I played this game a lot in the arcade and enjoyed it quite a bit, despite it being pretty mindless.
BaD #11: Magic Sword
|
 On 02/15/2018 at 11:55 PM by daftman See More From This User » |
In some ways Magic Sword seems like a continuation of the ideas in Black Tiger (which we established earlier is ultimately trash), albeit streamlined for more fun. Magic Sword is a sword and sorcery fantasy adventure that sees your heroes ascending an eldritch tower to destroy the Black Orb, the ultimate evil artifact which will allow the dark lord Drokmar to rule the world. That boils down to you beating the crap out of everything, naturally.
Magic Sword is interesting for a couple reasons. While the game supports 2 simultaneous players (for those lucky enough to be able to do it), each player can get a helper character that tags along. The floors of the tower (51 in all) are littered with treasure chests, some of which contain weapons, armor, or power ups, and some of which contain keys to unlock the myriad doors you'll come across. While some doors and chests have bad guys or traps inside, most of the doors hide a helper character—wizards, giants, lizard men, ninjas, knights, etc. These helpers have unique attacks and can level up as you use them, but that system is never really explained and I'm not sure how it works. My favorite helper was the ninja that threw a spread shot of shuriken; the wizard with homing orbs was pretty good too. The knight, however, supposedly has the strongest attack.
Even though the floors of the tower can vary wildly, the game manages to feel cohesive. The floors tend to be pretty short, too, so you always feel like you're making progress. You are going to fight a lot of bad guys and while the game makes full use of pallet swaps, there are enough unique enemies that the game can keep throwing them at you in different combinations. The bosses are not terribly impressive, particularly the final one which just flies around the screen shooting at you, but by and large they are fair.
The music was a nice surprise in Magic Sword and it turns out it was composed by Manami Matsumae, most famous for scoring the original Mega Man.
Magic Sword was a pretty good game. Yes, it is ultimately after your quarters but you'll have a good time along the way.
Comments