![]() ![]() It’s the exact same set-up as Idea Factory’s Dragon Star Varnir, but where Dragon Star offered a narrative that was often deep (sometimes surprisingly so) in the way that it played on fairy tale traditions and the strong feminist theme that it has running through it, WitchSpring3 offers exactly what you’d expect from a mobile game. In WitchSpring3, you play as a witch that has hidden herself away in a forest to avoid the hostile soldiers of the human realm from coming after her. It didn’t help that I’ve played the same basic concept in a much better form recently. ![]() The narrative, thin as it is, didn’t do much to endear me to the game either. Rather than a cohesive, coherent artistic vision, the game feels like it’s just a bunch of high-engagement “best practices” mashed up together, and while it all works, it also all left me a little cold. ![]() Basically, what I’m driving at here is that I could feel all the mechanics of WitchSpring3 at work as I played. And then there’s the combat system, which, though it allows the use of stuff that you’ve been alcheming up, has a tonal dissonance with much of the rest of the game. This is cumbersome in the extreme (there is nothing wrong with the way other games simply let you level up characters), and becomes yet another system to grapple with. You’ll use those materials to alchemy up things, but naturally, the really good things require incredibly rare materials, so the grind can be quite extensive (another mobile quality – at least, to this level of excess).īut then there’s the dating game-style levelling up system, where, every so often, you need to set tasks from a menu of them to improve various stats. You’ll go out and collect materials from the world, either by fighting enemies or picking them up from the environment (Atelier-style), and those items will have countdowns before you can pick them up again (an arbitrary restriction that is a hold-over from the mobile game). None of that has been stripped out of WitchSpring3, and that’s to the game’s detriment. However, mobile games are built in particular ways, and these days generally have a massive wealth of systems that are layered on top of one another to prioritise engagement. Sometimes this can work – the recent Shadowverse on Nintendo Switch is a great example of that. It was a mobile game before getting a premium adaptation for the Switch console. ![]() The game’s a mess otherwise, though, and that’s deeply unfortunate. There’s the germ of a good idea in there, and as someone that loves Atelier and JRPGs that respect your time, I loved that this one was a brief experience of a few dozen hours (at most), and had a particular focus on alchemy mechanics. Unfortunately, WitchSpring3 is simply not a good game. ![]()
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