digibutter.nerr

[Medikoopa]

It is a very odd game. I first did not look into it as I thought it was just a repeat of Magic Pengel: The Quest for Color, but it turned out to be a different game altogether.

For those who never played it, Magic Pengel was a turn-based RPG. In it, you drew your own monsters (or purchased blueprints from NPCs and either used them as they were or made modifications to it as you deemed fit). Everything was cell-shaded and every time you beat a monster, you won color-crystals, which you could use to make new monsters/modifications to your monsters or trade them for Gold Crystals, which was the currency of the game. But you never saw your own character's face, even in the battle sequence.

The monsters in Magic Pengel had a rock-paper-scissors system when it came to monster types. The types were Attack, Block, and Magic, which was determined by the colors you used. The types of battle commands were the same, except with the added choice of charge, which served as a sort of HP-Restore. The system worked as follows: Attack > Block > Magic > Attack. All > Charge. However, there were block-type skills which could deflect attack or magic skills. And if the barrier was hit by the type it was not deflecting, then it broke and the blow was landed. I won't go any deeper in this or I will confuse you all.

The plot of Magic Pengel was that the player is suddenly thrust into this world where humans with pure hearts have the power to make drawings come to life. The King was taking the color that people won in official tournaments and your new friends are miffed about that. Turns out that the King is evil and wants to get the pure-hearted Pengel users to make monsters to serve him and the evil king is pressuring your two friends because their dad who was able to make drawings live too would not work for the King. But this is quite different from the plot of the 'sequel', Graffiti Kingdom.

In Graffiti Kingdom, you still draw your monsters and you can acquire others, but the king is not evil and neither are there tournaments. Instead, you are the prince of the benevolent rulers whose castle and city have been twisted into the palace of a demon who you accidentally unleashed when you discovered the hidden Graffiti Wand and goofed around with it, making a blob that bounced onto the demon's 2-D form and unlocked the seal which kept him a 2-D drawing on the wall.

Instead of a battle-system much like its predecessor, Graffiti Kingdom has a 3-D world in which you walk about with the character quite visible on the screen, unlike the First Person view in Magic Pengel's world outside the battle sequences. You can take on the form of monsters whose cards you have collected by taking on borrowing their form with the Wand's Capture-power (this acts like a disguise spell which lets you know the enemy's skills before you kick its rear and thus gain the card that allows you to take on the form whenever you want).

Like RPGs, your character can level up. Leveling up unlocks new skills and functions which you can apply to your monsters. Example: You start off with Legs, Arms, Curves, and Motionless parts. Within a short while, you can apply spinning parts to your monsters. Wings are definitely not avalible at the start, but once you reach the level that you can, your monster-forms can fly if you assign the function to a body part. Unlike Magic Pengel, you can choose the combat skills your monster has and even its voice and moving style. You can make any sort of monster you can think of, from slimes to demons to twenty legged horses. Anything you can think up, it is possible to create.

So far, Graffiti Kingdom is fun and much better than Magic Pengel, in my opinion.

I give it an 9/10. I would had given it a 10, but music's driving me nuts in this area. So repetitive... And the intro was completely non-interactive and the dog-doodle that was hopping around was annoying me.