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Mage’s Initiation soon?
You don’t seem to get experience from combat, only stuff, like sellable goods, healing potions, money and so on.
i guess that means ‘experience’ as at its own meter of experience, or it doesn’t really add even to the strength level!?
Experience as in XP points for levelling up the character in order to improve the character. You gain XP through completing quests (or solving puzzles, however you want to see them in a hybrid game like this). You do seem to get XP every time you kill first of any monster but after that, it seems to be just for gathering stuff.
Now that I’ve played the game some more, I have to admit I am not a huge fan of the combat system. I think the devs did much better with their QFG2 remake, here the combat feels like a clumsy attempt in real-time combat, which somehow turned into clumsy arcade combat with pause.
Overall, in comparison to QGF games, Mage’s Initiation seems to be far more linear. You have one main quest open and you can do some additional stuff during them, like helping the townspeople in various tasks.
Pleasantly surprised when this popped up in my inbox. Looking forward to playing….I was on Rogue to Redemption for a while, but the daily time management turned me off quick.
”Ha, ha. Little graveyard humor there.”
Been playing Mage for some time, passed the first level and now in the middle of the second. Have to agree with what tommit said. The world is beautifully drawn with many details, but it still feels way too small, and the game - too linear and uninspired. It’s like they thought: ok, we’ll need your standard town with a standard inn and a marketplace, then your standard forest and desert populated by monsters (and only monsters) so one can gain experience, loot and do some basic fetch quests, plus several closed areas we will open one by one (and then close again), because main quests are solved only in one order. And combat is indeed arcade-based, with running and shooting. I’m playing on the hardest setting and kill everyone by brute force. At this point I only have 4 combat spells, one of them is practically unused.
There is, of course, A LOT OF talking, but characters and dialogues are so sterile that I already feel like skipping them as far as they are not related to the main quests . Now Heroine’s Quest also had long dialogues, but they were so wonderfully written and revealed so much about the inhabitants and the world. Nothing like this here. The game completely lacks wit, even those characters who supposed to be goofy are unfunny. Everyone enjoys talking, but there’s just nothing to discuss in this tiny stale world apart from small gossips or global “philosophical” questions. Also everyone is single for some reason, I have yet to meet a family or a love couple 
Weird. And what about mages regularly sending their students to the same areas to bug its inhabitants just to get something ELSE from them and pass the exam? The very idea that every now and then some idiot arrives to the castle and starts asking a mage in exile for her nails, breath or hair lock is… disturbing).
I feel bad about writing all this, obviously a lot of heart was put into the production. But I have yet to see a glimpse of brilliance (apart from art which is lovely). There are many pure RPGs that easily surpass this one as far as the writing, worldbuilding and puzzle solving go.
PC means personal computer
I did find the story, in general, to be pretty predictable. It doesn’t really have any surprises in as far narrative goes, and it did cross my mind as well about how annoying it would be for the rest of the world to handle all those students you see in the tower.
But, that said, I did find it interesting enough to play it through pretty quickly and some of the dialogue did make laugh out, though admittedly at times because not all of the actors are that good.
I think I’ll play it through again at some point with a different character just to see how it affects the puzzles, but I don’t see myself doing that 4 times in to see all the variations.
My further thoughts about the game: https://playernone.blogspot.com/2019/01/mages-initiation-reign-of-elements-2019.html
We’re also doing a community playthrough of it in the AdventureGamers Discord. Come join us if that sounds interesting to you!
I’ve finished the game. It was fine!
(And I somehow finished it with full points, without even trying. Yay me!)
I liked the world, and the story. It felt interesting, and I liked that little details of mage politics or town rumours ended up factoring into the main plot eventually. The writing, however, was bland, with characters that never felt like actual people and emotional beats that never quite landed. It probably didn’t help that the voice acting rarely ranged above “serviceable”, with the main character veering into “unbearably awful”. (Seriously, what was the idea behind having him sound like such a pompous cunt?)
The graphics were gorgeous, with the exception of those weird cartoon cutscenes which felt completely out of place. The soundtrack was fine, if unmemorable. I’ll spare you the usual rant about how AGS is garbage. (But, well, it really is.)
As a Quest for Glory fan, I was looking forward to the RPG elements, but they felt underwhelming. A lot of that boils down to a combat system that I never really managed to understand. If there were supposed to be interesting action or strategy aspects to it, I never figured them out, and I just went through the game by spamming my main attack spell until the enemies were all dead. I never felt like the stats or the equipped gems really mattered, or even the other combat spells.
Picking your element also has some impact on how you solve some puzzles, but that felt fairly minimal. (I ended up as an Earth mage, because I’m bookish and useless, I guess?) There were just times when the game expected me to use a spell I had, and it felt like another class would just use whatever spell they had, and that’s that. It never felt like the element defined my character the way it clearly defined every single other mage in the game. (Also, there was a weird class-specific side quest that I got dragged into when I least expected it, and then it was over in 3 minutes, leaving me bewildered and wondering what the hell had happened. Let’s all agree never to speak of it again.)
The puzzles were fine. Much like in Himalaya’s (then Tierra, or was it AGDI?) King’s Quest 2 remake, the puzzles felt extremely linear, with everything having to be done in order, which necessarily makes them pretty easy. Still, there were a few fun ones, and no awful clunker. I also enjoyed the big investigation around the second act (both the compulsory part and the optional extras), even if it wasn’t particularly challenging.
At the end of the day, the game was pretty good; I’m glad I’ve played it. I’ll probably replay it someday with another class, but I expect the differences to be minimal enough that I don’t feel the urge to do it right now. And I’m definitely game for a sequel; hopefully, that won’t take another 6 years to happen!
3.5/5
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