However, as you can see from the title, this is NOT an Obscusion B-Side review, so that means that this is related to anime and/or manga! Yes, I am serious!!
In late 1998 Crystal Dynamics & Eidos Interactive released The Unholy War for the PlayStation, a game by Toys for Bob that fused together a turn-based strategy game with a 3D arena fighter; I remember playing a demo for it back in the day, and it was instantly memorable. According to an interview with Matt Barton in 2011, Reiche & Ford regretted not being able to include a proper "Story Mode", so the pair thought this concept would make for a perfect SD Gundam game, as they were fans of the more traditional turned-based strategy RPGs that Banpresto released in Japan at the time. With help from Crystal Dynamics the pair were able to get into contact with Bandai, which had published the altered Japanese version of Toys for Bob's Pandemonium! (titled Magical Hoppers) & actually loved what it had seen of The Unholy War, but felt that it had an "even bigger" license to go with the concept. Reiche & Ford decided to make a deal before knowing what property they'd be working with, so imagine their surprise when they started getting faxes from Bandai... only to see production sketches of magical girls from the 60s & 70s. Yep, Toys for Bob accidentally signed on to produce a combat-focused strategy game/3D arena fighter starring a bunch of Toei Animation's old magical girl anime! The end result is early 1999's Majokko Daisakusen/Operation Magical Girl -Little witching mischiefs-, and since The Unholy War never saw a Japanese release this was effectively that region's equivalent.
Needless to say, & by their own admission, this was weird for Reiche & Ford. In that same interview the two fully admitted that no one at Toys for Bob could read or speak Japanese, while no one at Bandai could read or speak English, so while the initial development was easy enough (thanks to well drawn level layouts) things became complicated as debugging started becoming more & more complex as they neared the end of development, and the two sides could only communicate at the time via fax; e-mail did exist but still wasn't quite as ubiquitous yet. They were able to get some help from Eriko Johnson, the Japan-born wife of Greg Johnson (co-creator of ToeJam & Earl, who also helped work on Star Control II), but eventually Toys for Bob felt that the simplest thing was to just unplug the fax machine, call the game as finished as it could possibly be, & let Bandai release it only in Japan; by Reiche & Ford's admission, at this point they were working on the most obtuse bugs that most players would never encounter. "Best" of all, Toys for Bob didn't even get credited for developing the game, as the end credits simply list Crystal Dynamics for "Programming" (to be fair, CD was technically the owner of Toys for Bob at the time), while the rest of the credits seem to only be for the Toei-produced opening & ending animation, as well as the voice cast. Today, Majokko Daisakusen is generally known only as "That weird PS1 game about vintage magical girl anime made by the guys who made Star Control & Skylanders", but very few actually go over the game itself, even 25 years later. Is it any good, & can it act as a spiritual precursor to 2014's Super Heroine Chronicle, which took a similar-ish idea but played more like Super Robot Wars? Let's find out.
Not taken from the OP sequence in the game itself, but it's a literal frame from said sequence. |
"Daimajuu/Great Demon Beasts", lead by the evil witch Zarlem, have revived in the world of fairies, and the populace are unable to put a stop to them on their own. Seeking help, a young fairy named Leerio sends out an SOS to anyone who can use magic, or at least have access to a magical source like Mana, to come to their world & help put a stop to Zarlem's invasion. Answering the call are seven magical girls, plus some of their respective friends, who received the SOS in their dreams & will all come together to help save Leerio's world from the evil monsters roaming the land.
Being a crossover title, let's first go over what magical girl anime are actually featured in Majokko Daisakusen. In chronological order we have Sally the Witch from 1966 (based on the manga by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, & arguably the first magical girl anime), Himitsu no Akko-chan from 1969 (based on the manga by Fujio Akatsuka, & arguably the first magical girl manga), Chappy the Witch from 1972, Cutie Honey from 1973 (created by Go Nagai), Majokko Megu-chan from 1974, Lun Lun the Flower Girl from 1979, & Magical Girl Lalabel from 1980. It should be noted that all of these anime are entries in what's known as the Toei Majokko/Magical Girl Series, which came about due to the smash success of American sitcom Bewtiched over in Japan (where it was called Oku-sama wa Majo/My Wife's a Witch) & originally ran weekly from 1966 to 1975 on NET TV across seven entries, starting with Sally & ending with Megu-chan, before returning for two more entries (Lun Lun & Lalabel) on TV Asahi (what NET changed into in 1977) from 1979 to 1981. The only ones missing from this crossover are Magical Mako-chan from 1970 (loosely based on the fairy tale The Little Mermaid), Sarutobi Ecchan from 1971 (based on the 60s manga by Shotaro Ishinomori), & Miracle Girl Limit-chan from 1973, and while Cutie Honey's status as an entry isn't really official, it's often included alongside them anyway. Nippon Columbia would also release a Majokko Daisakusen CD containing all of the shows' theme songs (as well as full vocal versions of the game's OP & ED) around the same time the game came out, including the trio not seen in this game.
However, unlike later magical girl franchises from Toei, like Sailor Moon or Pretty Cure, the Majokko Series wasn't one based around combat in any way, leaving Cutie Honey the only one that really "fits" this kind of game concept (though Megu-chan did feature a pretty gnarly cat fight in its final episode; Megu will mess you up). Without a doubt, the very concept of a strategy game crossed with an arena fighter in the late 90s starring a bunch of (mostly) non-violent magical girls from the 60s & 70s is head tilting, but what's done is long done; time to see how it works as a game.
At the main menu you have fairly straightforward choices: Starting a new game, loading a saved game, "Battle Game" (you & a friend engage in a battle on any of the maps, once you've unlocked them), the System/Options menu, & "Omake/Extra", which lets you view illustrations of the cast that you unlock through gameplay (though I couldn't find out how, exactly). Upon starting a new game you're instantly asked to select which magical girl anime cast you want to start with... and it's admittedly a very lopsided choice. Sally & Akko-chan give you six & five characters to start with, respectively, while Megu-chan, Lun Lun, & Lalabel each give you four, but Chappy only starts with two, while Cutie Honey is literally just Honey all by herself; OK, it's technically two, since Honey Kisaragi & Cutie Honey actually have separate stats & levels. Anyway, once you make your choice you're given a quick intro to the series you've picked & sent straight into "Map 1" without any set up for the story. Yeah, despite this essentially being Toys for Bob's chance at making a proper "Story Mode" for The Unholy War, Majokko Daisakusen really doesn't have much in terms of storytelling, though that's understandable, as I'm sure whatever story the staff at TfB could tell would have to have been provided to them by Bandai... and this is 90s-era video games Bandai we're talking about. Aside from Leerio's SOS right before the OP sequence, & a basic set up in the manual, there's pretty much no proper introduction in this game, and even Map 1, which does introduce Sally & two of her friends (Yoshiko Hanamura & Sumire Kasugano) as NPCs to help you out, only gives you the most basic of storytelling, i.e. Yoshiko & Sumire wonder where they are, Sally arrives to help save the day, & there's a couple of generic lines between Sally & whichever magical girl lead you chose to start with; I imagine that if you pick Sally the Witch to start with you get a different series for NPCs. Not only that, but the evil "Great Demon Beasts" that you fight throughout the game are literally just monsters from both The Unholy War & Pandemonium!, and while some online would automatically blame that on Toys for Bob being rushed, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this was Bandai's idea, to start with; after all, Bandai liked what it had seen of The Unholy War, so might as well use those creatures.
As for the gameplay itself, Majokko Daisakusen is based on The Unholy War, so the main goal of each & every map is for you to make your way from your main base to the enemy's & defeat the monster guarding it (a new for one map, which then becomes a new grunt for future maps), before the enemy makes its way to your base & defeats Leerio, who's guarding it. Movement is hex-based, and while from Map 2 on you can start with five characters to instantly put on the field, everything else (sortieing more characters [one per turn], using certain on-field spells & abilities, etc.) require Mana (this game's equivalent to TUW's AUR), which can be earned by leaving a character on a hex that has a glowing square on it. Each new turn gives you some Mana if someone's on a square, but after a few turns the square runs out (the color it currently is tells you how many more turns it can be used), so you constantly need to move your characters around. As mentioned, there are on-field spells at characters' disposals, and they range from what you'd normally expect (healing, dealing damage without getting into a fight, temporary stat boosts, etc.) to more IP-based things, like having Honey Kisaragi do a Honey Flash so that she can transform into Cutie Honey. Unlike The Unholy War, which restricted each side to only moving three characters before ending a turn, Majokko Daisakusen lets each side move whatever characters it wants to before ending their turn, making it feel more like your usual strategy RPG, especially those from Japan. In terms of the strategy-based aspect of the game it's more or less what you'd expect from the genre on the PS1, outside of everything being done with 3D polygons instead of 2D sprites (with the shoulder buttons allowing for both camera rotation & angling), the fact that characters can be moved around like normal to reach their chosen hex (& anyone not controlled by you can zip their movement with the press of a button, thankfully), & the gameplay aspects based on The Unholy War, of course.
However, things change wildly when one of your characters fights one of the enemy's forces...
Once characters from opposing sides stand on adjacent hexes combat can initiate, and the game completely transforms to accommodate this. Instead of the usual "automatic exchanging of blows determined by a mix of comparing stats & some RNG" seen in most turn-based strategy games, Majokko Daisakusen (& The Unholy War before it) turns into a full-on arena fighter, where battle tends to end with one side standing tall & the other side being 100% defeated. In combat every character has the ability to perform a close range attack with & jump with , while certain characters also have access to a long-range attack with that uses MP & needs recharging if you use it too often; for your playable cast this is mainly for characters who can use magic. Finally, specific characters have access to a special ability with which has its own limited meter that it uses up & can't be recharged until a battle ends; for example, Sally & Poron from Sally the Witch have the ability to fly on their brooms during battle. However, an interesting twist to MP is that while it recharges during a battle, it can only recharge up to whatever MP your character has on hand, as using MP for on-field spells means that character now has less MP to source from for a battle, giving everything a bit of a risk vs. reward feel. For example, Honey Beam is an especially powerful spell that can attack enemies on three consecutive hexes, but repeated use eventually makes long range battle for Cutie Honey trickier, since she'll have less & less MP for each successive battle. Toys for Bob also handled character turns in an interesting way, as anyone can move, use a field spell, & attack within one turn... but you aren't forced to do them all at once. Instead, you can theoretically move all your characters, then have each of them use field spells, & then have all of them attack (if possible), and you can do these in any order (both the actions & the characters doing them), resulting in the ability to strategize in ways you normally wouldn't in most strategy RPGs; in fact, the enemy AI takes advantage of this, usually having monsters use spells first, before attacking or even moving.
When it comes to the actual combat itself during the anime fighting sections... it's admittedly a bit of a wild, semi-chaotic crapshoot, at times. Close range combat tends to require characters to be really, really close (& attacks are one-&-done, so no combos), so it's almost impossible for a character with no long range capabilities to really fight one that does, and there's only a sort of soft lock on mechanic when in range & facing the opponent, so the end result is a lot of movement, the occasional missed attack, and if a long range CPU character goes after one of your close range-only characters the only real solution is to play keep away for the 30 seconds most battles last for; thankfully, simply surviving a battle via time out still gives your character a little bit of EXP. The arena combat mode is also utilized for mini-games, which appear as vortex-looking icons on the field. If one of your characters land on a vortex they then engage in a mini-game that requires you to do things like grabbing a bunch of apples that drop from a tree before they go bad, keeping a bunch of crows from stealing food growing out of a field, destroying falling boulders or a machine that's polluting a lake, reaching the end of a maze within a time limit, recovering a bunch of stray dogs & cats, etc., all within a time limit; there's actually a rather large variety of mini-games, which is impressive. These mini-games are worth the effort, though, as succeeding generally results in a good amount of EXP, and if you do especially well you can even a get 2x multiplier on it! Not just that, but mini-games give more & more EXP when successfully completed on each successive map, which make them pretty much essential for any & all new recruits you wish to level up quickly, since almost everyone starts at Level 1, no matter how far into the campaign they debut. That said, the last two maps feature no mini-game spaces, as by that point characters were getting close to 200 EXP after a 2x multiplier; that's enough to instantly take someone from Level 1 to around Level 4 or 5.
And, really, that's the overall gameplay loop of Majokko Daisakusen for all 12 maps in the game's main campaign. Yes, you read that right, there are only 12 maps to play across, though that's roughly the same as in The Unholy War, and at least this game does see you go through them in an order befitting a campaign, of some sort; to be fair, though, the original Super Robot Wars game was only 13 maps long. That being said, individual maps can still generally take somewhere between 30-60 minutes each, depending on how many enemies are on the map, since it's impossible to skip any fights, due to their arena combat nature; to some, it could potentially become a little bit of a repetitive slog. As for the overall story of Majokko Daisakusen told throughout the campaign, don't go expecting SRW-esque conversations between the various magical girls whenever a new one appears, as most of them never actually say anything to each other. Instead, most new characters simply talk to their respective cast that's with them, and then they're just part of your crew for the remainder of the game. There is the rare moment where your selected starter character does talk to another magical girl lead, but it mainly just amounts to "Hey, we're here to help out, too, so join us!". In fact, the only truly notable crossover interaction is when Megu-chan & her rival Non from Majokko Megu-chan appear, and while Megu is all for helping out Non refuses unless she's beaten in battle, upon which your starter character enters straight into an "until one falls" battle with Non... and if you lose (which I did, since I had to use Honey Kisaragi, not Cutie Honey) Non actually departs! Granted, if you lose to Non she eventually returns to challenge Megu on a later map, so it's not like she's 100% missable. Also, after gaining access to everyone around the halfway point, the story literally becomes a non-factor completely until Map 12, and even then it's simply Zarlem talking evil villain talk when you initiate combat with her, Zarlem claiming to return one day to seek vengeance after being defeated, and Leerio & her mother(?) thanking you for saving their world.
Now, is Majokko Daisakusen necessarily a balanced game, both in terms of the tactical & fighting aspects? No, not really. Despite there being an admittedly large amount of characters in your roster by Map 12 you really won't be using the large majority of them, especially those who have no magical powers, i.e. no long range combat ability. Since everyone starts at Level 1, you wind up putting focus on the actual magical girls themselves, both the leads & supporting cast, and the only "normal" supporting cast that's really worth using is Chikako from Himitsu no Akko-chan, simply because she can move four hexes at time, which makes her great for occupying Mana spaces quickly; in battle, though, all you can really do with Chikako is play keep away & time out. Meanwhile, characters that can fly are absolutely broken, especially once leveled up, since they can outrun foes for time outs with little trouble by flying (which you can do for longer as you level up), and while some foes can be decent snipers for them on the ground you can usually fly so high that no long range attack will even reach; seeing an AI monster just stand there motionless like "NOW what?!" is admittedly amusing. An especially good flyer is Poron, as she has a field spell which literally shrinks a foe permanently, reducing all of their stats (including max HP) to half. Then there's Akko herself, who eventually gains a field spell which lets her transform into an ally for a number of turns. Meanwhile, healing is something that only a handful of characters can do, like Lalabel & Lun Lun, but the best is easily Mami from Majokko Megu-chan, whose Heal 2 spell is a literal full heal (both HP & MP!), has greater range than Lalabel & Lun Lun, & only costs 20 Mana (yeah, not MP); I guess her only being able to move two hexes at a time is meant to balance her out. Finally, though, there's Sally & the spell she gains at Level 14: Time Stop.
Yes, Sally can literally stop all enemies from doing anything for an entire turn... and it only costs Mana, which you'll be absolutely awash with by that point, as you carry over all Mana from one map to the next; however, Sally won't really learn this until near the very end. To be fair, the game does get tougher as you advance, so Time Stop is good for giving you a extra turn to properly plan things out, but it never truly becomes a hard game, especially since the enemy AI eventually stops focusing on claiming Mana squares (so it becomes more a game of attrition, as you can wait until the enemy simply can't summon more monsters) & becomes easily predictable. The difficulty mainly comes from the simple fact that higher level monsters become more & more common, i.e. low level monsters like the Prana Devil (Level 2) & Tesla (Level 3) stop getting summoned after Map 7 or so.
Visually speaking, Majokko Daisakusen isn't terrible by any means, but it has its rough spots. On the fully polygonal field, characters on both sides are portrayed using 2D sprites when not actively moving in any way, though the enemies are all the same silhouetted sprite (so you have to rely on the name to tell which is which), but once someone starts to move they instantly switch over to fully polygonal models. For the monsters that come from Pandemonium! or The Unholy War they overall look fine enough, but the human characters you control from the various magical girl anime are where things get a bit mixed. While the team at Toys for Bob definitely did their job in making sure that each character is easily identifiable in polygonal form, whenever the game zooms in & gives you an up close look at the characters you can see the various flaws & quirks of the PS1 hardware. Some characters admittedly look okay enough, like Sally, Lalabel, or Lun Lun, while others are a little rough around the edges, like Cutie Honey or Akko, but I would chalk this up to more towards the game being made for the PS1; Megu, for example, definitely looks like she's seen better days, but is still easily recognizable. Sure, had Toys for Bob maybe been given a little more time they could have possibly ironed out some of those kinks (including for the battle arenas, as it is possible to see through the seams in the ground during some zoom ins), but I think this was just a case where The Unholy War wasn't really made with human characters in mind (humanoid creatures, sure, but not actual humans), so there was a little bit of fitting a square peg into a round hole here. Still, as mentioned, the anime characters themselves are easily identifiable in their designs, and there are some nice little details to be found, like Megu hanging from her broomstick as she falls to the ground after being defeated while flying. Akko also has a hilarious "Praise the Sun!!!" pose when winning a battle or mini-game (as seen above), which I've been told is not something she does, & that's hilarious. The OP & ED animations, as well as the short little eyecatch seen at some point during the campaign, are directed by Takao Yoshizawa (generally an episode director) & are honestly look good, though the video encoding for them is a tad rough, even for PS1 standards, I feel.
In terms of audio, there likely isn't really a lot of it that's wholly unique to this game specifically. Each map uses the same overall instrumental song, which is light-hearted enough & matches the magical girl aesthetic of the shows featured (so I imagine it was made specifically for this game), while the various arenas you can fight in have their own songs when in combat or in a mini-game. However, these arena tracks are usually more intense in sound & likely are just pulled straight from The Unholy War and Pandemonium!, much like the monsters were, but they do the job for the moments they are used; this is still a battle-focused game, after all. Since this is based on a variety of magical girl anime, it only makes sense that voice actors from those shows would also be featured in Majokko Daisakusen, but not everyone is actually voiced in this game. Instead it's mainly just the main characters plus a couple of their supporting cast, but at least we do have Yuriko Yamamoto (the 1989 Sally, as Michiko Hirai passed in 1984), Fuyumi Shiraishi & Sachiko Chijimatsu (the original Poron & Kabu from 1966) from Sally the Witch, Yoshiko Ohta & Sumiko Shirakawa (the original Akko & Moko from 1969) from Himitsu no Akko-chan, Mari Okamoto & Michie Kita (Lun Lun & Togenishia) from Lun Lun the Flower Girl, Mitsuko Horie (Lalabel) from Magical Girl Lalabel, & Eiko Masuyama voicing both Honey Kisaragi/Cutie Honey & Chappy Hans Charles Grimm and Aesop Et Cetera (yes, that is indeed Chappy's full name) from Cutie Honey & Chappy the Witch. Unfortunately, Majokko Megu-chan's voiced roles use replacements, as Noriko Tsukase (Megu Kanzaki) passed away in 1989, while Rihoko Yoshida (Gou Non) retired from voice acting in 1997 to become a director & casting manager over at 81produce; Mari Okamoto & Yuriko Yamamoto take over Tsukase & Yoshida's roles, respectively.
Unfortunately, even with bringing back all these voice actors, there really isn't a lot of voice work in the game. Sure, there are the usual yelps & screams during battle, but when it comes to actual lines characters seemingly only say stuff like catchphrases or magical incantations, with some only speaking after winning a fight, others only while casting field spells, and Honey's sole full line is her iconic "Honey Flash!" when transforming from Kisaragi to Cutie. In comparison, all of the enemies have their respective "voices" from the games they came from, which includes one of them outright speaking a little English ("Ha ha ha... Victory!") when winning a fight. Meanwhile, for the original characters we have Leerio voiced by Ai Nagano (Honey Kisaragi in Cutie Honey Flash), Assena (Leerio's mother, I believe) voiced by Chiho Ohkawa (Sister Jill in Cutie Honey Flash), & Zarlem voiced by Michie Kita (playing dual roles here), though you barely hear any of these performances, as Leerio is only really heard in the intro & ending (unless you play so badly that your base gets attacked), while Assena & Zarlem literally only appear at the very end; at least Zarlem is a two-phase fight, so Kita gets a little extra to work with.
Look, there's no beating around the bush here: The very concept of Majokko Daisakusen -Little witching mischiefs- is just so utterly bizarre. How anyone at Bandai somehow thought that this was a better use of Toys for Bob's Unholy War game concept than SD Gundam, which Paul Reiche III & Fred Ford had originally wanted to do, will forever be a mystery, but how did the end result of this actually fare? When I first said that I'd finally be playing & reviewing this game on Twitter someone actually tried to point out that it's apparently considered a "kusoge/crap game" in Japan... but the source saying that, which I'm familiar with, had utterly poor reasons to prove that & even got some things wrong, like saying that Crystal Dynamics developed it, when it was Toys for Bob (despite linking to the Matt Barton interview I mentioned at the start!). Is Majokko Daisakusen a great game? No. It certainly has its flaws, though most of it is inherent just from the nature of The Unholy War it was built off of, as while the gameplay loop is good & solid it can also be a bit slow & admittedly repetitive at points. Meanwhile, the visuals aren't always amazing, though I do feel that Toys for Bob did about as well as possible in rendering the magical girls (& their friends) as well as they could with an engine that was (mostly) based around rendering monsters & the like. Sure, that kusoge website's complaints aren't invalid, as there is a bit of an inconsistent atmosphere to the game, mainly due to how it was produced (blame Bandai for that, I'd argue), it is an admittedly short single-player campaign (though that was true of The Unholy War, too), the character balance is for sure a bit off, & there is a strong lack of story & even usage from the voice actors from the various anime.
However, I also had a lot of fun playing through Majokko Daisakusen, and not in any "ironic" fashion outside of weird little things, like Akko's "Praise the Sun!!!" pose or Poron delivering an absolutely devilish sounding laugh whenever she defeats a monster. Like I said at the beginning, I still remember playing that demo for The Unholy War back in the day, because it truly did have an outstanding concept behind it, and Majokko Daisakusen is effectively the same exact game, only with a bunch of magical girl anime from the 60s, 70s, & 80s tossed in; and, no, the roster isn't a good reason to call it a kusoge. Simply put, Toys for Bob is a highly reputed development studio & the people who work there are just too good (or, at the very least, competent) to release anything truly bad; even their "worst" games seem to be merely "average", in reality. Yes, this is a very weird game, & the way it came out is arguably even weirder, but it's still built on a very solid foundation, which results in it still being a fun game to play, overall, and even with only 12 maps it should take you around a solid 8-9 hours to complete. Is it exactly the spiritual precursor to Super Heroine Chronicle? No, but it's a fun, solid time nonetheless.
In fact, now that it's an independent studio, Bandai Namco should totally hire Toys for Bob to make a brand new game, this time including the likes of (keeping it Toei, of course) Sailor Moon, Pretty Cure, Magical Doremi, Cutie Honey Flash, & Phantom Thief Jeanne, alongside some of the old Majokko Series girls. I'm not even joking, because I'd love to see Toys for Bob return to The Unholy War concept with modern hardware, in general.
Game © Hikari Pro・Fujio Pro・Dynamic Planning・Omochabako・Shiro Jinbo・Eiko Fujiwara・Toei Animation © Bandai 1999
I wonder if the person who said Japan considers this a kusoge confused that term with bakage, because I can absolutely see Japanese players applying that term to this game.
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