2006.08.14 
Magna Carta Sucks
Playstation 2 - USA
(This was originally a journal entry)
If you have any interest in Magna Carta the opening CG is the only good thing about the game. Avoid it at all costs. Oh, but I forgot to mention that the opening might not be tolerable if you have the US version since they didn't use the Korean or Japanese song, they decided to create a new song for the US version. "TEARRRZ OFFF BLOOODDDD~~~"
You probably thought I'd have Magna Carta done right now. Well I've now encountered a new problem. This game fucking freezes up during the boss battles. First it freezed up with Azhadi. Now as of writing this, it froze up right before I was going to fight Carian. I can't stress how much I fucking hate this game. But dammit I'm on the last boss. Don't tell me this is another one of those FF7 deals where I don't get to beat the game till several years later because my copy or system is fucked up. Some of you may have heard of my FF7 story but if you haven't - I first played FF7 when it came out in the states back in 1997. Yeah I pretty much enjoyed the game and such and couldn't wait to beat it. But my problem was - my game always froze RIGHT BEFORE the first cluster of fights of the last battles started. So in the end I never got to see the ending or the final showdown with Sephiroth till years later. I never saw it or played the final parts of FF7 till 02' when I got a PS2. ARGH. Fuck this. I'm leaving this game on my shelf in the mean time. I'll just give you my thoughts on it anyway and explain WHY you should stay the fuck away from this game.
Story/Characters:
Magna Carta has every single cliche in the book you can think of:
- Reith is some random whore Calintz found on the street that has amnesia.
- Agreian, the man that everyone respects and also the man that Calintz looks up to and is best friends with, is actually the main villian of the story.
- Haren is the "ME MAN HEAR ME ROAR FEED ME!" type. Eonis is the woman that cheers/calms the group up when in trouble. Chris is the playboy. Azel is Calintz's right hand man and wants to be like Calintz when he grows up. Raul is the mysterious swordsman who is actually one of the eight heroes from fifty years ago and so on.
All the cliches were actually tolerable in this game since the characters are likable (much like Lunar.) But yes, the main fault of this game is the terrible gameplay/battle system. There were also some "kind of" good plot twists but by the time they got to the good parts of the story the game was already over. What did they do to fill in the time before we got to the plot twists? Oh, we went back and forth and did one part with Calintz and made sure you went back did the same shit over again with Reith's party. They made it much more repetitive than the first three chapters of Suikoden 3 ever could be. Some random comments about the story?
- It was pretty cool that Agreian was using you all that time since he seemed less likely to be the spy of the group, but the way they show to the player that he was just using you all along was completely terrible. "YAY! Agreian is evil! Let's reveal this to the player by making him laugh in an evil manner!"
- Reith is actually the Queen of Yason-Roven while her sister Serina impersonated her while she was gone. It was pretty cool how Reith slowly regained her memory during the talks that you do with your party members to build your trust with them. But then again (not unless I missed it) here's the biggest plot hole: If Reith, Serina, and Calintz were all from the same village HOW THE FUCK did Reith become queen of Yason Roven? Oh and cheers to Reith for locking up her sister Serina so she could kill everyone else and become Queen. :D If only Reith was developed a little more she'd so be my most favorite RPG heroine ever. :(
- Another pretty cool plot twist was when Orha sides with your party and Carian tries to become the new Queen. Sadly, that was done so last minute. That would've been a cool plot twist had Reith regained her memory HALFWAY into the game and if Carian's story had more meat. Had they not made the player waste so much damn time running back and forth and had the second half of the story going against Agreian, Carian, Azhadi and such this would've paced the story so much better. Now if indeed that one part is that last time you see Roxy, wow that was one lame death scene. In her profile they state that she likes Orha but doesn't show it. It just seemed random that she finally tells him that she loves him right before she dies. Sure she probably knew she was going to die, that being the reason why she finally tells Orha. But the directing is terrible. And hell, as said before the death scenes for this game suck and come off the least bit tragic. What am I saying, I find that the majority of these games have crappy death scenes. (Hmm, nothing is like Valkyrie Profile I guess. Plenty of great deaths! :D)
- Lehas was the hottest. But she also died out of nowhere too. Now I'm not expecting everyone to have one of those glorious Oscar Francois or Luca Blight kind of deaths but they should put some more thought into it if you're going to kill a character. The first Suikoden had a lot of great death scenes that didn't pop out of nowhere like they do in this game. When Reith dies it's the least bit dramatic. You get some crappy FMV and then BOOM! She's dead and she sacrificed herself for Calintz. =/
- Speaking about those two, Reith and Calintz had a believable love story going on. (Unlike FF8!) Just since in the middle of the game they chose to make you run back and forth doing the same shit under different POVs they didn't fully develop their relationship before Reith died. LAME. SO MUCH WASTED POTENTIAL.
- I suppose the Magna Carta trilogy will be a lot like Suikoden where each game only takes place on a continent since this only takes place in Efferia. Much of the backstory was very interesting (like the story about how 120 boats tried to land in Efferia but only 4 made it and the four towns in Efferia are named after the boats) but it's like the first Suikoden. You're like WTF? What's with all this story that's not even in this game? And uh...unlike Suikoden I don't see myself coming back to this series. =/
Graphics: The graphics are pretty good and very similar to FFX. Yeah, not much I can say in this department since I'm not a graphic whore.
Cutscenes: Contrary to popular belief theres barely any CG in this game. Hell, there's barely any in-game cutscenes. Many of the coversation scenes are a lot like Suikoden 5's. But at least in Suikoden 5 you see a room of people in the convo scenes much like how SNES talk scenes were handled. As for MC? Wow, they're completely lazy. Much of the time you just see a blurred screen with dialougue boxes and anime pictures for the convo scenes (sometimes they're voiced.) And something odd I noticed about the in-game cut scenes is that they only bothered to fully animate characters that were completely relavent to the story. While Reith's mouth flaps would move realistically, a common soldier would only have one mouthflap like Suikoden 3. (But at least S3 wasn't voiced!) And the CG scenes? Other than the opening and ending they aren't that special or long for that matter.
Gameplay: I went over the bulk of how much the gameplay sucks in this post. (Just scroll down to see it) But ZOMG, there's actually more bad shit I can add on to that list!
- When you're on the field fighting monsters you have two modes. Run and Detect. If you didn't defeat all the monsters in the area yet (other than the very last part at Epentar they don't respawn) you HAVE to use detect mode. What is detect mode? Well you walk VERY SLOWLY so you can scan the area in front of you and see enemies. It's kind of like Wild Arms 3 (except no where near as annoying as that game since you don't repeatedly need to press a button to scan shit) where you can only see what's in front of you. Enemies are on screen before you attack them. You have the choice to either run into them (and get the first turn of the battles) or let them run into you (they get the first turn.) If you try going into "run mode" without defeating everyone on the screen prepare for a long 10 minute battle because you'll have to wait two complete bars to fill up till you get your turn. Ah, all this cute talk about turns. Why play games at all then if they're going to be this much of a pain in the ass. There was one other thing that really annoys me about the battles but it seems I forgot what it was.
- Edit: I remebered one thing that I forgot to mention. THIS GAME IS FUCKING LINEAR. By far one of the most linear RPGs I've played in the longest time. It's pretty much the same shit. Town - talk - dungeon - town - talk - dungeon. And you can't freely explore till the end of the game when you're most likely already pissed off at the redundant battle system and just want to get the game over with. Like if you try venturing out to another town one of your party members will ALWAYS remind you that you need to be at a certain place.
- There's some good elements that I liked, but they weren't major or anything. I liked the fortune teller, how you can buy gifts for your party members to increase their respect for you, how you could talk with your party members and such. But sadly the good things were so few. SO FEW.
Overall: I'd only recommend this game to people who really like the character designs. As for me I bought it knowing that this game would suck. But hey I guess it's no different from those people that blow 300+ on a Cloud statue, I pretty much just bought this game just to say I have it. While I'm not a big HTK fan I found his character designs in this game stylin'. It's annoying to hear people insult HTK for "only" knowing how to draw girly men. Anyone ever notice Haren? o_O Though I don't mean to act like I'm a hardcore fan of his art like I am of Kazuma Kaneko. His character designs in MC (this one, not the PC version) are the only character designs I really liked.
Ignore anyone who tells you to play this game for the story, they're probably the same idiots that think Shadow Hearts: Covenant, Inu Yasha and Naruto are a masterpiece. Anyway, what kind of psycho bitch (other than me who's bored and currently has a lot of free time) would want to put theirselves through the tortue of playing through a HORRIFIC VIDEO GAME just for the goddamn story?
Magna Carta = SUXXORZ.
Update: Well I wrote this entry last night. Today I tried to beat the game again and I'm pretty sure it'll freeze up at Carian's battle no matter what. Ugh. Time to bring this game to someone else's house in the future and see if it'll work on their PS2. Just hope they don't see me playing it or they'll wonder what the hell is wrong with me.
====Following is from an earlier post=======
I decided to also include the following rant about how much Magna Carta sucks because I went more in depth about the what makes the game a pain in the ass.
Well the game is pretty, the music is great, the story is cliche but all the characters are pretty likable so it doesn't matter. So where does this game fail at? THE GOD AWFUL BATTLE SYSTEM. Jesus christ, where to begin?
- ONE EFFIN' ATTACK BAR. Well think of this like Final Fantasy but all of you share one attack bar. The fights last forever just waiting for that damn thing to fill up so you can have your turn and attack the enemy. Even the enemy has one attack bar. So if anyone else is watching you play this they'll probably ask "How come everyone is standing around and doing nothing?" "STFU! I'm waiting for my leadership bar to fill up!"
- CHI. Chi? What? Well all your attacks have an element. In battle the elements tend to disappear if there's not enough. Well I don't know how to explain it. There are laterns where you can change the element so it won't run out in battle, but even if you do it won't guarantee that your element will always be available in battle. By far the worst thing ever is when all three of your characters (who all take turns at attacking bcoz dere nice lolz) run out of a certain "chi" in the area. It's even worse than waiting for the attack bar to go up. Because if there's no chi you can't do shit but wait around and hope to hell that the effing chi fills up again. You can use items but not even that will always guarantee that it'll work. Nothing is like being asked to do something in r/l in the middle of these battles. "Oh I'll be right there, just wait till I'm done with this battle! C'mon effing Chi come back!" *10 minutes later* "Dammit, the chi still didn't fill up!"
- BRITNEY'S DANCE BEAT. No, the battle system has more flaws than you can think of. Shadow Hearts has that judgement system or whatever it's called where you press a button in a timely matter so you can attack. MC has something like that too but it's much worse. In MC you press two buttons in a timely matter (rather than SH where you just press one button). If you fuck up - that's it. Your leadership bar goes all the way down and you'll have to wait your turn again. At least with Shadow Hearts if you hit the first two times right but messed up the other two, you'll still get half your turn. Not in MC.
- ONLY ONE CHARACTER CONTROLLABLE AT A TIME. While in normal RPGs all your party members can attack at the same time, as mentioned above, you only control one character. First heading into a battle you'll probably be like "Wow this is like Star Ocean 3!" Nope. Your party members are nothing more than statues if you don't control them. Say like if I'm one guy attacking the enemy, the enemy will go back and hit my other party member and that party member won't do anything back but just stand there like "LOL WTF. STOP IT NOOB!"
It's a real damn shame that this game has the shittiest battle system you can think of since everything else about it is pretty likable. One refreshing thing is that everyone except Reith is actually mature, even the teenagers. None of that Shadow Hearts: Covenant shit where it has this cute gimmick "Wow, we're actually adult RPG heroes but we all have the mentality of a five year old!" It's only tolerable with Joachim though it's sad that he's stereotypically French and gay. :( Well yeah in SH:C you have Yuri who's an all around wannabe badass, Karin who's so damn confused she most likely doesn't know how to wipe her own ass, and Lucia who's as useful as nice looking wallpaper. Hmm, I remember Nicolai was a joke too since he was in love with Karin.
(2008.04.04 COMMENT - I know this review was all over the place but i didn't want to merge two seperate entries into one.)