Might and Magic DS - A Pleasant Surprise

[Nickoten]

Now, I'd like to first apologize to anyone who came in here thinking I was going to talk about a game remotely like the Might and Magic they'd played on the PC, or maybe even Heroes of Might and Magic. This game is Might and Magic in name only, and even throws in some generic anime art to further piss you off. However, this game is actually a quality piece of software.

Developed by Capybara games, of "Critter Crunch" fame, Might and Magic is essentially a new form of Puzzle Quest with a more strategic puzzle game at its core. Rather than literally playing a puzzle to simulate individual combat between two people, your puzzle is now made of people - your pieces are units in an army. Your playing field is split into the bottom screen, which houses your troop, and the top where your enemy stands. On your turn, you have three "moves" you may take, where you can either delete members of your army from the column in which they've been randomly placed (Moving everything below it up), switch the bottom-most unit from one column to the bottom of another, or call more units depending on how many are already on your screen. Every hero also has a special ability which charges like a super meter in fighting games (Giving and taking hits) that costs nothing to use.

Your screen:



So why is everything a different color? Well, when you match three like-colored units in a column, they begin charging an attack. Once this attack is released, they stampede up their column into the enemy's screen, where they have to fight through any existing enemy defense on that particular column until they make it to the top of the top screen, where they'll attack the enemy's HP directly, Magic the Gathering-style.

To protect yourself against attacks, you can either just throw units onto a column (Where they can only absorb about 1 HP's worth of damage), you can set up an attack in that column (Where the unit's attack power becomes defense, this is a LOT better), or you can set up a wall. A wall, you see, is what happens when you match three (Or more, going with four or five lengthens the wall's width) units of similar colors. You can keep making more walls and they'll combine with each other and become stronger, essentially giving you a choice between a strong defense on one column that will eventually become offense, or a wide defense that will stay for as long as it's needed and even recover itself a little every turn.

And that's the gist of combat. Delivering the fights to you is a fairly generic fantasy war story that allows you to gain secret units, equip artifacts that give you special attributes in battle (One lets you come back from the dead with a little HP, for example), and even take control of whole other sets of armies, including ones you might have fought in previous chapters:



Each chapter gives you a new protagonist and a new set of units to fight with (All with their own unique characteristics), so there's plenty of variety and strategy since you don't get to use all of them at once. And while I haven't finished it, I've been told the campaign can last as long as 19 hours depending on what side content you want to do. And of course there's multiplayer, which I haven't really touched yet.

So if you enjoy Puzzle Quest, strategy RPGs, or even just plain puzzle games, I really don't think you can go wrong with Might and Magic. Give it a try, I think you'll be pleased.

[Void]

Looks like a pretty solid game. I'm going to pick it up after Christmas.

[Nickoten]

I didn't stress enough in that first post how much of a difference the charge times make. In Puzzle Quest it seemed like the CPU always knew what new pieces were going to appear and based their moves around that to make some really unlikely combos. Here, you always have a chance to react to every single attack, which I really appreciate.

Only real complaint about the battle system itself is that it doesn't start you both off with the same "puzzle," i.e. troop arrangement. It really feels like that starting formation affects too much of the battle to be randomized, such that I'd restart sometimes and go from a crushing defeat to a landslide victory. Don't let that turn you off, though, it's still a good game.