The bad: Tons of text may deter those who are not inclined to read. The disorganized presentation is bound to confuse players. Like The Sims, there are no set objectives to attain.
The tally: 7 / 10
About the Game
When you start a new game, you first create your character. From the outset, the number of options that are open to you is large, and the text that you have to wade through is sizeable. This is a precursor of things to come. The world of Academagia is rich and detailed, and to present it without graphics requires an impressive amount of text.
Once you’ve created your character, you are ready to live life as a first-year student of wizardry one day at a time. The core gameplay consists of tweaking your schedule for the current day and confirming your orders when you are done. By default, a typical day of school consists of two periods of class and one period of rest. You don’t have to stick to the suggested schedule. In fact, you may cut classes if you like, but if you do it too often, you’ll be risking detention.
Upon confirming your schedule, your actions will be resolved, and you will be presented with a number of events as well as several options for reacting to each situation. The color of the text indicates how likely you are to succeed with any given option. Green means that you will succeed. Blue indicates a high chance of success. Black means that you have an even chance of success or failure. Red indicates that you will probably fail, and purple means that you will almost certainly fail. The last two color codes aren’t particularly intuitive to me. I would have thought that purple would indicate a low chance of success and that red would refer to almost certain failure, not the other way around.
Your chance of success is determined by what skill is involved in any given option and your level in that skill. Skills are made up of several sub-skills, each of which has its own level. Your level in any given skill is determined by your level in the sub-skills that comprise it. I’ve counted fifty skills in my one play-through, although there may be more. Academagia reveals only the skills that you have at the start of the game or that you attempted to use during the course of your life as a first-year student. I never bothered to count the number of sub-skills that I’ve seen, but trust me, there are a lot.
Typically, you raise your sub-skill levels by training in them, which is one of the many actions that you can engage in during the day. When you raise enough of your sub-skills by a level or more, the skill under which these sub-skills fall will improve as well. There are other ways for you to raise a sub-skill, such as training on the job or going to some forbidden school of magic.
Six of the skills in the game are academic courses of study. Apart from training in those skills, you have to study them separately. Studying an academic skill will help you pass your exams but won’t improve your proficiency in that skill. In other words, studying will improve your theoretical knowledge, but training will improve your practical knowledge. Thankfully, there are no sub-skills that you have to study for. Instead, you study for the academic skill itself.
The way the sub-skills are organized under each skill is far from intuitive. For example, if you’re looking for the Artisan sub-skill, you probably would not think to look for it under the Sabotage skill unless you’ve been playing Academagia for quite a while. To cite another example, you probably would not think to look for the Patience sub-skill under the Malice skill, but there it is. I have no doubt that the designers have their reasons for choosing which skills to put each sub-skill under, but the result is confusing to those playing Academagia for the first time or so.
Apart from skills, your character will get to learn spells. Learning a spell requires that you first learn all the “phemes” that comprise that spell. Phemes are the building blocks of spells. Once you’ve learned all the phemes of a spell, you learn the spell as well. Spells can give you bonuses on your skills, so before you attempt to use a particular skill, you may want to cast a spell that will enhance it. You can learn phemes by attending classes, although there are many other ways that you can learn them. Neither the manual nor the game lists the spells that are available or the phemes that comprise them, so you are left on your own to discover what they are.
During the course of the game, you may want to build friendships with other students. Doing so will grant you bonuses in the skills in which they excel and will open up new opportunities for adventuring with them.
You are also bound to meet other students who will rub you the wrong way. During my play through, there was one student in particular who bullied my character often and caused him undue stress. I was so irritated with that bully that I attempted to harm her with my spells. None of the actions of first-year students are lethal, though, so I just wound up wasting time that I could have spent more productively on my training or adventures. I’m sure there is a lesson to be learned from this experience, one that can apply to real life as well.
The 2D graphics in the game are spartan, consisting of static pictures of the students, faculty, and environs. There are no animations here as all the action is illustrated through words. There are no sound effects in this game, although it does have some Baroque music. The music and artwork suggests that the world of Academagia is like a fantasy version of the European Renaissance period, unlike the modern times of Harry Potter's world.
Although I’ve played through Academagia only once, I’m impressed with the sheer variety of events that my character experienced. I’m pretty sure that I’ve barely scratched the surface of what a student of wizardry may undergo in this game. Academagia is a work of love, and it shows in the quality and volume of the writing. Despite the simplicity of the core mechanics, the game is oddly compelling, rather like a novel that you can’t bring yourself to put down even though it’s way past your bedtime.
Room for Improvement
A text-based game like Academagia has plenty of room for improvement. The most obvious one would be to present the game primarily through animated graphics with sound effects instead of just text. With the power of modern desktop computers, the designers missed out on an opportunity to engage players through many sensory levels.Nevertheless, the biggest improvement in my opinion would be to reorganize the system of skills and sub-skills to make them more intuitive to find and use. As a role-playing system, Academagia is a mess. Re-engineering the fundamental mechanics of the game would go a long way toward making it less confusing to use.
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