By the grace of Godoka, Madoka Magica: The Battle Pentagram showed up at my doorstep on this wonderful Christmas Eve. As nobody else has made one yet, here are my impressions of the game.
For anyone worried about anime spoilers, you should probably steer clear from this thread.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The Battle Pentagram is a Vita game. The limited edition comes with an art book, soundtrack CD, Charlotte screen cleaner, DLC costumes for each of the five girls, and a Homura Voice World chat number that assumedly works like a telephone choose your own adventure story. Both the regular and limited editions come with Mami Voice World chat number.
The game opens with a very brief runthrough of the general Madoka timeline, ending with Homura unable to save Madoka after fighting Walpurgisnacht, and thus resetting to a new timeline. Now Homura aims to unite all five Puella Magi immediately, and ensure that all of them are alive to take on Walpurgisnacht at the end of the month.
Gameplay consists of two phases. Daytime, where you do regular teenager stuff to improve relationships between the five girls, and nighttime, where you take on Witches and their Familiars.
Daytime is almost like Persona 3/4 social link stuff. You're given a list of locations, and shown the faces of the people at those locations. Select that location, witness character interaction, and the characters present will gain relationship points towards one another. It's fun to see characters interact with other characters that never really had the chance to meet in the proper series. Unfortunately, the game doesn't allow you to take screenshots, so yay massive photographs.
Nighttime has you fight Familiars and occasionally Witches. When a Witch isn't present, the menu below usually gives you two difficulty choices/locations for where you want to battle. Higher difficulty = more experience points. The icon below represents a Witch dungeon.
Now onto the actual gameplay. Triangle is your melee attack, square is special attack, circle is dash, X is jump, L is lockon, R is combined with other buttons for various things, and select can recharge your MP (1 point) and revive you when you die (3 points iirc) at the cost of Soul Gem points. You can switch between your three current specials by using the DPad. All special attacks drain your MP, but it slowly regenerates and you can find pickups to restore it.
Excuse the quality on this pic, totally wasn't expecting Mami to instantly dash at me and smash my face in.
There are a few faults with the battle system. Each time you do a single melee attack button press, your character will attack twice. Button presses are also buffered. This means if you miss, you're pretty much committed to a single direction until the animation ends. There's also no knockback animation for getting hit or invincibility period. Only a few attacks actually cause you to fall over. So if you're careless, you may lose over half of your HP without realizing it. It also seems like the game may dip slightly subnative when action gets heavy. During one of Homura's gun attacks, she turns kind of pixelly mid-animation. I don't know if it's the gun effect that looks odd over her model, or if it's actually dipping, so I can't say for sure. But overall it keeps a steady framerate and doesn't bother me too much.
Familiar dungeons usually finish with a stronger-than-regular enemy that can summon more enemies. The Witches are the real boss enemies, and you do actually need some effort and strategy to beat them. When you defeat a Witch though, you get a Grief Seed that increases your Soul Gem points permanently by 1 on level up. You'll also gain relationship points with your partner, increasing compatibility between the two characters. Homura and Kyouko pictured below.
I'm only a couple of hours in so far, but as someone who's watched the series, the first two movies, and the third movie twice and loved the whole thing, I'm enjoying the hell out of this. If you like Madoka, you'll probably really enjoy this game as well. If you're not a fan or familiar with the series, this probably isn't going to win you over. In that case, the gameplay probably isn't intuitive enough to really carry you through the game. It's very much for Madoka fans, to see so-and-so characters interact, the slice-of-lifey social link stuff, and the chance to use special attacks from the show, like having Homura stop time, shoot off a rocket, toss a time bomb, launch a truck out of nowhere, resume time, and seeing the enemy disintegrate into nothing. It's not perfect, but it's fun for what it is.
Anyone else import it or looking to import? What are your thoughts?
For anyone worried about anime spoilers, you should probably steer clear from this thread.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The Battle Pentagram is a Vita game. The limited edition comes with an art book, soundtrack CD, Charlotte screen cleaner, DLC costumes for each of the five girls, and a Homura Voice World chat number that assumedly works like a telephone choose your own adventure story. Both the regular and limited editions come with Mami Voice World chat number.
The game opens with a very brief runthrough of the general Madoka timeline, ending with Homura unable to save Madoka after fighting Walpurgisnacht, and thus resetting to a new timeline. Now Homura aims to unite all five Puella Magi immediately, and ensure that all of them are alive to take on Walpurgisnacht at the end of the month.
Gameplay consists of two phases. Daytime, where you do regular teenager stuff to improve relationships between the five girls, and nighttime, where you take on Witches and their Familiars.
Daytime is almost like Persona 3/4 social link stuff. You're given a list of locations, and shown the faces of the people at those locations. Select that location, witness character interaction, and the characters present will gain relationship points towards one another. It's fun to see characters interact with other characters that never really had the chance to meet in the proper series. Unfortunately, the game doesn't allow you to take screenshots, so yay massive photographs.
Nighttime has you fight Familiars and occasionally Witches. When a Witch isn't present, the menu below usually gives you two difficulty choices/locations for where you want to battle. Higher difficulty = more experience points. The icon below represents a Witch dungeon.
Once you've chosen your destination, you can select which magical girl you want to use and a partner. Partners provide extra help, can revive you if you die, and if your relationship levels are high enough, you can use special team-up attacks.
Now onto the actual gameplay. Triangle is your melee attack, square is special attack, circle is dash, X is jump, L is lockon, R is combined with other buttons for various things, and select can recharge your MP (1 point) and revive you when you die (3 points iirc) at the cost of Soul Gem points. You can switch between your three current specials by using the DPad. All special attacks drain your MP, but it slowly regenerates and you can find pickups to restore it.
Excuse the quality on this pic, totally wasn't expecting Mami to instantly dash at me and smash my face in.
There are a few faults with the battle system. Each time you do a single melee attack button press, your character will attack twice. Button presses are also buffered. This means if you miss, you're pretty much committed to a single direction until the animation ends. There's also no knockback animation for getting hit or invincibility period. Only a few attacks actually cause you to fall over. So if you're careless, you may lose over half of your HP without realizing it. It also seems like the game may dip slightly subnative when action gets heavy. During one of Homura's gun attacks, she turns kind of pixelly mid-animation. I don't know if it's the gun effect that looks odd over her model, or if it's actually dipping, so I can't say for sure. But overall it keeps a steady framerate and doesn't bother me too much.
Familiar dungeons usually finish with a stronger-than-regular enemy that can summon more enemies. The Witches are the real boss enemies, and you do actually need some effort and strategy to beat them. When you defeat a Witch though, you get a Grief Seed that increases your Soul Gem points permanently by 1 on level up. You'll also gain relationship points with your partner, increasing compatibility between the two characters. Homura and Kyouko pictured below.
I'm only a couple of hours in so far, but as someone who's watched the series, the first two movies, and the third movie twice and loved the whole thing, I'm enjoying the hell out of this. If you like Madoka, you'll probably really enjoy this game as well. If you're not a fan or familiar with the series, this probably isn't going to win you over. In that case, the gameplay probably isn't intuitive enough to really carry you through the game. It's very much for Madoka fans, to see so-and-so characters interact, the slice-of-lifey social link stuff, and the chance to use special attacks from the show, like having Homura stop time, shoot off a rocket, toss a time bomb, launch a truck out of nowhere, resume time, and seeing the enemy disintegrate into nothing. It's not perfect, but it's fun for what it is.
Anyone else import it or looking to import? What are your thoughts?
