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Toil and Trouble… Academagia: The Making of Mages [Review]

Academagia1Training to be a wizard isn’t all fun and games, you know. There’s wizardry school to attend, exams to take, trials to overcome… the list goes on. I am now all too aware of this, thanks to the slog that is Academagia.

The world of magic has never felt so utterly dull. There’s plenty to see and do in Academagia – maybe too much to do, in fact – but it’s just all so horribly strung together and not satisfying in the slightest. Harry Potter this ain’t.

GAMEPLAY

From the get-go, Academagia wants to completely overwhelm you with stats to alter and buttons to press. You can choose your character’s strengths, weaknesses, background, past experiences, star signs, birth place, cheese preference, sleeping pattern – OK, a couple of those aren’t true, but you get the idea. It may sound like an amazing amount of freedom, but it sure doesn’t feel like it – there’s barely any explanations as to which options are good to choose, or whether any of it is actually important.

Then you’re thrown into college, planning each day one by one, attending classes and juggling your free time. Everything is completely customizable – a default calendar is set out for you, but you can alter it however you like. The problem is, you’ll most likely have no idea what are good options and what aren’t, and eventually after messing around for a little while, you’ll just use the default day layout.

Each day consists of a possible scenario which you must puzzle your way through, then end-of-day statistics. Scenarios are mildly interesting, in a ‘does this game really hate me’ sort of way. You’ll be given a small storyline, and asked to choose an option to continue the story.

Academagia2It didn’t seem to matter what I chose, as I’d always end up with a bad result. For example, in the nearby town, I encountered a fight. The options were to join in the fight, or try to calm everyone down. I chose the calming option, thinking that would be the ‘good’ way to go about it. It didn’t work, and I was harmed for getting in the way. In fact, I played dozens of scenarios and only a couple of times did I get a good ending!

What it boils down to is that the majority of the gameplay is really rather boring and over-ambitious, and even when it does get interesting, the game always seems to be against you. If it had been a little more lenient, it would also have been more playable.

STYLE

Academagia is made up entirely of menus filled with reams of text and numbers. It all has a lovely polished feel to it, but at the same time there’s a limit as to what you can do with the same static menu throughout the entirety of play.

It doesn’t help that the loading times can sometimes be ridiculously long, especially when saving and loading. If text moved along more swiftly, it may be easier to read. It definitely would have helped if the story sections had been read aloud too – the world of Academagia would have felt far more plausible.

As far as I’m aware, the game uses free classical music as its soundtrack, which in general fits well with the setting. Of course, if that’s not your cup of tea, there is an option to turn the music off and pretend you’re a rock wizard instead.

Academagia3STORY

You play a teenage who has moved to a school of magic to learn the art of wizardry. Along the way you attend classes, make friends, keep a pet, master spells and go on random adventures.

You’re thinking Harry Potter, aren’t you? I was too, until I actually played the game – it’s a far cry from the wonder of Hogwarts, missing all the mystery and substance JK Rowling’s boy wonder brings to the magic table. There’s definitely plenty to see and tons of story elements, but it’s all rather dull.

OTHER

Academagia fails to impress for a number of reasons. It’s incredibly overwhelming, throwing options and stats all over the place without enough explanation or reward to back it up. The game also hates the player, trying to trip you up at every turn. It simply becomes a guessing game, and you might as well just choose random options in the hope that something good comes from them.

Training to be a wizard is an exciting prospect, but Academagia is not the way to do it. Buy a Harry Potter DVD instead.

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Comments

  • http://www.academagia.com Academagia

    Mike;

    Thanks for the review!

    As the developer, I was disappointed to hear that you were frustrated with the game.

    I wanted to respond to two points in particular that I feel overall characterize your experience with Academagia.

    Firstly, that there was a lack of explanation for statistics. I definitely feel that this is something we can better introduce to the player, but ultimately we truly wanted you, as a gamer, to explore, experiment and role-play. The variety and depth of the actions is meant to provide you tools to shape your character and their experience in whatever fashion you choose. It’s not meant to be frustrating: instead, we hoped it would be liberating.

    Secondly, that the game’s events are difficult. It’s true that at the very beginning you are unlikely to complete too many of them successfully. However, the key to success lies in training your skills and choosing which path you wish to take based on the difficulty color coding explained in the tutorial and manual. As you attend your classes and train your skills, you will very soon be able to deal with most Events.

    I am sorry that your experience was not pleasant- our goal was to give as much freedom to the player as possible. Do you think a more directed tutorial would help?

  • Mike Rose

    Hey there,

    I understand where you’re coming from with the lack of explanation = player has to experiment more, but the problem was that the majority of the time I spent experimenting with options, nothing I did seemed to yield any interesting results and I was left feeling confused. For example, at one point I decided to gossip with two other schoolmates. It asked me where to do this, and I had no idea where was good, so I chose a random place. Then I chose two random people out a long list.

    When I implemented this, it merely told me in the stats at the end that ‘Gossiping with X and Y has failed’, or something along those lines. No explanation was given as to what exactly I had done wrong, or indeed, if I’d done anything wrong at all.

    Your idea of starting with an extreme difficulty and, rather than it curving up, giving the player skills so that they eventually align with the difficulty, again can work in some scenarios, but I don’t believe it works here. Games like this need to feel rewarding for the player to want to continue playing, and I barely ever felt rewarded for what I did. As I said in the review, I felt that I was being constantly punished, whichever option I picked.

    I think there definitely needs to be a little more hand-holding involved – it wouldn’t take away from the freedom provided, but rather show the player exactly the type of freedom they have at their disposal.

  • http://www.academagia.com Academagia

    Mike;

    Thanks for the comments. For us, since we are so well versed in the Life Simulation genre, we probably had some tunnel vision. We did have a fairly wide beta, but this particular criticism was not among the actions we took away.

    I think to address this we will produce a supplement to the manual which goes over attributes, skills and how they work together so you can be successful in your actions and stories. For instance, in the specific example you mention (about Gossiping), in order to succeed there you need to raise your Gossip Skill. It’s obvious…and yet, at the same time, it isn’t. I think we can improve on this at least.

    Thanks again for the feedback!

  • Jered

    Just wanted to add that it sounds like the issue may be one of feedback for players more than a need to list everything in the manual. In the gossiping example, it sounds like a location is selected, then targets, then a simple result is given. That the Gossip skill would have an effect would be obvious, yes, but it doesn’t sound like it’s obvious what kind of effect the choices the player made might have had. “Greg seemed uncomfortable in the garden” is the sort of result that lets the player know that the location has an effect, and something about one of the characters selected meant the garden had a negative impact on their gossiping effort. Other possibilities, depending on what actually did influence the outcome, could be results like “You were uncomfortable in the garden and couldn’t focus,” or “You tried to talk to them but got tongue-tied” if the location wasn’t a factor at all, just your Gossiping skill.

    The key to making the players learn as they go, basically, is giving them enough feedback to make the failures interesting. A feeling of progress keeps me coming back to simulation games, anyway, if even the random-seeming outcomes (“Be nice to him” results in “He hates you”) have something in the result text that tells me what I might have done better, or teaches me why I was doomed to failure (“You decide he simply hates nice people”), and I’m more likely to come back to play that scenario again to see what other outcome I can try for.

  • Mike Rose

    @Jered: Yes! That’s exactly the kind of thing that would help. I guess I didn’t fully explain myself well enough – it wasn’t that I didn’t understand how to success at certain aspects of the game, but rather than the game didn’t actually let me know what I was doing wrong.

    As Jered says, if the game had let me know that ‘you failed to make conversation because this person doesn’t know you well enough, maybe you should do this instead to get to know them better first’, rather than simply stating ‘conversation failed’, then I would be far more inclined to work at it.

  • http://videogameblogger.org Video Games

    I hated this game and was not able to even progress through the first random event as I couldn’t find the button to actually start my quest after I had created my mage. Such a big let down.