Otaku-Complex.com – Your Portal to Japan!

Been kind of busy with school, but finally managed to push myself to going forward. So~ after spending about 14 hours on the game with a little more than 25% of the quests done (assuming I haven’t missed any side quests), I’ll do a mini-review of the game. The game itself is two disc, so I’m nowhere near completion I think, but I’ll give a brief rundown.
Magna Carta 2, made by SoftMax and published by Banpresto (Namco-Bandai) with art done by Hyung-tae Kim (who has a very distinct art style) is the latest game of the Magna Carta series. The relationship between the first game(s) and second game are not exactly connected from what I can tell. Only history if anything. One can easily go into the game without playing the first game (I’ve only played a few minutes of the first game). So, how well is the game itself…

Graphics: Running on the Unreal engine gives it a fairly nice look, but the draw-distance is not amazing, so you’ll just get some bloom/HDR here and there with some fairly good animation. Dialog cuts are fairly bland considering they follow the normal JRPG style of having the two characters with the dialog on the bottom. As a JRPG, graphically it is fine. It is definitely not something that is going to be eye-candy throughout (*cough*Final Fantasy*cough*), but it’ll do.

Gameplay: The gameplay is what you’d expect it to be. It feels somewhat like Final Fantasy XII with the real-time battle system with the ability to change leaders (characters you control) and swapping of people in your party instantly. The game, however, does implement a chain system and an over-heat system which restricts on how much you can repeatedly mash A and forces you to switch leaders to chain combos. It also gives each character two different fighting/weapon styles. Depending on which style you go with (which is judged by the weapon you have equipped) will judge what skills you will have along with stat-boosts and number of attacks you can chain. Game is fairly straight-forward with very little areas to be explore. Basic JRPG elements such as dead ends in roads usually leads to a chest with items. Each town you go to has a tools (potions and other things) seller along with kamond (used to enhance your weapons) dealer and usually a weapons dealer.

Audio: First off, lets start with music. The music is…well…sub-par. It does the job, but nothing to memorable. Well compositions, but just feels like its missing something. The sound effects are also fairly generic from what I can tell. Nothing to really get your adrenaline flowing or get you hyped (then again I have yet to get any extremely devastating skills). The English dub (since there is no dual-audio option…) is…actually okay…It feels very bland and fake at times, but the fact that they have some fairly decent voices (Steven Blum – English Spike Spiegel) is quite nice. I would of loved to have a Japanese language option though. It doesn’t effect anything, but its a nice add-on to have, especially since it seems standard now for most JRPGs.

Overall, the game itself is pretty good. It takes awhile before the story starts to pick up and I believe the execution could of been done better, but as of now, its nothing horrid. I guess my biggest complaint is the lack of dual-audio and also the fact that the opening is just some other song that’s not even a non-vocal version of the original Japanese OP. The game is also fairly short from what I can tell compared to a lot of other JRPGs and probably lacks replay value. The good news is, since we’re in the world of DLCs, we will hopefully get some extras. As of launch, there has already been a DLC for Magna Carta 2 which adds new achievements, weapons for each character, and comical cutscenes which can be accessed in the extras feature of the game. The DLC goes for 420msp, which is apparently cheaper than the Japanese version, which has the cutscenes and stuff separated into multiple packs. Probably not the greatest game of this season, but its definitely worth checking out if you’re into JRPGs.

Videos:
US Intro Cutscene (first cutscene of game)

Japanese Intro Cutscene

US OP

Japanese OP

Korean OP

Ougi (Special) demonstration

Renkei Ougi (Link-Special) demonstration