Mado Monogatari: Fia and the Wondrous Academy Game Review – Game Review

Did you know that those cute little slime-things from the Puyo Puyo puzzle games originate from a series of dungeon crawlers from the early 90s? If you didn’t, I don’t think anyone could blame you, since the franchise has only ever had a single western release in its decades-long history. It was called Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God, and it only arrived on Steam in 2018 after being exiled to the PSVita wastelands for five years. Now, interested Western fans finally have the opportunity to check out the dungeon-crawler franchise that helped bring us so many hours of slime-stacking fun, as the latest entry from Idea Factory and developer Sting Entertainment is making its way to the Nintendo Switch and Sony‘s PlayStation 4 and 5. Curiously, the original localized title of Sorcery Saga has been abandoned in favor of simply calling the game Mado Monogatari: Fia and the Wondrous Academy.

Consider this needlessly clunky first impression a sign of things to come.

The gist of Mado Monogatari’s gameplay will be familiar to anyone that has played an old-school dungeon crawler like Etrian Odyssey or any of the Mystery Dungeon spinoffs: With heroine Fia and her party of classmates, you will venture into the randomly generated floors of the various towers and prisons that fill the land surrounding her illustrious academy so you can fight monsters, level up, collect loot, and unlock the challenges that await on deeper floors. This is not a roguelike RPG, so the experience is much more laid back than some of the more hardcore fare that genre fans seek out. The dungeon floors tend to be fairly small and easy to navigate, with monsters that populate the map instead of showing up as random encounters, making it easy to breeze past them to focus on nabbing materials and finding the exit portals to the next floor, should you choose to do so.

While Mado Monogatari’s exploration systems are certainly breezy enough to function as an introduction to this type of game for younger players, I imagine more invested fans will find the simplistic nature of the actual dungeon crawling to be fairly rote. Even the introduction of traps and other hazards in later stages does little to liven up the experience. Unlike past games in the series that I researched before digging into this one, Mado Monogatari eschews grid-based movement for a more freeform style. The drawback of this approach is that most of the traps barely register to you at all, since nothing is stopping you from skirting around or easily dodging most of them until late in the game. It doesn’t help that the graphics and art design for the game are exceptionally bland, meaning that you will get tired of the bare-bones environments and repetitive monster designs long before you exhaust the dozens upon dozens of different dungeon floors you may end up delving into. I played this game on the PS5, but if you’re planning on buying this game for either the PS4 or the Switch, do not worry. I cannot imagine any piece of modern gaming hardware struggling to run a game with visuals that are this basic.

When you do get into a battle, you will find the same degree of quality waiting for you, meaning that the game is very functional, but nothing about it is going to get any but the most ardent fans excited. This iteration of Mado Monogatari goes for a mixture of turn-based and real-time elements, with your party of three heroes battling it out in a small arena with your monster foes and moving about without any hindrance. To do anything but make a basic attack with Fia’s weapon, you will have to wait for her to arrive at her turn in the battle order, which counts down and resets throughout the battle and is based on each character’s speed. This is all well and good, except most of the abilities Fia will use, regardless of whichever of the handful of different classes you decide to equip, are ranged spell attacks. These can be fiddly to properly aim at the right range when enemies and allies are just bouncing around all over the place, even when you opt to use the meager lock-on system. The battles are playable, but they aren’t ever anything more than a chore to get through so you can get back to hoovering up curry ingredients and crafting materials from random dungeon shrubs and rocks.

A lot of the battle system’s issues come from how relatively flat and uninvolved the character progression systems are in this game. Teammate AI can only be customized in the broad sense of how they prioritize using attack skills, healing spells, and so on, and learning the different skills for each character is as simple as equipping new gear, grinding through some battles until the skill is learned, and then swapping out for new gear. Outside of the standard stat boosts that come from leveling up, there is a skill tree of sorts that comes in the form of Fia’s Grimoire, which has you spending LP earned from completed quests and side activities to unlock nodes that give you new spells, new map abilities, upgraded stat blocks, and so on. Just like everything else about Mado Monogatari’s gameplay, the Grimoire is perfectly adequate, but the way the game gates node unlocks based on quest progression makes it feel less like you are making meaningful choices to develop Fia in your way and more like you are simply wading through a different form of linear grinding.

Speaking of Fia’s Grimoire, we should touch on the story of the game that has put all of our characters in this magic academy so they can take all of these classes about Great Heroes and Demon Kings. It is…fine. Perfectly inoffensive, even. Mado Monogatari is not a game that is trying to take itself too seriously, and the adventures of Fia and her classmates reflect the same casual but unremarkable approach that the rest of the game adheres to. Classmates like the studious Leena, the dumb-but-sweet Will, the mysterious Totto, and the oblivious Eska are all simple and well-worn anime tropes walking around in decently appealing skins, thanks to character designer Sunaho Tobe. I will give the game credit for its animated and likeable character sprites, which are the only elements of the game’s visual storytelling that stand out.

My biggest complaint about the narrative in Mado Monogatari comes from its writing, and more particularly its English localization. It’s obvious that, even in Japanese, this is not a script that was ever going to win any prizes for Story of the Year. Even when the story eventually, after many tens of hours, decides to raise the stakes a little bit and explore the truths behind the mysteries that our characters have been uncovering throughout their academic year, the story is never anything more than an excuse for some silly sitcom gags and anime cliches. In English, the story loses a lot of the charm and fun it might have possessed in its native Japanese on account of its dull-as-dishwater translation. The game is chock-full of moments where the localization went with the most literal and lifeless interpretation as possible, leading to conversations that always sound stilted and forced. I can’t speak to how well the callbacks to past games and overall impact of Fia’s adventure speak to the quality of past games, but I can promise that nobody will be walking away from the latest Mado Monogatari raving about its story.

The best way I can describe Mado Monogatari is by comparing it to an especially long and complicated version of the mazes that come on the back of kids’ menus at restaurants that you complete with the stubby little crayons the waiter hopefully remembers to give you. Some effort was put into making it look nice, and you could easily kill a lot of time doodling around the mazes over and over, but it’s not the sort of experience that you arrive at as the main event itself. It’s a cute-ish but mostly corny way to distract yourself and kill some time when you have nothing better to do except wait for however long it takes for your burger to come out.

I did not hate Mado Monogatari: Fia and the Wondrous Academy, but my memories of playing are beginning to fall out of my mind even as I write this review. It isn’t outright broken, and it certainly took up time while I played it and took my notes. If you have nothing better to play while you wait for the next big title to drop on your PlayStation or Switch, then sure, it is better than just sitting there and staring at the wall. Surely, there are better dungeons to delve somewhere out there.