Lost Magic (DS) review

I got Lost Magic for the Nintendo DS on the 9th via eBay after waiting 22 days (long story short, it was a pre-order wrongly advertised), so I thought I'd write a review for it.

Lost Magic is best described as a mixture of a RTS (Real Time Strategy) and a RPG (Role Playing Game). You control Isaac (the main character) as well as monsters you capture as you would in an RTS, using the stylus to click and drag to select multiple units, or clicking on a single one to select it. Unlike most RTSs though, the selection is a circle instead of a box, and it (unfortunately) sometimes makes it harder to select the units you want. If you select lots of units and tell them to go to the same place or attack the same thing, they tend to overlap each other, adding on to the difficulty of selecting specific units.

Another downside is the non-existent AI for units to walk around objects; Instead of walking around a wall, hole, tree, etc., the unit(s) you tell to move will run right into whatever is blocking the way you told them to go.

In my opinion, the RTS part of the game is a bit poor, though lets talk about the good parts of the game!

The RPG side of the game is what's really great, allowing you to cast and combine Runes with the stylus (equaling up to almost 400 spells!), capture monsters by casting a spell from a Dark Rune, equip your monsters with which ever items you want (raising attack, defense, magic defense, movement speed, etc.), and more. Also, a nice addition to any RPG game is an interesting story, and Lost Magic has one. With entertaining conversations of Isaac talking to people he meets along his adventure (accompanied by portraits with a fun art style that change their expressions), Lost Magic manages to have these conversations and tell the story without sounding corny, because the characters (mainly Isaac) notice things that the player would, and also think the same thing as the player would about certain situations. In a Nintendo Power issue, the main animator of the game stated that one reason Isaac is a young (14 years old) is that he wanted the players to be able to relate to Isaac, and I think they did a pretty good job of that.

As talked about above, the game has a nice art style, though the in-game characters and backgrounds look like something from a simple GBA (Game Boy Advance) game, as well as the sounds in the game. Though it would have been nice to have slightly better graphics, I personally don't mind too much, as I mostly play games for the gameplay, not graphics.

Lost Magic is also playable over Nintendo Wi-Fi connection, where you can have One on One duels with other players, either using your own party from single player (Duel), or using preset characters (Free Duel). In both modes, you can search for anyone to fight, search for people with around the same ranking points as you (you start off with 2000, and you earn more by winning matches, or lose some by losing matches), search for friends, or manage your friends list. In Free Duel, it's basically the same thing, except as said above, you use preset level 40 characters; Besides being Isaac, you can also play as any other Sages you've beaten in single player. They give you a preset list of monsters, though you can switch them for monsters you've obtained in single player (though they're set to level 40 for the Free Duel). This all sounds like fun, and well, it is, but there is of course a few bad things about online play. The main problem is that there is usually quite abit of lag (slowness), as in it can take a few seconds for your units to respond to your commands, as well as some framerate lag when there's lots of things going on. The lag is most of the time bearable, and it really depends how far away your opponent lives from you. While we're on the topic of lag, I regrettably have to mention, that the game also has bad lag problems offline in single player as well, which is very noticeable in games with lots of enemies.

All in all Lost Magic is a good game, and in single player, it actually gets pretty difficult at times, which should be welcome; Though, it's not really a must-have game unless you really want another DS game and adore RPGs/RTSs.

Overall, I would give Lost Magic a 6 out of 10.