Not a rogue-like but still a great game. The combat and level design are very rogue-like but that's where the similarities end. There is no permadeath here. When you die you retain your level, your stats, your magic and your important items. You also retain most of your progress since there are checkpoints every 4 levels that you can skip to after you die.

The magic crafting system is kind of fun and the text parsing for naming spells works surprisingly well considering the rest of the translation is pretty bad. You pick up "Anonymous Magicite" and when you use it you get to give it a name. The effect of the resulting spell is determined by what you name it. Something like "Holy Beam" might give you a straight shot magic with the Holy attribute while "Fire Storm" might give you an AOE attack with the Heat attribute. You could also type in nonsense just to see what you get. There are tons of combinations of effects and crafting magic could be great fun except for one thing...

In this game you don't have HP and MP. Well, you do except you use MP for magic, you lose MP when you take damage and you die when you reach 0MP. There are no typos in that sentence. "So what the hell is HP for?", you ask. HP allows you to regen MP. You lose HP over time and when you use certain types of magic. If you're at 0HP, you don't regen MP. So think of MP as your health except you're playing a brawler where you're only allowed to use those special moves that cost health and think of HP more like a hunger bar. This actually has a serious impact on playstyle...

You see, you can't play around with magic much due to the health system. If you use high cost spells, you open yourself up to dying easily. If you use low cost weak spells, enemies can end up hitting you which costs you MP, anyway, so you should have just used stronger spells. Worst of all, if you're in a pinch you can't really do anything aside from teleport away. Heal yourself and you take hits which cost MP and then you attack back which cost MP and then if you don't kill all the enemies in one shot, they hit again which costs MP and you're probably dead. Basically, what it all boils down to is that you'll be running a very specific setup: your most efficient damage spell to exactly 1 or 2 shot enemies, a cheap ping to clean up anything with low health, a bomb in case you get overwhelmed and a wild card which could be a teleport, a heal or a protect spell. It's just odd how limiting the HP/MP system is considering how wildly creative the magic system is.

Overall it's a great game as long as you aren't expecting an actual rogue-like and I do recommend it. It may sound like I complained a lot but it's more a matter of being confused by the design choices than anything else. It's a fun game for what it is. Give it a shot. Give it a Giga Frost Shot, in fact.

A Magical High School Girl 101
Find Magicites
Learn Spells
Trade Trash Spells for Magicites
Hoard unidentified magicites

Name spells.

The algorithm for named spells is the greatest thing I have ever seen.

'Absolute Zero' - Ice spell that freezes. So far so good.
'Whirlwind' - Storm spell with high range and push. Alright, this system is pretty solid.
'Sleep' - Ice spell that sleeps. Makes sense.
'Barrier' - Damage shield
'Cure' - Heal

Goes great... so like a rational individual I...

'Nagasaki' - Fire type bomb spell... There is no way this is a coincidence.

10/10

Story: You play as Usami Sumireko on a quest to return Marisa Kirisame's hat.

Key Point: The gameplay is similar to the Fushigi No Dungeon(Mystery Dungeon) series. What's unique about this game is that you create and discover by naming magicites, then you can modify magic with levels and many stats to do everything at once or for one sole purpose. You will hop through levels like a ninja, become untouchable, and abuse the systems to defy every law. Loads of fun, surprises, and secrets...all mostly limited to these magicites. It's a game made by a couple of individuals so don't expect too much but for this unique fun system...if you're a nerd like me!

Bugs: a lot has improved since release, chances of running into them are high, and once in a while it makes this game "almost" unplayable.

Advice: restart the game.

Conclusion: The ending is worth it as we get to see Usami and Marisa reunite.

Played the game, found a blank magicite, did not know about the spell creation system.

Named a spell DEEP SELF COMET, received a meteor on the face.

10/10 this is genius.

I don't like to drop games, but I gotta drop this one. For those curious, I got right to the end of the second dungeon until I realized I had no good ways of damaging the boss. Here's why I stopped playing:

-Naming spells is cute but you can't determine an effect until you name them, effectively making the creativity pointless as you're forced to just use practical names and keywords instead to keep up with the game's brutal difficulty. Meanwhile new spells for you to name spawns less the longer you go.
-In addition, since you're constantly dying and losing everything, the crosses you hoard are more or less your only actual money, due to you getting to keep those.
-Enemies get absurd the further you go, eventually out-damaging your potential healing with little you can do about it.
-You can't change direction without moving, which severely limits what you can do and how you can position yourself against enemies. Shoutouts to the Rock golems and those little things that blow up and damage you for half your current health.
-Enemies can sometimes spawn 5 more of themselves if you can't take it out before casting time
-Sometimes teleportation spells/potions will just move you one tile away, effectively being a waste, or worse, put you right next to an enemy so they get to smack you for free.
-Some rooms are just enemy hoards, which means if you can't go rambo or didn't spawn close to the exit you may as well restart.
-Not knowing descriptions of items just adds to the tedium, meanwhile getting the badge that just tells you what everything does makes this idea pointless anyways.
-Level-ups don't feel impactful outside the free heal because the cost of spells is a percentage rather than a solid number.
-Having your mana be your health feels goofy as well because if you're close to dying you're completely unable to defend yourself with a proper attack or spell.

It's a very cute idea but there are just so many little things that keep it from being what it could be.

Consider this recommendation as having a big asterisk next to the "thumbs up", because I was honestly on the fence about how strongly I actually recommend it. This game's story is going to become my go-to example for a work that needed more love. Because there is absolutely glimmers of brilliance in this game, with original ideas and a very interesting story concept.

It's a roguelite about a highschool girl whom, every time she returns home from school, winds up taking a magical path through a dungeon. One based on the route back home. This is thanks to an unwanted blessing put on her by a witch who is seemingly trying to turn her into a witch. Can Akari sort out her feelings that cause her to be pulled into this world, or will she surrender her humanity and completely become a part of the witch world?

That is a compelling story idea in my opinion, and certainly original a setup for a roguelike-type title! But the story doesn't really deliver on any of these ideas and a lot of what's happening has to be inferred because there aren't much in the way of story scenes or dialogue. Even the support characters in the form of the witches that Akari befriends in the game's main town aren't really given much chance to shine. I wanted to know not just more about them, but I wanted to see a lot more character development for even Akari herself. The story is very thin on the ground for such a great hook and it feels like they wrongly gave up on it.

How about the gameplay? Well, I have to admit. It actually impresses me how much this game does a good job of teaching the player how to ideally perform best in a roguelike, without even so much as a tutorial to do it. You essentially cast spells and make all of your attacks using your healthbar. Your healthbar is easy to replenish with frequent healing item drops and a backup health meter that quickly regens it anyway, though itself depleting over time. The game becomes a matter of juggling your resources and thinking outside the box with the spells you discover to eliminate enemies quickly and efficiently, without putting yourself in too much danger. (even a light breeze will kill you if you don't pace yourself with your attacks) Because roguelikes at their core are about resource management and application as well as eliminating enemies quickly, this is a great game to build good habits with. The boss fights in this game are also, unusually for the genre, mechanically interesting and demand thinking out each turn. All this makes this game easy to recommend to people who are interested in designing a game in this genre. On top of everything else, it's also really interesting how you use words as seeds to discover new spells with different keywords have different effects. You get frequent chances to do this and it's one more form of permanent progression.

Sadly, the game gets kind of grindy towards the middle and end. Eventually just having enough health to fight even the strongest enemies without being immediately knocked out becomes a matter of how willing you are to drive yourself into a wall over and over. Thankfully the game has a lot of permanent progression and very few truly rare items so it's not as frustrating as it could otherwise be, but with very little story payoff it doesn't feel rewarding to push through it.


Nonetheless, I'm glad I played it and I found some inspiration in its ideas.

Naming a spell Kamehameha lets you fire one 10/10

Update: After about 18 months they finally rolled back the patch that broke the English version of the game (naming system completely broke). I sent in a report way back when on the SP website and it's disappointing how slowly they acted but at least they acted.

---
Original review Jul 2018?
The most recent patch (July 1, v1.901c) seems to have introduced some major bugs with the spell naming system (at least in English). As far as I can tell, they haven't acknowledged the problem. Don't buy, wait for another patch.

Ate a Godly Potato to try and save myself from dying and only recovered 30 MP.
Ate Tasty Crisps to heal a little bit of MP and recovered 60 MP.
Ate a Hot Potato and got poisoned.
Ate a Premium Potato and recovered 999 MP

This game is cute, and I only played one run up to the first boss, but it definitely feels more straight out about the grinding than playing off your knowledge from previous runs.

Normally, dying and retrying is part of the dungeon crawler experience, but you're also normally able to make do with what you get/have (to a point). In this game, you're punished for not having used an item before, and for simply not having enough MP to survive fights. I took all the fights I could on my way to the boss in an effort to stay leveled properly, but around the last few levels leading up to it, there were more and more enemies together that just got tougher to beat without kiting them out 1 by 1 despite my effort to keep up in levels.

Add to this what is possibly translation issues, or simply lack of any meaningful dialogue, that makes any advice a bit confusing. At the start of the game, I used some items to find out what they do, ate some Onion chips or whatever and got "Stinky" ailment. The game told me that I can check my status/afflictions by going to the menu. ... So I checked the menu, and my status just said "Stinky." Nothing else. Very helpful.
Running into the boss, my first spell was Mist Potion, which blinded the boss, but the witch came back in to tell me that I should use Blind to blind the boss because spells can't hit it when it sees, or something like that. Used Blind, still was getting hit by its spells, and still was better off using Mist Potion to damage it than wasting turns on Blind.

It was during this fight that I used the Godly and Hot potatoes I mentioned at the start, which highlights another issue: the lack of item description before use, and the wanton item names. You would think that a Godly Potato would do something... Godly. But no, instead Tasty Crisps were the item I should have used, and had much, much more of than what I thought to be a rare Godly Potato. Totally understandable to leave descriptions in the dark for items such as the colored Magicite, but for literally every item? The fact that crosses (that I've found) have no downside to equipping just to find out their description have their descriptions hidden is the worst. In a game that relies on resource management, forcing you to use your resources to know what they are is puzzlingly counter intuitive. (The worst example of this is a Perfume I used to find out what it does, and I only got text on the screen that said something like "the air is thick." Guess I won't find out until I get the item again and check its description.)

Another gripe I have is controller support. Used a controller because there's no key rebind option (and I'm not a fan of the arrow key for movement with ZXC for actions Japanese default), but despite setting up my controller at the start, I'm only able to move diagonally. (Using a brand new 1st party Xbox Series X controller that I've never changed the configs for on Steam.) Buttons do work properly though. Just strange that there would be any issues using a controller considering this has a Switch release.

Overall, I don't have a strong disapproval for this game, but I simply don't have the patience to grind out the game. If the game were a bit more compelling with a stronger story or more interesting levels and fights, I could give it another shot. Instead, you're lazily dropped into the world and expected to make the most out of the bare minimum.

The game is pretty good, mostly thanks to the interesting spell naming system. Unfortunately, the latest patch broke said system beyond repair. Thankfully it is possible to fix that by installing an older version of the game. You can find a guide for that here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/611h5e/guide_how_to_download_older_versions_of_a_game_on/

I used "download_depot 555630 555631 3858705127182369078" to downgrade to version 1.840. Haven't had any problems that way.