What familiar do you want? Was there an omen when you were born? What's your relationship to your family like? And, obviously, what stats do you have? It's the Fallout of Princess Maker games with masses of ways for you to define your character, which continues into the game. Even before you start, you go through page after page of options to select. Hell, you don't even know what skills you can have - even quite common skills - until you uncover them during play. Dozens upon dozens of skills, spells, abilities, Phemes (the atomic elements which spells are made) and items are gathered during play. You don't really get a sense of how impressive the fact that all these people have exactly the same abilities as you amass until you realise exactly how details you have. So these people will be the ones you'll end up crafting an experience across the whole games.
#Academagia the making of mages walkthrough series#
And I have to assume they're actually individually crafted rather than generated - their bios certainly seem have the touch of a human hand - because the game is the the first of a series of five, each one taking in one of the years at the school. Rather than the pupils being abstract events, the whole of your year are individual characters, each of whom do their own daily routine, each with their own priorities and abilities, each who'll grow and show their personality. This starts to lean towards some of the area where the game's really pushing it. Disasters tend to be social disasters as much as anything, like calling your teacher "Dad" or something. Getting bullied by your class-mates can stress you out to the point of being bed-ridden, cause mad moods with awkward stat penalties and similar. Which isn't to say things can't go wrong. There's relatively little of the Princess Maker trope of selecting a day's activity which increases one stat while decreasing another - which suits me fine, as it was one of the least interesting things in the genre. Anyway, the results of your decisions feed back and influence your statistics and abilities, which leave you in a slightly better position to take on the next day's challenges.Īnd in Academagia, you really do generally end off in a better state. And you can always have actually chosen to go on one of the game's adventures. There will be the chance of a random event, which you'll get choices to respond to - or perhaps even a magical duel or something more fancy. So, for example, you can go to your lessons in the morning and afternoon, and then - say - explore the campus in the evening. On each day, you get to choose three slots. As in, you have a calender for your character. So, the core mechanics are very much standard to the life-sim. well, playing half way through the game's year reveals that it's not just complicated. Perhaps its because it's built by a multi-national team with lots of contractors (50 people doing the game's writing, apparently) which reached for the more famous inspiration.Īnd the result is. Well, perhaps that was the original inspiration, but there's very little which feels as creepy and otherworldly as Le Guin and lots that screams Rowling, from the general tone, to the graphical style to details like the magical sport you can concentrate in. And, frankly, a scarily deep Princess Maker with Wizards.Īlmost adorably, the developers deny that the inspiration was Harry Potter, instead talking about the off-action scenes of Wizard of Earthsea. Think Princess Maker with Wizards of Kudos with cantrips. Academagia is, basically, a complicated Life-Simulator set at a Hogwarts style School. Since then, we've had a steady string of people asking what we made of it, so I manned up, read the tutorials and headed back to Mage College.
I had a look at it, bounced off the surface and made a note to return to it, ideally when a demo was out. We were sent a copy of Academagia pre-release, and it was rapidly filed in RPS' "Kieron's Sort Of Thing" dumper.
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