-basics as much as this game.
Every Character has one element, which cannot be changed, and for every element there's only one character available. Elements are connected in a Strong vs. Weak circle, for instance, Nature beats Beast beats water beats electricity etc., until you come back to Nature, like in those crappy survival shows you get on cable.

Only three elements stand outside of the circle: Love, which has no weak and no strong points, Darkness, which rules all, and Light, which rules darkness, implying therefore that Darkness does not in fact rule all and I think we're back to Disney again. Bunch of Nazi's!

Elements are represented by Spirits in a true Secret of Mana vein, but this time they can be called to appear on the combat screen, not to perform attacks, but to increase the power of attacks that use their element. One spirit means twice the damage, two means four times as much, three means 8, and this keeps increasing exponentially until you do a SHITLOAD of damage. The maximum amount of Spirits of the same element is 7 though, but that still means 128 times as much damage, which is considerable.
Spirits do not join your team easily though. First of all, you have to find them hidden throughout the gaming world, and then you have to give them specific items, as well as answering to some conditions. For instance, Slash (spirit of Blades) will not join you if you have Frog Gummi (the main source of healing items) with you (yeah, that makes sense), Nirva (spirit of Darkness) will ask you to fight some of his monsters (which are hard!), and most others require specific coins that can be found everywhere.

When venturing through dungeons you will meet monsters in the same variety of elements, so a large part of the game consists in making sure you have the right people with you, with the right elements. Monsters are not vulnerable to their own element, nor to the element they dominate obviously, so you need to keep your party well balanced and varied.
The idea of the game is great and most dungeons are entertaining in that they always offer some kind of gimmick or something to do, rather than just being a run from point A to B. And if the whole game had stayed in the same light, "don't worry" tone as in the beginning it would have been great and it would have earned a higher score, but as it is, it becomes REALLY hard towards the end, requiring massive upleveling to make sure you can get by even the most common enemy, since leveling up once only increases your status slightly and hardly noticeably. And that is immediately where the most painful omission of this game stands out. You don't get ANY information on experience points. NOTHING.
At the end of battle you just get a screen telling you how much money you won, and some items perhaps, but no information on experience, and even in the menu screen you cannot see how much experience you already have. There's only a colored gauge beneath your characters profile, indicating how close you are to levelling up, but no real numbers are apparent, making levelling up extremely unattractive.

Basically, you don't even know which enemies will earn you good experience and which won't! For a game that focuses so heavily on uplevelling towards the end, this is really unforgiveable. It's plain and simple, towards the end you are going to have to put a LOT of effort into this game to make it through, and this has made me painfully aware of the question "do I really want to do this?". Especially considering the ending is not that good anyway.

It's got some good ideas and it's fun while it's still normally challenging, but in the end, this game falls into the "die-hards only" category because of unforgiving difficulty. A 7.3




Oh, and I have a confession to make. I never finished Kindergarten. It was just too hard I tellz ya! All this stuff about sharing and not hurting other people!? If you want some of my Lego's you can retrieve them from your backside!

Oh, no, wait, the other confession.
I have a criminal record. Of sorts. Actually, it's not really a record, more of a muffled cassette tape. You see, I have bought some illegally copied games in the past. "Honestly officer, I didn't know, that Chinese man looked so trustworthy!"
That's right, when I was in China, I bought 3 GBA games, being Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga, Rockman EXE 4, and Sonic Advance 3.
You can tell they're bootlegs because of the "we just printed this out on our commodore" packaging and cartridge. And also the fact that when you start them up it says something like "WE ARE THE ROMHACKZORZZZ! WE PWNED UR GBA! PHEAR OUR L33T SKILLZ!" all in Chinese of course. Also, YOU try and buy a LEGAL game in China. It just won't work.

Funnily, the box "art" of Mario & Luigi proudly proclaims in Chinese that the game contains Chinese dialogue, and it does, for like, the first 10 minutes, then it goes back to Japanese (fortunately for me). So it really looks like they just translated the first couple of minutes, so any idiot Chinese boy who tries the game thinks "Great, now I can finally read my illegally copied games!" (if they could read. Or think.) only to bounce on that infernal Japanese language WHICH THEY STOLE FROM US, and will then go off to resurrect Mao in a strange plottwist that will overthrow the world all because of a Nintendo game.

In the meanwhile some shady salesman is going "haha, that miselable little ass just blew his palent's monthly wages on a game he doesn't even undelstand! LOL!", whereas I'm going "Haha, that idiot just sold me a perfect copy of a great game for the equivalent of a new pair of shoelaces! NOOB!", but it is him having the last laugh, cos he only downloaded it for free and jammed it on a 10 cent plastic GBA cartridge, making him a profit of about 490%, so now I know why the Chinese Economy is supposed to be rising.

Henceforthnotwithstandingly, I have decided to erase these three games from the project, and indeed, off my entire Collection List, in accordance with the rules, which state that this project only encompasses LEGITIMATE games, and no copies or ROMs.
So this means that up next is Mario Kart Super Circuit, which I can already tell you I finished in 10 minutes just now, so expect the review tomorrow, but up REALLY next is Mario Story. Cool.

posted by Ingen! @ 4:48 PM