This review was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Its format does not match our own but we support its content.

I’m sure you all remember Pokémon, the simple monster-catching game that enabled players to catch, train, and battle with their very own bundles of monster-cuteness. Taito’s Lost Magic follows a similar approach: you catch and train your own monsters, fresh off the field, and then use those monsters to assemble a miniature army and crush your corrupt human opponents. Unlike Pokémon, however, the focus is primarily on the main character’s magical abilities, and Taito took advantage of that feature as well as the Nintendo DS’s touch-screen to implement an interesting, real-time battle scheme that allows players to draw their magical attacks while the pet monsters ravage the field. It’s an intriguing concept that, with a bit of tweaking, could easily have overshadowed the game’s faults – with tweaking. You know where this one’s going.

Lost Magic introduces players to a world crafted by the Divine Creator, a mysterious being that, after forging the planet and all its living things (minus the monsters), then gifted the human species with magical, elemental, powerful wands. The humans really took to the godly powers bestowed upon the wand bearers, called sages, and eventually the really ambitious ones used their wands to birth monsters from their hatred and then send those monsters out against other humans. But then one day, all the remaining sages got together and decided to lock the monsters up and, most importantly, protect the divine wands from their fellow (easily turned evil) human beings.

Players are cast as Isaac, a boy who’s lost his mother and his father to the Diva of the Twilight, the newest sage to have completely gone bonkers and use her wand for sinister purposes; the Diva has let the monsters out to play while she seeks and assimilates all the other sages into her wicked plot to (get ready for this): destroy the world. But do not abandon hope, for Isaac has obtained one of the few wands to slip through the Diva’s grasp and is dead set on mastering magic and heading... straight for the Diva. Ideally Isaac is preparing to defeat her, but if he loses – and once you see this boy, you being to realize that he actually might – then he’ll be delivering the ever-powerful Wand of Light right into the hands of the most evil person on earth. It’s not an incredibly engaging story, or a surprising one, but for an RPG variant, it’ll do.

The majority of Lost Magic’s plot is delivered via small cutscenes that are triggered whenever Isaac heads to a blue marker indicating the next destination. The world map consists of slots for each location, and you can only travel from one connected spot to the next (in other words, you have to go through several areas before you can reach the next quest spot). With the blue marker in sight, Isaac and his monsters will engage a character, converse for awhile, pick up a rune (spell), and head out to the next marker, and that’s usually all there is to the story: meet a mage, defeat the mage, get a rune, and move on to find Isaac’s father, who the boy imagines is still alive somehow – alive, and possibly controlled by the Diva.

Of course, to acquire all those powers to locate daddy and defeat the Diva, it’s a given that Isaac will first have to pummel “turned” mages and other miscellaneous bad guys who crave a world of anarchy and deception. As Lost Magic is a real-time strategy RPG, the most unique feature of its battle system involves spell casting; to cast spells, players hold down the left shoulder button to bring up the rune screen, which looks like a geometry problem from hell drawn in ugly brown paint. You then use the stylus to draw runes – learned magical symbols, like half triangles, half circles, and the like – to create and cast magic. While you’re drawing, however, your monsters are rumbling with the evil monsters on the field, and it’s entirely possible that those bad monsters can run into a vulnerable, casting Isaac, which heightens the intensity a bit. Once you’ve drawn the spell and selected a target, Isaac’s wand does the rest, shooting off fire balls, icicles, and acidic puffs of smoke at your will. The system is rather dull at the start, as you’ve only got a few spells (fire, ice, and heal), but eventually you learn how to combine runes to create new (and much cooler) magical attacks.

But Isaac’s wonting magical talents aren’t sufficient to seize control back from the Diva of the Twilight, as while he’s casting (and you’re drawing), any monster within five feet will rip him a new one. Enter the monster pack, your personal army of magical creatures that literally keep you alive so you can cast spells. Monster types are assembled into groups and require points in order to be equipped (the stronger the monster, the more points it’ll cost you to bring its group out on the field). Your task is to control those monsters so you can quickly kill opponents, as each mission is timed (even the random battles are restricted to five minutes). Each monster type has its own stats (HP, attack power, etc.,) and element (water, fire – you get the idea), which are combined to determine how much damage it can do (and take from) the baddies. Missions tend to come in three varieties (defeat all monsters, protect stupid townspeople, and slaughter the heathens controlling the evil monsters) and, after completion, grant experience points to Isaac and his monstrous army. Isaac and his monsters eventually level up, growing in HP and attack power.

The real strategy in Lost Magic is also three-fold: you’ve got to play your monsters to their strengths while avoiding their weaknesses (this usually means keeping the monsters unaligned to red-hot fire out of the molten lava); split the group into smaller packs to cover a map in time; and utilize magic to alter the environment as well as heal your monsters and attack your foes. That doesn’t sound like much, but when you toss in the small size of the viewing screen, the fact that everything’s done in real-time (including casting!) and that while you’re moving the screen around to glimpse the next area, Isaac and his monsters are left to their (utterly horrible) AI, then you’ve got a lot of action going on at once, and I haven’t even mentioned that you’ve got to baby-sit your monsters that are beating on a creature you’re trying to catch for your collection in order to call off the dogs so you can cast the trap spell. There are also mana crystals (devices holding magical power that can be turned to either side during the fight) and monster portals, which can only be temporarily sealed by sticking one of your own creatures on top of it.

As a handheld title, Lost Magic has got as much going on for its graphical presentation as it can afford to. Isaac and the various monsters are detailed enough for sprites (even if a ton of them are really the same monster type cast into a different color palette to represent a new element, which I really hate), but you’ve got a camera that’s panned back so the player can see the field, which makes it difficult for the game to show off every strand of hair on Isaac’s blonde head as well as keep you alive. You get far more detail in character storyboard cut-outs (the little anime-styled graphical representations of characters, the kind you find in a dozen RPGs a year), which feature the different character moods (happy Isaac, mad Isaac, and so on) as well as some flashy spell effects, which are impressive on the DS. The audio is decent and spills out lengthy RPG-ish tunes (short, looped, whimsical background music that, while not memorable, successfully conveys the mood), but very rarely any voices (although I’ve found a few creepy “hums” here and there).

For those who relish the thought of battling other monsters online (monsters with somewhat intelligent owners), you’ll definitely enjoy the game’s online mode, which actually includes people playing the game (I only had to wait a minute or two to find an opponent). Lag is a severe problem, though, occurring every two-three seconds, but at least it’s affecting your opponent as well as yourself. Right?

Lost Magic boasts more faults than entertaining hours of gameplay, so let’s get started. The plot is about as extremely unsurprising – and even boring – and anti-climatic as it can get, with stereotypical characters (some of which look pulled from almost any anime you could name), disinteresting (and expected) twists, and tedious dialogue. What’s worse is that the cutscenes and battles are squished back to back at each marker, so every time you fail a quest battle, you’re rewarded by being forced to sit through the same cutscene all over again, and after the third time you’re tired of mashing the buttons to speed up the conversation. This annoying problem could be solved by allowing us a chance to save before the battle starts and after the cutscene. It’s also cheap to force me to move from one spot to the next just to trigger a cutscene that carries a continuation of the conversation Isaac just had five seconds ago. Just play all the cutscenes in one spot rather than make me move all over the place, as it does nothing but add time to the clock.

I mentioned earlier that Lost Magic features a real-time battle system, so that while you’re casting the monsters continue beating each other up, and – on occasion – this includes you. This wouldn’t be so problematic if Isaac could take more than two-three hits from the smallest of creatures, but instead Taito opted for the extremely powerful, albeit stereotypical, mage who got tired of lugging his armor around the world and finally mailed it back home. As a consequence, Isaac tends to go down fast, which can be incredibly frustrating.

The horrible AI doesn’t improve matters, either, as monsters (and Isaac... the “intelligent” human) can’t even smoothly turn corners; if you tap a direction that’s not directly in their line of sight, they try to walk through walls/trees or fly over giant holes in the ground. This gets frustrating when Isaac is being beaten to death and the cavalry is stuck around the corner because it continues to walk into the environment instead of throughout it. And it gets worse. In some levels you’ve got to protect villagers – villagers who walk back and forth in the same pattern, villagers who don’t run away when they’re being attacked by flesh-eating dragons, villagers who will walk into walls of fired placed there by you to protect them from opposing monsters, and ultimately, villagers who go down even faster than Isaac.

Having timed levels does apply some healthy pressure on the gamer, but unfortunately this only works when you’ve given her enough time to complete the mission objective/s. Five minutes is usually enough for the random battles, but if you can’t handle the other timed missions, then you’ve got to spend an hour or so forcing random battles to level up or catch stronger monsters (random fights take awhile to activate, too, so you can go back and forth between spots several times without running into enemies). This also becomes a problem when you’ve got monsters that can’t turn corners, crystals being turned against you, and more baddies popping out of portals with each passing minute.

Another issue area concerns the tiny view you’re given of the map. It’s true that you also get a miniature map so you know where the opponents are, but if you’ve got monsters working away from Isaac and you want to check on them, you’ve got to leave the action on the main (Isaac’s) screen and zoom around, in real-time, to find and order monsters you’ve split from the primary group. As an aside, even if you’ve got monsters traveling together, things can get difficult, as it’s very hard to pick out Isaac from the fray and move him around the battling monsters; ideally you can just tap him and tap a destination spot, but if you can’t see him then the best you can do is move Isaac along with several fighting monsters, leaving him open to attack (usually the monsters you move with him just stand there because you’ve ordered them to move away from the fight).

Lost Magic is a real-time strategy RPG that’s got some things going for it: it has a functional plot, a Pokémon-like “catch and train em’ all” motivation, and neat spells you draw on the touch-screen, not to mention a huge variety of said spells. It’s also got some downright wicked (and I mean wicked as in bad) AI, a very vulnerable main character, a plot that’s even more boring than it is functional, annoying cutscenes, and a constraining map navigational scheme that, when combined with the timed mission feature and repeated viewing of those cutscenes, can all get very annoying, fast. If you like the idea of controlling monsters and drawing spells, give Lost Magic a try. If you need a more engrossing storyline, though, or get easily aggravated by the “little” things that keep you from virtual victory, pass it up. 

Fun when everything works; frustrating when it doesn’t. Drawing spells is a nice feature.

They’re adequate, but far from special. Good spell effects, though, and detailed environs.

Not impressive at all, but functional without being too annoying. Again, spell effects are good

When everything comes together, I have enough time, and the AI behaves.

It’s doubtful that you’ll complete the game, much less go back.