Saying the name Mado Monogatari or it’s English title Sorcery Saga might draw a few blank expressions for the series that launched in 1990 and spanned many older consoles and other platforms due to the niche market. However, many more recognise the simple yet addictive puzzle game Puyo Puyo whose origins lie in the blob-like puyos from the early dungeon crawling Mado Monogatari titles. Mado Monogatari: Fia and the Wondrous Academy follows a cheerful trainee Mage Fia and her yellow curry loving friend Carbunkle as she starts her magical education at an esteemed academy, learning magic and friendship, and helping others along the way.
Newcomers to the Mado Monogatari universe will delight in the charming atmosphere Fia inhabits, with several areas of the academy available to explore all nooks and crannies. Fia is unique by having extremely good luck the majority of the time, but she can be a little less than lucky when engaging in the many mini-games. Catching more fish than the other contestants requires concentration to not peek at the active scoreboard, and it takes a long time to see the exact details of the magical eggs that must be hunted down. It can take several attempts to actually win these optional competitions.
Fia is thrown together with her equally unusual classmates whose stories receive deeper insight in the main story, usually with a different focus in each of the seven main chapters and additional epilogue. There is an even mix of male and female characters, each with distinct personality traits. All but Fia can be swapped around in the party menu almost at any time. They can’t be swapped in and out of battle, which is only an issue late game when the final few bosses like to heavily deplete team health, but those not in the playable trio still gain experience points from each battle.
Dialogue is crucial to the story, making the game part visual novel as well as a dungeon crawler. There is a skip option, but unless it’s a replay that button should be left well alone. Much of the protagonists’ and NPCs’ character development happens in the conversations. This includes even the smaller side quests called requests, which either involve collecting specific items, battling certain enemies, or simply having an extremely random discussion that warrants opinions for the requester.
These are not the same as the main quests selected in the classroom that must be reported in when complete and help gain main spells in the grimoire. The magical spellbook records Fia’s progress and has other features like a help guide, and allows for the changing of equipment, as well as learning and adding spells to the skill slots. There are side quests that count as credits needed to progress to the next level of being a mage apprentice alongside the main credits.
Performing a bit more than the bare minimum of required quests took almost thirty hours, making full completion a longer endeavour. Each node in the grimoire’s skill tree displays which quest is needed for unlocking once that task becomes available. This convenient tool is useful if players are limited in time and need to focus on the mandatory game tasks and don’t want to do all the optional ones.
All the dungeons have a similar format of starting at floor one, ascending each level to the next where there might be a goal boss to defeat or specified items to find. Usually the latter are not in treasure chests but dotted about the dungeon floor as glowing objects. Alongside the standard health and magic meters, there is the green bar of vitality that decreases during exploration, and more significantly if dungeon traps are activated and when moving to the next floor.
There isn’t a way to go back down to a previous floor, making saving in a separate save file per floor a good practice. This is most true later in the game to avoid traipsing through the previous twenty-plus lower levels just to get a quest item that was missed on the first run because the save and ascend option was pressed accidentally before realising the required item was missed.
The starting dungeon, which is returned to many times, has a brilliant feature that disappointingly wasn’t repeated the same way in other dungeons. On the ground floor there are doors that can only be opened once Fia is promoted to a specific mage level, which allows her to skip the first ten or twenty floors. Every other dungeon requires starting from floor one, no floor skipping available.
There might be three difficulty levels in Mado Monogatari: Fia and the Wondrous Academy, but even on Hard the game is relatively easy, making it a cosy dungeon crawler. Having lower stakes puts the emphasis on enjoyment. Various pedestals are dotted around dungeon floors that can send items back to the inventory, so if the three-times expandable bag is stuffed with collectables it can be emptied to make way for newly gathered items.
Every boss level is met with a teleport unit that allows exiting the dungeon and returning to that level without having to traipse back up through previously conquered floors. These two features can be ignored if a more challenging playstyle is preferred. Additionally, in later chapters there is equipment that slows how fast Elemental Orbs are generated.
These spheres occur in battles once magic is used through weapon skills or magical skills. The different coloured Remnants automatically turn into Elemental Orbs that appear in a bar on the lower part of the screen. Paying attention to these is crucial, as combining them correctly allows unleashing powerful attacks called Great Magic Arts. Every enemy has an elemental weakness, and using the correct opposing element can significantly reduce their health. In the early chapters the amount of magic needed, and thus the actual power of Great Magic Arts, is low, but when the Arts require multiple Elemental Orbs of various magics, it can be a balancing act of making sure the main party’s arsenal has a wide enough range of elements.
There are four job roles that provide different stat attributes for Fia to take and change to, which dictate which equipment is available. It is possible that sticking with the wizard role means Fia has less Great Magic Art slots, as for so much of the game she only has one slot, whereas Leena and the others have two or three. Equally this could be because only Fia can activate the Great Magic Arts during battle for herself and all her teammates, so doesn’t really need more slots because she activates the others.
Sometimes Element Orbs combine randomly into making a completely different element type. While the mandatory and secondary short lessons taken in the classroom explain all battle features, the Element Orbs sometimes combine randomly creating a different element to what it logically should. The colour changes are shown in a chart, but there isn’t a way to decide which combinations are allowed in use.
Thankfully with the constant character level ups and learning new spells in the grimoire, it doesn’t matter too much if Elemental Orbs have a mind of their own in battle. In a few button presses unwanted Elemental Orbs can be removed from the Great Magic Arts meter and new ones take their place. Occasionally monsters can decrease the five-slot bar to four, which reduces the amount available, but it rarely happened on Easy difficulty. The same is true for the usual status effect attacks; the positive ones can turn the tide of battle, and there are spells to cure the negative ones. After the initial battle mechanic introduction, battles have a noticeable rhythm to them, and seeing each elemental skill’s colour on the floor move to try to hit an enemy if targeting wasn’t engaged is like watching the world through a kaleidoscope.
