Magnacarta 2 – By Dogma
A long long time ago, in a small country home there was a young boy with a PS1. It wasn’t very reliable, the memory cards seemed to find their way into everything except the console, and every controller seemed to meet the unfortunate end of being eaten by the cat. But after awhile the boy got bored of his Crash Bandicoot, his Ape Escape, and Parappa the Rapper. Which thus motivated him to look for something new, something different and complex.
Alas, he stumbled upon a completely new kind of genre, a quirky, long lasting, high thought kind of thing, called the RPG (namely Final Fantasy.) Though, we’re not going to make mention of FFVII, because the one he really liked ended with no numbers, and just said “Tactics.”
This, was the birth of a new, lazier kind of gamer. Who appreciated other games for their straightforward kind of value, but still looked toward these familiar and mysterious type of games to curve his boredom. Even if he initially sucked at them.
However, now that I’ve come out the closet about being an RPG fan, it goes well to note that more then ten years later, that a lot of these games really aren’t that good. In fact, they suck and just fall short of expectations.
However, Magnacarta (and I don’t know why the writer forgot his fucking spacebar) boasts a few good additions, and a few less then simple procedures that kind of make it good, and still make it kind of shitty.
Now, on the Xbox 360, there isn’t exactly a huge list of RPGs, most of them look about the same, feel the same, and play the same, ending on exactly two notes. Either the story and the characters suck and are boring, but the gameplay is fun and interesting. (I.E Last Remnant) Or, the story is amazing, the graphics are great, and atmospheric, but the gameplay is about as fun as churning butter. (I.E Lost Odyssey)
So with Magnacarta 2, a sequel to a text heavy stylistic, and at the least pretty looking PS2 game, its somewhat hard what to figure out which one this is.
There is this Kingdom, its name is Lanzheim, and its at war. I’m not sure why its at war, and it didn’t look like it was that tough to take over, so an official looking guy named Schunzeit just waltzed up and took over the throne.
I was curious if there were other countries or nations around Lanzheim, but when I inquired about it, the game kind of shrugged and asked me why I wasn’t off doing a quest for the chief of the starting village. When I had officially reached the “good guy” HQ, I looked for an NPC to question whether or not it was a civil war, that technically consumed the world, or just the country, and once again the game just kind of shook its head and replied “No. You’re playing for keeps.”
Still, that’s about all there is too it and the “unified” land. Once the main castle is taken over by the main bad guy, and he goes through the trouble of putting up new drapes, arm chairs, and matching pillow for his throne, he starts to kill innocent people for the lulz. The princess, and it is always a princess, is immediately forced to leave her home. She is quickly tracked down and nearly killed like her mother, but she gets away and goes and meets this green haired looking noble, and they form a warring faction.
So if your earth didn’t shatter with the thought of two forces at a power struggle, coupled with an amnesiac angsty young male protagonist, and a handful of other clichés that are prevalent in both fantasy and RPGs, then you understand that Magnacarta 2 is immediately represented by the latter.
Majority of the characters themselves seem to be handily copied out of other stories, or even some anime. The main character is the Cloud, Capell, Rush kind of fellow who is angsty for no reason, and typically enigmatic until later on. The princess is clearly like any other princess, there is the tsundere little bitch, the ditzy big boobed character, and draw in a gentle giant, a sarcastic pretty boy and you’ve got a great big old pot of same old bullshit you’ve seen before.
Not saying that the story is completely boring, and not interesting, but if you’ve played one RPG, you get the feeling you know what’s going to go down in this one, however the combat is rather fun and interesting, and breaks the boring standstill mode of most Rpgs, and adds a bit of depth.
You can control up to three characters at one time switching periodicially between the leader, and attacking a certain amount of times on a small cooldown bar until it fills up and you overheat. The skills are pretty good at killing everything, and the attacks aren’t too bad to look at so you get a feel for the rhythm of utilizing skills, chains, and overdrives to beat up anything dumb enough to not be main characters.
However, combat is not without a few gripes because if your timing is off, or you don’t set the AI to exactly what you want to see, majority of the time you’ll be able to move your character anywhich way around the opponent but have several moments where you can’t safely attack again without risking an overheat. Similarly you might lose out on a few random skill points because it’s a windy area and you want to use fire so the game just tells your fire to go eat a dick sandwich for a little bit and you die to the boss who loves the wind.
It just seems a little bit avoidable, I believe combat could have been much smoother. While it does bring a lot to the table, it doesn’t break it. Unlike the game I keep mentioning for its combat, you can only bring your character a small portion of the way, and add more skills to the repertoire. Minor things that really boost performance are left out for a two sided skill tree that simply designates which weapon you prefer, and when you want to use it.
It goes good to note, that the combat kept me interested for quite some time, all the way into Disc 2, because the story kind of put me to sleep. However, it did pick up, and I grew an increasing interest in the story and actually wanted to see how it all concluded. So despite being cliché its not all bad.
Mangacarta 2 looks rather impressive, if you ignore the character models. The graphics are crisp and well animated, but for some reason they took the beautiful, and visually striking art of Hyung-tae Kim, and made them just look weird.
The character, particularly the young human characters, look foolish and malnourished. Its not even a matter of classifying it any other way, because in almost every cutscene, there is the desire to scratch your head and just kind of wonder just what was the idea behind the design choice.
I get you can’t profitably turn something quite as vivid and amazing as Hyung-tae Kim’s artwork for an entire twenty hour game with ease, but this borderlines just questionable. As majority of the time, the characters just look childish, and ugly in a story that is surprisingly more grown up then I thought.
The music is a step up above the visuals, but majority of the time I forgot the music was even playing due to the fact that its not really amazing either. A few tracks in particular are worth mention (The menu theme) but otherwise, no real rush.
The voice acting isn’t very good though. A good dub is typically one you don’t mind having on either the original, or the dubbed version and seeing as this one doesn’t make the former available its mostly you wishing it was. Johnny Yong Bosch makes yet another appearance in yet another game, and does the same “angry at the world teenager” he’s been doing for years now. The rest of the voice actors aren’t bad, but well once you get Johnny Yong Bosch you can pretty much imagine how the rest of it is going to turn out.
Now that I think about it, this is particularly negative in a game that I didn’t think was bad, just not really all that breathtaking.
Magnacarta 2 has a handful of really positive things, its just a shame they got it from other games of an incredibly similar nature. The few things that set it apart from your typical rpg game, or that made the first one so much different feel a little bit lost in translation.
I can tentatively recommend it, but its hard to want to play this game at times. There isn’t enough story, substance, of vivacity to really bring you to the table time and time again, and although similar to Last Remnant, here the combat is the strongest aspect of the game, but doesn’t really evolve much after you figure out a few tricks.
As it is currently, I can only recommend it for the art and the value as an RPG in a mostly RPG-less season till December (JRPGS that least.) Get it, play it when you feel like playing it, leave it off otherwise.