Tuesday, January 2, 2018

The Perfect Score: Magicka


In this series I detail the few series I have given a 5/5 too and why.

What is it?
A gauntlet-styled video game set in a parody of fantasy worlds, where nothing, not even death, is very serious, and where all the forces of nature and the multiverse are created by a race known as the Wizards, a well-meaning destructive rainbow-robed race known for their ability to wield magic.

Why do I love it?
Magicka has a lot of things to love. It is a very funny game, both in terms of it’s writing and just the situation humor you get from the crazy magic system. It is a game with a really innovative combat system and who allows you a great many magical options to explore. It defies standard video game logic and gives you all the magic combinations at the beginning, you don’t have to “unlock” elements or anything. You have no mana, no limiter to how many spells you can cast but the speed you can press buttons. And it feels absolutely amazing.

I can honestly not explain how good this game feels to play, I feel like a manic while playing cause I just want to burst out yelling or singing, completely out of character for me, because it just feels so good. And this becomes especially apparent at high levels of skill.

When you get a feel for the 8 elements in the game well enough, you stop rationally thinking about the magic and you just briefly “become” them. It is difficult to explain but you stop thinking of yourself as a player or even a wizard, but you just think as a pure force of nature, spewing out elements in perfect response to the environment.

Magicka both thematically and in gameplay encourages exploration, intuition and the joy of discovery as you adventure yourself into a variety of situations and just allows the magic to flow through you.

I just need to reiterate. It’s SOO unbelievably fun.

5/5 Moments:
Magicka’s moments emerge more so from gameplay then from pre-scripted events, emerging as naturalistic interactions between environment and spells so there isn’t so much definite moments here but a few that come to mind
*Grimnir explaining himself before the fight fight with him
*First fight with Grimnir
*Battle with Cthulhu and Dagon at the end of “The Stars are Left”
*Battle with Death
*Carving your way through the warzone in chapter 5

Favorite Moment:
In the 9th Element, the prologue novel, Grimnir the Dark Lord is just another Magicka Wizard, albeit a highly talented one, clearly the best of his party and notably ambitious. Vlad the mentor from the game is part of his group. Near the end Grimnir usurps the villain’s power and plans to use it in conjunction with a celestial alignment that could allow him to warp the entire multiverse to his will, which would make it totally serious and drained of all the chaos and confusion and…fun and exploration…


Vlad, originally apathetic to most things, sees this and without losing his nature as a comedic character in a world where nothing is serious understands this as something important and fights Grimnir in an epic battle, managing to hold him off long enough that the alignment runs out and the multiverse is saved.

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