(Andriod/iOS)
The World of Magic is a MMORPG that is available to play via your mobile or tablet. I choose this as the second games as I thought it’d be cool to find a great MMORPG experience on my mobile. It is a top down action RPG that sees you exploring maps to complete quests. Think classic Super Nintendo RPG and you’ll be close.
Overview
- Top down action RPG – Secrets of Mana Style.
- Simple RPG gameplay, more powerful and epic attacks as you level up
- Touch screen interface with an easy layout but lacks responsiveness.
- Lots of grinding to progress
- Limited choices in the character creation screen.
- PVP, Guilds and a busy community of players.
- 3 classes – Warrior, Ranger and Magician.
- Confusing directions and dialog boxes – quests are hard to follow.
Character Customization
The character customization is extremely limited, but this might be because it is a mobile platform. You a choice between two factions and three rather uninspired character classes – Warrior, Ranger, or Magician. Here are a few screen shots detailing the character choices: –
Story
The story is told through a series of the poorest designed and ugliest text-boxes that I’ve ever seen. The words continued across lines and my brain just seems to reject the information that was contained in them.
But the story seems to be the typical fantasy plotline about warring states. I think.
Gameplay
So, I choose an archer, and I am all ready for the epic quest I couldn’t quite take in from the giant and confusing textbox. I spawn in a field and try to follow an instruction to talk to a random pink monster that is kind of like Kirby.
I couldn’t quite get the controls to work, the explanation to come up and suddenly I am in a field filled with the rabid mutant offspring of Kirby and Jiggly-Puff. Still unable to get dialogue working, I decide to kill the big pink monsters, and collect what looks like their dead corpse off the ground. Hoping that’s what I was supposed to do.
The Kirby connection strong in my mind, and the Super Nintendo style graphics makes it feel like I am slowly desecrating my childhood gaming memories. Here’s a short memorial video: –
By ignoring the instructions on screen I got the dialogue function working and began to talking to the random dude and discovered I needed more dead Kirby-spawn. As a reward, I got a skill book to teach me a double shot skill, and that I am unsure how to use or if I even equipped successfully. I was then told I had to visit an innkeeper in town who would give more quests. So I started this game totally confused and hating the control system. (I’m sure it gets better, there is a confusing learning curve here)
The maps contained a few surprises, like this :-
Yes, that’s me posing in the hole on the right. You’d be surprised that number of killer boars I hate to fight off to that picture. If there was a purpose to this board beyond the photograph I didn’t find it. There was also a collection of warping stones that take me to places, like the beach if I had green powder. I know I had boar meat, a picnic would have been nice.
As I found the text-boxes hard to follow I also found the story hard to follow, and the quests become jumbled and confusing very easily. You need to remember who gave you the quest, what the quest was for, and even what is in your inventory for each quest. Not a difficult task, I feel many will see this as a pro as it’s slightly more realistic in this aspect. The drops for the quests are very low meaning you have to kill what felt like over a thousand enemies to get five item drops. This makes the play time seem longer and a little boring for me.
Battle System
The combat system is rather straight forward. As an archer, I just had to double click on and enemy and auto-attack would takeover. The downside was the screen did not respond to my clicks and it was difficult to get the combat started.
The combat starts out slow with time based damage, one hit every 3 or 4 seconds to one enemy. There are 4 slots that hold 5 attacks that you can place the the bubbles on the lower right. As you level you get more powerful attacks that activate upon press and have a variable cooldown.
Graphics
The graphics are a simple, however if you have done pixel graphics you might still applaud them. They are definitely not off-putting or a reason to avoid this game. The characters are colorful classic final fantasy 8-bit gaming – which are fun and cute. The maps are interesting to look at, with a lot of unique (and often funny) areas to explore.
Community
There was a large community presence in this game, and this can be seen easily in the town.
However, as you can see from the picture above the sheer amount of players can be a little daunting. Amongst all these other-plays are quest giving NPC’s that get lost in all the chaos that is going on.
It is a very helpful community. If players see you struggling against some angry boars in your eternal quest for boar meat, they will help out and save you. It’s very rare that an impromptu party will form on the battle field like this, but it happened twice in this game – which is amazing. Although the chat is a little hard to master if you have large fingers
Conclusion
If you love that classic RPG gameplay, and don’t mind getting past the learning curve of glitches, this game might be for you. If you want to explore additional similar games, you might look into:- Final Fantasy, Chrono-Trigger, Dragon Quest or Adventure of Mana.
