Mado Monogatari is the JPRG property that gave the world the Puyos – the cute little blobs that form the basis of the Puyo Puyo series. We don’t get many of the Mado Monogatari titles out west, though (as far as I know the only one is actually Sorcery Saga back on the PlayStation Vita). So this release of Fia and the Wondrous Academy is an interesting curiosity, and one that has more heritage than you might have realised at first glance. The best way to describe it is “fun.”
We obviously talk a lot about fun in video games – it is one of the core objectives of most of them, after all – but rarely do we see the efforts at delivering fun quite so distilled as we do with Mado Monogatari. The plot, for a start, is absolutely bonkers. Every second line is some kind of joke or pun, and while that comes at the expense of things like characterisation and worldbuilding, you would be doing it a disservice to say that it wasn’t fun.
As the subtitle suggests, you play as Fia, who is, to put it in the nicest possible terms, an absolute idiot. She’s a newly recruited student at an academy, and she rocks up for her first day on the wrong day. They admit her anyway, and then at the entrance ceremony, she accidentally kickstarts a series of events that could be charitably described as “resulting in shenanigans and chaos.” Fia then makes friends with some of her classmates and they start going on adventures together, but the game is by no means Persona and generally uninterested in giving any of these characters a personality beyond what can be utilised for the next joke or pun.
The main purpose of all those puns is to drive you into the dungeons, and you won’t generally be waiting long between trips into Mado Monogatari’s roguelike spaces. These dungeons play out like every other classic roguelike you might have played while exploring – randomly generated rooms and hallways with plenty of traps and enemies to threaten you.
What’s different is the combat side of things. Most roguelikes opt for a simple turn-based combat system: You swing at the enemy, and if they survive, they get to take a swing back at you. Mado Monogatari opts for an action combat system instead, with enemies and your allies moving freely around an area while they wait for their attack cooldowns to reset. You can launch a wide range of magical attacks, each with their own quirks, areas of effect, strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, the combat system is Mado Monogatari’s greatest weakness, for the simple reason that the combat is a little too chaotic and messy. It can be hard to keep track of what’s going on when so much of what you do in combat is handled through a menu system that isn’t totally intuitive to wade through. It’s not the most challenging JRPG you’ve ever played, but more than a few times I had characters running out of health because I simply couldn’t monitor everything that was going on while also grappling with the menu system.
On the plus side, a simple but effective skill tree that dispenses with new skills and abilities at a good rate, and the fact that you can play as four different classes, does mean that the action has nice variety, even if there’s nothing in here that you wouldn’t have seen in plenty of other JRPGs in the past.
Outside of the dungeon crawling there are a limited few things you can do back at the academy, including gardening, fishing and cooking. None of these are going to concern the developers of the Story of Seasons series, but they do provide a nice pause from the action.
There’s really not much else to Mado Monogatari. A lot of it is very standard genre fare, and as most people have played at least one Mystery Dungeon title in the past, you know what you’re going to get… at least in terms of how it plays. What distinguishes Mado Monogatari is its extreme enthusiasm and relentless humour. With a joyful art style, hugely entertaining character design and a painfully catchy and exuberant soundtrack, Mado Monogatari ends up being more memorable than it has any right to be. It’s been a stressful couple of weeks for me with an almost overwhelming workload, but whenever I loaded this up I found myself smiling and relaxed almost immediately afterwards.
