Magna Carta review

To us Westerners, there’s a noticeable, if intangible, feel to the traditional straight-laced Korean RPG, a distinction of influence and character that separates it from its Japanese counterpart. It’s in the environment: the over-reliance on washed out pastoral landscapes, bland villages and sparse temples.

It’s in the people and plot: to the player, a familiar, yet ever so-slightly off-balance manga style of dress and facial features, and a subtle ideological difference that years of Square-Enix et al almost made comfortable. But most of all, it’s in the grind, that perpetual Korean RPG feeling of work as reward. Let’s explain.

Magna Carta is levelling up for the sake of levelling up. Paths out of town are corridors, linear roads to the next plot point in which there’s nothing to do but gain experience for little purpose than that’s how it’s done.

Battles may not be random, but if you run, you’re punished, forced into an inevitable encounter where the enemy strikes first. Better to increase your field of vision and walk slowly along, pressing the advantage in your favour, earning first-hit rights by sneaking up from behind before they notice; succumbing to the laborious toil of work.

Where it differs from, say, (out of a million other Japanese RPGs) Final Fantasy X’s ill-disguised monster tunnels is that the cosy entertainment of that game’s predictable mini SFX extravaganzas is negated by Magna Carta’s far more transparent reliance on limited, repetitive strategies without flair. Let’s explain.

Combo Combat

What at first seems like a potentially interesting semi-turn-based combat system soon reveals a lack of depth. Both physical and magic attacks are activated by inputting a rhythm action-lite combo – three presses on a variation of the X and Circle buttons – each style of attack getting consecutively more powerful as it’s used. One neat touch in all this is your Leadership skill, effectively a bonus that reduces time between turns when an enemy is defeated, it helps put a quick finish to fights that are resolutely going your way.

This is itself tied in with the concept of Chi: each area has a different environmental effect (your standard fire, water, lightning, etc) which dictates how powerful a style of attack will be or how often it can be used.

The idea that this will force you to develop intricate strategies based around each character’s style attributes is commendable, but let down by one problem: the game’s too easy.

Of the twenty or so hours we put into this for reviewing purposes, the Game Over screen appeared twice. Once was a rare boss, the other was a fight that the plot made sure was impossible to win. Levels creep up inexorably with no challenge as you monotonously go through the motions. A large pile of items are built up in the inventory, unused and unneeded. Fights are essentially the same one over and over again, with none of the distraction of fireworks that the great RPG magicians like to add in order to get us through such tedious encounters. The limited number of enemies and unchanging fighting mechanics for everyone reduces the fun to a grind, a dispiriting trudge to the next town.

Mute Button

And what you get in the next town is some of the most horrifically amateur voice-acting ever to come out of an Asian RPG since, well, probably the last Asian RPG. Localisation issues aside, it’s a lazy piece of storytelling in comparison to its epic intentions, especially in these latter days of the PS2’s life. The story is often reduced in stature, told through static text box conversations with an apparently random chance of being acted out in in-engine animated cut-scenes with those awful voices. Crashing into the desert in a flying transport, for instance, (what could be a short but thrilling incident) is relayed through a short line of text communication on the map screen. That FMV that showed promise in the intro is few and far, far between.

This minimalist approach is mirrored in the complete lack of interaction. Masked behind busywork, the game forces you to shuffle back and forth between locations just to trigger the next conversation. It’s a cruel extension of game time, not one to bolster the excitement in claims of 40-60 hours of play, especially in the company of Magna Carta’s stereotyped characters.

Main character Callintz walks around wearing a one-piece that exposes his upper thighs, an effeminate hero stringing along an equally gender-mixed cast of buff males and precariously-breasted females. Arguably, the dress code is the highlight of a game that desperately needs some kind of distinguishing string to its bow, for otherwise it’s as bland and culturally distant as clichéd manga template design can be.

But when the repetitive design is at its clearest, the question remains of whether the actual story is enough to push aside such worries. And when you’re slowly progressing through a cavalcade of brooding heroes, mystical love interests with hidden pasts, comical sidekicks and a lot of bad guy posturing in a quest for magical items in the midst of war, your tolerance for plumbing the depths of trite fantasy with little innovation or grand design may well answer that.