Mage Elite
By Teemu Salminen
““I see. I must gather my resolve… so that I won’t be a burden to you.”
You spent some more time with Will at the casino after that. It felt like his attitude toward you had improved a lot.”
I was far too young to properly understand the themes behind Starship Troopers when I originally read and saw it. It is really strange for a piece of entertainment to stay both entertaining and to change from a popcorn flick to a slightly shocking riff on fascism, all the while never changing.
General Story:
After being accepted into an elite mage academy, you find yourself pitted against world-devouring zeno aliens and leading a small group of peers in a world-defining conflict.
In a world where mages defend the world against alien creatures, can you keep them from spreading? Contain them? Is this a losing battle?
Take a pinch of X-COM, a dash of Pacific Rim, and a dollop of Starship troopers… baby, you got a stew going. Well, sort of. This is a short title that reads like a table-top roleplaying session narrative with time management elements. Dialogue is pretty much one-liners and you are a silent protagonist for the most part. Most of your dialogue is summarized, and this all culminates in a title that felt pretty impersonal, especially in the epilogue where team statuses are copy-pasted.
Format and Typos:
The title itself is pretty typo-light. I had a hard time seeing anything that stood out. Format is in a very game-like time management set, and reads almost like an interactive fiction Persona. This means that a lot of the pages are short, and to the point. This can feel very halting, and makes the title seem fairly thin, which to be fair, it is only 40,000 words.
Game Mechanics and Stats:
Time management choices to raise relationship stats and opposed pair personalities. Choices will inform you of what stat raised and lowered, but for the most part it was somewhat difficult to understand which stat would go up or down without having the code open. There may have been too many stats to try and juggle for how small the title is. At some point you can play Blackjack, and have credits you earn… but I didn’t see any reason to do it. Maybe there was an achievement I glossed over?
Replayability:
You ‘might’ get two plays out of the title, if for no other reason than the major epilogue choice. No romances, but you can likely get two ‘loyalty’ statuses out of four during each run. It may be possible to optimize the relationships to the point of getting them all, but I couldn’t do it. Most major spells are restricted after a certain point, so you are casting what you’ve made yourself good at at the end of the title. This leads to just reading the outcomes of your early choices, for the most part.
Dislikes:
- Very impersonal. Reads like someone took a rough character backstory in a table-top RPG, and continued writing until the end of their imagined story.
- Halfway through the title, you stop making choices, and are basically restricted into choices locked by stat gains early on.
- Dialogue is pretty much non-existent.
Likes:
- Theme is well-tread, but is one I always like reading different takes on it.
- Clean and readable, definitely well organized for a management game.
- You can try it out for free.