Magic Fantasy is a really short side-scrolling action doujin game, taking a little less than 10 minutes to complete. With only four stages and one major gimmick, it may seem limited in what it can achieve. However, it impressed me quite a bit with its pacing.
Each level basically has two phases. The first being where the player is at a disadvantage, leaving them without the abilities or skills to easily overcome foes. They’ll need to dodge lobbed acorns from giant trees, hop over boulders rolled by giant rock monsters, as well as evade dive bombing birds. While these encounters are not hard per se, most enemies act as a fairly significant wall that the player needs to deal with. It often takes more than a few hits to kill them while also requiring some extensive maneuvering to line up a shot or dodge their attacks.
Halfway through each stage, it introduces the game’s main gimmick – The ability to cast various elemental spells. The wizard will learn to lob fire balls, slide ice blocks across the ground, and launch tornadoes upwards.
As expected, these spells do more damage to foes that are weak to them. But what’s neat here is that each element’s trajectory directly correlate with an enemy’s attack or movement patterns. Not only does an iceblock deal the most damage to the giant rock monsters, it also slides across the floor and destroys the boulders they roll. Meanwhile the birds scurrying about the top of the screen can be sniped by launching a tornado upward.
Usually the only spell useful in a stage is the one found in it, with the exception of the final level that has waves of foes from every locale. It requires the player to quickly swap between magic types to deal with them. Which is a skill they’ll need in the final boss fight against a Dragon.
This encounter feels like each stage, as well as enemy type, was built in a way to help teach the player how to counter him. His attack patterns mimic many other challenges from before. The tornado counters the Dragon’s dive, similar to the birds. Or he’ll roll fire balls across the floor that can be dissipated by using the ice block, just like the boulders.
Teaching the player in this way is nothing unique, but it is cool in how quickly it executes on it. In only a handful of minutes, the player learns how to evade a threat and what spell to use in opposition multiple times over. The final challenge brings it all together in a way that feels like everything learned matters. That rapid cycle, along with the pay off, is really satisfying.
If you can find a way to play, I definitely recommend giving it a look. It was made by the X680x0 Club, which is a group of students at the University of Electro-Communications in Chofu City, Tokyo. Unfortunately, I can’t find a download link on their website. If you’re able to get one of their discs at a Comiket or similar event that has a collection of their works, it should be featured on there.
