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A jam submission

Magic and MysteryView game page

Submitted by Mynespyro — 18 hours, 41 minutes before the deadline
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Magic and Mystery's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Theme Interpretation#83.5003.500
Engagement/Fun#93.2503.250
Polish#103.2503.250
Originality/Creativity#113.2503.250
Magical Girl Concept#133.3753.375
Overall#143.1963.196
Aesthetics#163.1253.125
Audio#182.6252.625

Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your game fit the Magical Girl Genre?
Taya, the Main Character, is a girl and gets turned into a "magical detective", having powers like casting fire, ice, lightning, healing and light arrows. Also the detective "skills" could be interpreted as magical.

Which theme(s) do you pick?
I picked the themes: Sister, Service and Sadistic

How does your game fit those theme(s)?
Miyako, Tayas Sister, plays a main role in the games story (covering sister); further a specific service plays a mayor role in the story (covering the service); and the game contains a sadistic choice (covering sadistic).

Were the assets for your game made during the jam? Elaborate as you see fit.
Most of the assets were from the RPG Maker Engine, so no the assets weren't made during the jam.

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Comments

Submitted

This was pretty interesting, and there were some cool concepts I would like to see explored more. A magical girl detective is something I don't think we've seen enough of! I'd say that the biggest gripe I had was just that the world felt a little empty - I ended up being startled in the Factory when I ran into the Evil Girl since there weren't many other people around. The notifications for whenever you could interact with things was very helpful though, and felt like a nice quality of life addition.

Submitted

This game is one of those games that leaves me conflicted. There are a lot of good ideas in this game. The premise is interesting, and in some ways it's a very ambitious game. Unfortunately, it's very poorly executed overall.

The art assets are (almost?) all stock RPG Maker. That's fine. I've built games like that, and I won't judge harshly on it. The only thing that really bugged me was the battlebacks and battlers all being at different scales.

The environments are a swing and a miss. They're generally very detailed, fairly realistic, and make good use of the available assets. But they're huge and empty, and the majority of the game world serves no purpose. There are so many rooms that you can go into, but have nothing in them to interact with. It's incredibly tedious and frustrating to run around trying to find which buildings have something important in them.

If the signposting about that was better, that would help, but I'll get into that in a bit.

The little callouts that appear when you move next to things that you can interact with are appreciated. That's a neat little feature.

Doors at the bottom of the screen that are entered via the tile above the wall are really unintuitive, and I don't think I've ever played another RPG Maker game that does this. I will call this out specifically because there's one switch behind a door like this that took me ages to figure out.

The gameplay is disappointing overall. It's essentially a switch hunt, with glowing orbs that kinda-sorta make sense in the context of the game but not really. It was at least pretty clear how the switches, orbs, and locked doors worked together.

Which is... fine, I guess, but I feel the game is kind of a bait and switch. I thought it was going to be a detective story where you run around finding clues, talking to people, and solving a mystery. The game starts that way, with a few initial clues to check out, but two of them (the hotel manager's son and the office corp executive) go nowhere and as soon as you find the sewer the detective concept is pretty much gone by the wayside.

I was, however, not a fan of the passcode puzzle that requires you to go count objects, especially since the hint that starts that puzzle is in a building I didn't realize could be entered at all. The rest of the switch hunt is okay, being more disappointing because of what it isn't than what it is, but the passcode puzzle sucked. Ironically, I think this one would work okay in a detective game if it were better implemented.

A detective game screams for a journal or log system, but that's not really how this game ends up playing, it's not too much of an issue.

Honestly, I wish this really had been a game about a magical detective without the twist. The real plot has been, frankly, done to death, and I saw it coming a mile away. It doesn't really resolve cleanly- I'm still not sure how the evil girl factors into it- and I was left with more questions than answers. A nice little detective mystery but with magical girls would could have been a lot of fun.

The writing, in general, isn't great. There are some typos and non sequiturs, there's way more telling than showing, the pacing is weird, and the dialogue is really unnatural. The way the main character just blurts out all the necessary background information in the first lines of the game is a case in point. Some of this can be handwaved by the twist, but I don't feel it fully excuses any of it.

The text-only "cutscenes" at the end were pretty lame. I'm assuming time was a factor at that point, but the ending is one of the most important parts and it falls flat here.

I don't have a ton to say about the battles. They're barebones RPG Maker battles. There's not a lot to make them interesting, but there aren't so many that they become unbearably tedious. I did find they generally devolved into a loop of spamming heal until you have an opening to attack, then repeating the cycle a lot. There are elemental attacks, but how elements work was never really explained. I wish the attacks had explanation text; the game does appear to be set up for it.

While I didn't enjoy the slimes, at least they weren't random encounters. Trawling through random encounters would have driven me up the wall.

The game is incredibly sparse musically. The stock RPG Maker music on the title screen is not great, but at least it's something. Most of the game is silent. I would have taken more stock RPG Maker music over that.

I really wanted to like this one. I think there are some really good ideas in it, both in the narrative and in the gameplay. I just don't feel the game as submitted does a good job of exploring any of those ideas.

Submitted

I like the idea of exploring and find clue. it somehow makes me wonder what's happening, so i keep playing and finish the game.

the world is mostly static and the game is slient most of the time. for me, it feels blank. but after finishing the game, i feel maybe it's on purpose? i still feel adding music will improve the gaming experience. i feel fine wandering around finding clue. it gives a joy when i figure things out. but the turn base battle part is not my cup of tea (that's also why i don't like JRPG). i can see the battle is doable because i just need to keep healing and converting, but it makes the battle repeative.

overall, i like the game

Submitted

I really like the concept of a Magical Girl detective! Exploring and finding clues was neat, though I wish there was less finding switches, and more finding clues. As an RPG, it was solid, but not terribly out of the ordinary.

The maps were pretty huge, and thing that might help is a little more visual aid to figure out what you can interact with and where you can go. Though with enough searching, I did manage to do ok.

Audio wise, I really wish there was music throughout the game. It felt pretty empty and lonely during the exploration segments, and the silence didn't help.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or not, but when I got the red orb lit, it stayed unlit at the hospital.

Overall, great work! There's a lot of content here for a jam game, and I imagine there's even more considering I got stuck. (Shortly after the "evil girl" fight)

Submitted

I beat all the slimes in the sewer, and then couldn't figure out what to do next. Decent enough game. Some of the maps were a bit sprawling.

Submitted

Very nice game. Although it did take me too long to figure what the blue switch actually unlocks, I did find the game a lot of fun. 

The overworld without music is a bit empty and the transition between the last two enemies was quite abrupt in my opinion.

But overall good game.