During the SNES era like many of you out there I discovered just how awesome RPGs, after playing Secret of Mana and Illusion of Time (Gaia for you lot in the USA), I decided I liked RPGs and I need more of them and then along came the N64. As I’m sure I’ve said before I’m a hardcore Nintendo fanboy, up until this year I’d owned nothing but Nintendo consoles. So I was gutted when Square Jumped ship to Sony, I can understand why they did it, but it really did not help me then when I watched from afar as people played their Wild Arms and Final Fantasy 7’s. So when I heard that there was a game of the RPG variety coming to the N64 I was excited and that game was Holy Magic Century.



So yeah the N64 unlike the Super Nintendo is not really a system known for its RPGs, it’s better known for its early Console FPS’s, Platformers and awesome Wrestling games. I think I could count all the RPGs that appeared on the system on one hand. When I first saw Holy Magic Century I was soo happy, finally I would have a game that would satisfy my RPG needs. I would be able to laugh at those fools playing their Wild Arms and FFVII’s and laugh, now the N64 would be a complete console. Shame it didn’t really work out like that. First things first when talking about Holy Magic Century, it’s not a great game, it’s a very average game at the end of the day. The storyline was ummm, I honestly can’t remember, so yeah not that great. I’m sure it was the usual lone warrior takes off to fight big evil thing and bring peace to the world. You play a young boy name Ayron (or if you lived in the US he had the awesome name of Brian) who can wield the forces of nature and is on a quest to save his father (yay for Wiki).



So yeah the storyline is barely there at all, think something more or less on the same level as the first Dragon Quest game and that’s kinda what you get. For any post 16bit era console RPGs the storyline is usually the driving factor of the game, so with that in mind how does one enjoy a RPG where the Storyline is really nothing to write home about. Well it helps if you have a really fun battle system. It’s kinda odd to explain so I’ll do my best. Battles are random, when you encounter an enemy you’ll be in the same spot you were before but now you will be surrounded by 2 octagons, the larger one will have both yourself and whatever monsters you’ve encountered. Then around you is a smaller one, you are free to move around in the smaller one until the end of you turn, this allows you to get into a better position to cast spells or move up close to be able to hit an enemy with your staff. You take your turn either cast a spell , attack with said staff use an item or try and escape. Come the enemies turn to attack you still have that little octagon around you and you have the option to try and dodge out of the way of one of their attacks. It was great in that you could get yourself in a position where the enemies could not hit you providing they had no long range missile attacks.



Pretty much all the magic in the game is area based, so if you can move out of the way you’ll be able to dodge the attack and suffer no damage. Also when you are casting your spells you can try and get yourself in a position to hit multiple enemies at once. Magic works off 4 elements which are shock horror Earth, Fire, Wind & Water (but no Heart sorry Ma-Ti). When you start you get 4 very basic spells, for Earth you get a large stone appear above whatever you’re targeting and comes crashing down on them. Fire gives you the always popular fireball attack, wind grants you the ability to shoot out a crescent moon shaped wind attack that also homes in on things and water gives you a Water Pillar. As you progress through the game you can level up your magic, either evenly distribute points into all the elements or just target one or 2. As you level up your magics you get access to bigger and better spells.



I tried to play the game by evenly levelling up all my magic, the main problem I seem to have encountered was that in the later stages on the game my magic was so god damn under powered it was better for me to just walk up to an enemy and whack them on the head with my staff. So I ended up in a situation where I was doing hardly any damage and it would just drag battles on and on and on and on and on. The whole pace of the game was rather slow truth be told, the battles took awhile and being random there was no way to avoid them. The storyline was no real motivation to move forward, and a lot of the game was just spent walking from one area to the next battling monsters here and there, it was just one massive grind. As I said the combat was fun and the game looked and sounded nice, I remember being really happy that I had finally finished it, I honestly can’t remember anything of the ending, there was some dude, I killed him everyone was happy.



It’s sad that Holy Magic Century did not live up to its potential. I mean it’s not a bad game by any means. It’s an Average game and it’s a shame they could not have fleshed out the story and made the whole experience a lot more engrossing. The game has a nice little battle system, it looks good, sounds good and plays well. But the world just feels empty and sterile. All it needed to lift it from an Average game to a good game was a reason to play the game. Holy Magic Century harkens back to the early days of console RPGs, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, if you go into the game expecting a story on those lines you’ll be fine. I played through this game and I enjoyed it, I don’t know if it was that I was that desperate for an RPG on the N64. I guess Holy Magic is lucky that the N64 was soo starved of RPGs, had we had Final Fantasy or the like I would not have looked at it at all. I’m sure many people looked over this and I don’t blame them, it’s not a life changing game and there are certainly better games on the N64, but as I said I liked it and who knows you may too.



Also credit to Gamefaqs.com for these awesome screenshots, heaps better then the crap IGN had up. Also fingures crossed new Handheld hotel sooner or later.