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Magical Pop’n – Hidden Greatness

Started by Dracos, January 17, 2006, 10:40:28 AM

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Dracos

Recently, Olg was bugging me to find him a copy of this strange game that I'd honestly never heard of before named Magical Pop'n.  He wanted to give it a try and such.  I took a glance at it and was sort of put off at the start.  It was cutesy.  Like, give you diabetes cutesy.  It was made by some company I'd never heard of before too, a Pack In Video.

   Then my gamer mind noticed something.  The motion in the game was very fluid and responsive.  The level design was, at a glance, solid.  The enemies were interesting to fight through without being overlong.  This was something worth taking a deeper look into, a gem in the rough and all that.

   Let's start off with the negatives/so-so.  The game has weak music, often one or two instruments looping in a very simple pattern.  It's not annoyingly bad, but it's pretty much totally uninteresting and doesn't contribute well to the overall whole.  It doesn't have a story worth speaking of, the entirety of it represented in some eight frames of art and text that show before and after the game.  In fact, I didn't see that there was any story whatsoever until I beat the game and then thought of waiting at the title screen a while.  It also is ridiculously cutesy in aesthetics, which may or may not fly with you.  It looks like playing a little kids game.  The game is also not easy, in my opinion.  It'll demand you get very good at it to get all the way through it.

   That's the entirety of the bad and/or so-so parts, and many might not be so depending on your preferences.  What's left is a truly awesome action game with amazing level design for the most part, plenty of bosses, superb secret design, a good deal of exploration possibility, and generally very fun gameplay.  You're playing this little magic princess who's running off to save her kingdom and retrieve a magic artifact that was stolen by the King of Evil.  This girl is remarkably agile, flipping, hopping, crawling, and basically moving with fluidity all over the screen while battling enemies with sword and magic.  You start with this little golden sword and a single spell for sending out a small blue magic burst, one of six magic spells you get over the course of the game.  Each spell takes a certain amount of star points which can be refilled by item drops and items in chests, as well as having a sort of big spell screen clearer (I rarely used this).  You get a pretty healthy amount of magic points, enough to use magic regularly but not waste it.  Combat involves swinging sword fights, complete with the ability to parry pretty much anything with your sword, similar as the enemies can also parry sword blows, block with shields, and stab up with spears as you leap by.  There's something just awesome about entering a room and having a little sword fight with four or five duck swordsmen.  It's kept mostly simple (rapid presses can often break enemies guard) but it works nicely enough.  The sword gets a good amount of maneuverability, being able to strike in four directions as well as stabbing while crouched or crawling.  The spells exist both for combat and for puzzle solving, consisting of bombs, grappling hooks, fire and ice spells, and even this sort of metroid wall grab ball trick.  The result is you've got a lot you can do to interact with your environment for an action game of this era.

   The game has excellent level design.  The levels, while generally linear, do not just head one direction or scroll, but allow you to explore around the place, looping around and often solving things on one screen after getting stuff on other.  It's largely kept to simple loops and branches, which allow variety and interesting level traversal without being a challenge to keep track of where you are or where you're going (at least until the last  level, which is truly a massive undertaking).  What really makes them special is that their secret design is superb.  There's tons of them, they're both well hidden and at the same time clues to each of them.  Sometimes you'll enter a cave and see on the other side a doorway that should lead to a doorway on a screen you just came from where in turn, there's a small rift of grass in the middle of a cliff face that hints that you can cut the rock away over it to reveal a door.  Sometimes you'll see a wall that looks solid, but if you get close, you notice there's a room on the other side of it hinting that you might be able to just walk through.  Sometimes you'll find a treasure, one that distracts from a translucent roof tile that would lead you to another treasure.  The game is full of these kinds of things all over the levels.  You can get 1 ups, magic recharges, full life recharges, and hp bar increases by searching out through the levels.  In plain, the game rewards you for challenging assumptions and being observant without encouraging random slashing of walls, running into things, and just checking every ceiling.  If a ceiling is going to be jump through, it is obviously jump through.  It is, perhaps, one of the better examples of secret design I've yet seen.  It felt like I was solving puzzles put there by an intelligent designer and being rewarded for doing so.

   What's left to talk about?  Bosses, sometimes as many as six to the level.  They generally didn't let you go on for too long without invisible checkpoints being hit that you'd respawn at if you died and neat bosses showing up.  Pretty much none of them being recolored, all of them being made of a 'learn a pattern, pass the boss' style with enough flexibility to let you choose several ways to deal with that pattern.  I thought this was pretty keen for an action game.  A good realization of what folks want when they play them (neat boss fights), while at the same time spreading them out so that they have cool down time and recovery time between each boss fight.  These aren't the contra style destroy the scene and fill the screen with fire type bosses either.  They're generally large but not huge enemies which give plenty of room to maneuver while at the same time providing a reasonable challenge to circumvent.

   Overall, this is an awesome game that  I much enjoyed playing and suggest to pretty much anyone who can stomach the godawful cuteness of it all.
Well, Goodbye.