Shadow Covenant

Finished playing “Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom” this weekend, I got to admit it is a pretty nifty title…

When it came out, I was probably busy with a whole lot of games and I ignored it (although the art always fascinated me)… I picked it up some months ago in a bargain bin, and I managed to play it this last week…

My first reaction is that the game is like Enslaved: a good title lost because of too many games out there and not that much media attention…

“Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom” is a family-friendly third person adventure, in which the player controls one character (the human) and can give some limited commands to the Majin, resulting in a somewhat cooperative gameplay experience.

Thankfully, there’s none of those usual issues in this kind of co-op gameplay (dodgy AIs doing more harm then good, etc)… You actually have to use Majin and his abilities to overcome puzzles and obstacles, which the game has his fair share. Combat is almost secondary, but it requires it to use the Majin… You can do the fights on your own, but they’re extremely hard that way…

The art of the game is gorgeous, giving you the fairy-tale feel that suits the game… Sound and music is good, but some of the dialogues are pretty flaky (thankfully only on the secondary characters, the main characters have decent writing and voicing).

The game follows the structure of a Metroidvania game, in which you acquire powers that allow you to access parts of the game that were previously unreachable.

My only real complaint about the game is the power-up and upgrade system. The upgrades feel “tacked-on”, with no real relevance (they have, I guess, but you don’t feel it). The power up is noticeable when you get back to the starting areas (lots of backtracking on this one), but the game’s difficulty scales up so uniformly with the power-ups that you really don’t feel it as well. The finishing move combos (that you keep getting upgrades) also feels empty and non-important.

All in all, “Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom” is a pretty fun experience, if third-person adventures are your cup of tea… It’s not as “epic” as an Uncharted game, but the story finishes being more emotional and with real fairy-tale moments that I enjoy immensely. 8/10