Elemental Saga: The Awakening
Oh, Elemental Saga, how I wanted to love you.
It’s no secret if you’ve read any of my reviews that school stories and elemental magic are two things I just can’t get enough of. Mandar Deshmukh’s Elemental Saga: The Awakening should have been my own personal brand of catnip.
As the story starts, you’re beginning your first year at the college of your dreams. Whether you excelled in athletics, academics, or the arts in high school, you managed to distinguish yourself and secure a place. Now you’re making friends with your suitemates and struggling with your calculus homework. Attending a presentation at which a physics professor demonstrated his revolutionary new research seems like an interesting change of pace - until the demonstration is attacked, and something strange comes over you. You manifest a superpower you’ve never so much as dreamed you had - and before you can process what’s just happened, you’re knocked out by a hooded figure and wake up in a compound full of people with abilities like yours. You’re an Elemental, one of the powered beings who exist to protect humanity from the machinations of the evil Wraiths - and you’re about to be drawn into a war as old as time.
It’s a great premise, but the execution fails on almost every level. Deshmukh doesn’t seem to understand how families work (the PC’s mother stops speaking to them and feeding them to try to convince them to apply to her alma mater instead, and this is treated as eyeroll-worthy rather than unhinged and abusive), how college works (almost no one applies to just one school; art and theater aren’t “extracurriculars” if you’re majoring in them; you can’t disappear for weeks at a time and still pass your classes), how skill development works (manifesting your powers for the second time ever when your life in danger, then kicking your trainer’s butt with magic for the first time ever after weeks of practice does not constitute the student becoming the master), how organizations work (ancient leagues fighting existential battles don’t let untried newcomers, even extremely talented ones, into leadership, at least not without a much better reason than “huh, guess we might as well”). The prose is distractingly awkward at best, with moments of near-incomprehensibility. The coding is clumsy - I played as a woman, but other characters kept referring to me in the masculine, sometimes going back and forth on a single page.
Perhaps worst of all, I never had any reason to care about any of the characters, including my PC. The game ends with a cliffhanger in which a group of characters important to the PC are in mortal peril, and I didn’t care - I was just glad the game was finished. And considering that it’s been nine years since this game’s release with no word on the planned continuation of the saga in nearly again as long, that’s probably for the best.