In a marked departure from what else I've been playing on DS, last night I started in on Konami's Magician's Quest: Mysterious Times. My wife also got it, as a slightly-belated Mother's Day present, and though we've yet to play together (it supports up to four players via either local wireless or Wi-Fi Connection, it seems) we've been comparing notes a little as we start out.
Magician's Quest has been compared to Animal Crossing, and though there's definitely a surface vibe going on here (your toolkit includes a bug net, fishing pole, shovel...), the game has a very different feel to it. In contrast to Animal Crossing's wide-open, make-of-it-what-you-will feel, Magician's Quest appears to impose more structure, from the once-weekly quests to the meting out of spells and what not via daily classes to the much more highly-architected and very artistically detailed town your school of magic is a fixture of.
We both did try to do this week's quest—catch an unspecified animal (bug or fish, it wasn't clear, except that it had "fins")—but neither of us succeeded. This particular quest was slow going anyway because fishing is a pretty slow process, which resulted in not-insignificant annoyance. But what's been bothering us both the most is that while there's hints of a lot of deep systems in this game, especially when it comes to dealing with interacting with fellow students, we didn't come off feeling like we understood much of it at all just yet.
There's promise that bewilderment won't be long-lived, though. This morning I attended a class and learned an invisibility spell... which, when properly done (chant an icon-based incantation, walk around some ruins, and hold a crystal which I'd acquired the night before), let me walk around and nudge other confused students, and purportedly even listen in on gossip.
If there's more like this (manual says there's over 100 spells, so I imagine so), Magician's Quest should get interesting indeed.
We both did try to do this week's quest—catch an unspecified animal (bug or fish, it wasn't clear, except that it had "fins")—but neither of us succeeded. This particular quest was slow going anyway because fishing is a pretty slow process, which resulted in not-insignificant annoyance. But what's been bothering us both the most is that while there's hints of a lot of deep systems in this game, especially when it comes to dealing with interacting with fellow students, we didn't come off feeling like we understood much of it at all just yet.
There's promise that bewilderment won't be long-lived, though. This morning I attended a class and learned an invisibility spell... which, when properly done (chant an icon-based incantation, walk around some ruins, and hold a crystal which I'd acquired the night before), let me walk around and nudge other confused students, and purportedly even listen in on gossip.
If there's more like this (manual says there's over 100 spells, so I imagine so), Magician's Quest should get interesting indeed.