Academagia Review

Academagia: The Making of Mages is a role playing video game that takes place at a magic academy in Mineta. You choose your character’s starting stats and background, which depending on how you want to play can vary greatly. You arrive as a First Year student at the Academy of Magic where you’ll attend class, learn magic, make friends (and enemies), train a familiar and embark on adventures and explore your new surroundings.

Features:

• Interact with over 80 Students
• Maneuver through more than 800 possible Random Events
• Set out upon any of over 100 Adventures
• Explore hundreds of Skills
• Cast Spells from the five Pillars of Magic, or learn the Forbidden Arts
• Add new effects to existing Spells as you master the vocabulary of Magic
• Discover and visit mysterious castles, ruins, shops and secret hide-outs
• Teach, train and adventure with a Familiar from one of dozens of species
• Enjoy nearly endless replayability and scope


My Thoughts
This is a video game that is text based. There are some beautiful images but it is not an animated style of video game most are probably used to these days. This is more reminiscent of a video game from the 80s with a Harry Potter style magic academy. This helps with the low game size and equally low system settings. Also allows it to load extremely fast and wasn’t ever laggy for me at all.

The character creation is quite limited. The background offers many choices, but doesn’t allow you to pick very many of those choices, probably so your character isn’t too advanced to start with.

The tutorial comes in the form of a letter left on your bed from the student who used to inhabit your bedroom. Funny and explains the basics in the game rather well.

I enjoyed playing the game and advancing my character in the studies I chose. However, it gets very repetitive. Attending class, studying, training, etc. becomes a bit dull. After I finally completed my first year at the Academy of Magic, I was sad and annoyed to see that not much of anything exciting happened and the credits rolled concluding The End of the game. I wanted to go on to the next years after I spent so much time learning the skills!

Overall, it was fun while I played and I did enjoy the storyline (which seems to be a lost art among many games these days). However, how it ends and the repetitiveness of finishing even the one year makes me not really want to play it again. It is fun enough to give it a go for the first time around.

I hope you enjoyed my Academagia review. I have more video game reviews coming soon!






* Thank you to the publisher of Academagia, Black Chicken Studios and Gamers Gate for providing me a digital copy of this game and allowing me to review it.