rine

Stuck in the backlog of games

Living in Korea, blogging about games, TTRPGs, and other things I want to fixate on.

PFP credit to: https://twitter.com/Seharuuchan


Spellcaster University store art, depicting a tower-like magical school with various wizards and creatures flying around.

I completed this a while ago, but may as well transport my thoughts on this game over here. While it may get reposted to my 'review' account, remember I'm mostly just talking about a game I completed and what I thought it did well or poorly. Also: Sorry in advance if the screenshots are a bit...off. For some reason, no matter the setting this game had really bad jaggies on the models, and the varying resolutions of screenshots was me trying to fix that.

(Perpetual thanks to This post for the template idea)

Summary

Spellcaster University can best be described as a semi-roguelike, SimTower-like, deck-using-like game. It tries to do a lot of different things at different times, but by far the strongest comparison at a glance and style-wise is SimTower itself. In essence, you are the head wizard of a wizard school, in a similar vein to the series that shall not be named. You will attract students, teach them magic, they graduate and give you bonuses based on what job they end up with. You have to pay for maintenance, salaries, deal with events randomly, and build more and more of the school.

Story wise, there is a background about an evil lord who rises up every so often, and people got the dates wrong so he's 'early' this time. This mostly is in the background and serves as a timer. When you're playing through story mode, you pick a location, which has various benefits and problems, and you play through that location. The Evil Lord shows up after a certain amount of time, affected by various choices/difficulty/events/etc, and ends that location. This is the 'rogue-like' element to a degree. A story mode has you making several new schools from scratch, kind of like a story mode in an RTS, but some things carry over.

Each location will give you three quests, and when you get chased out and have to start anew, you get to pick permanent bonuses for the rest of the campaign. The power of the bonus depends on how many of the quests you completed. You also get permanent penalties that also follow you the rest of the game. You can select from some options, but the game is iffy on balance as I'll discuss in the other sections, so some bonus/penalties are way better based on how much they actually affect you.

The quests for each location you pick don't vary that much. You will always get two pulled from the general pool, and sometimes three. Sometimes the third is specific to your location, like pleasing the Sphinx or making friends for the local zombies. The first two are always either graduate X students of a certain job, gather a large amount of mana of a specific type, get a lot of money, or get a faction relationship near max. This can vary from super easy (faction relationships are just clicking the right button when you get a chance, and then after it hits 90 you can ignore it), and entirely random (jobs of students can be leaned on to go certain ways, and the game always selects a job for a quest if its available to that student, but its still -heavily- random based on how the student studies).

The Story mode's last stage is always a turtle, and you still get quests for...some reason? Regardless your actual quest is to either build a barrier (requires random cards from each deck), or complete a long series of quests, which can be made easier if you picked other locations during the game. It can be pretty random, and one of the achievements is to beat the story mode on hard which does not let you retry this stage.

So on to game play, since the Story just affects what happens between stages. When you start each location, you'll be given a few basic cards (dormitory, mess hall, etc), some money, and new student cards. New students can either be acquired by playing these cards, or automatically each semester. You can see their traits, and assign them to houses that you created. Each house grants students two traits as well. As you play, student selection can be altered by items or choices you make, and you can get non-human students as well, which are just outright better than human students (and far more adorable).

Note I keep saying 'cards' when referring to things, because the game does not let you just buy rooms to put down. Instead, you use resources to draw cards from a deck. Initially you only have money, and the deck you draw from with money has random low-value things from the other decks, or generic rooms. Some initial choices when dealing with events will also give you mana or free cards. When students study in a classroom, the magic school associated with it is also associated with a mana color. You can use that mana to draw from the associated deck, which will give you more specialized rooms, along with artifacts, gear, creatures, etc associated with that mana type. Each time you draw from a deck, you get three (or two with some penalties) choices, and the cost for drawing goes up.

Some cards interact differently than just giving you a room to place. You can put down artifacts that give bonuses to that room or people in it, creatures that wander the hall for various effects, and there is an entire sub-menu for when things give you alchemy ingredients to make potions. There are also event-only cards, like the jousting ring, tied to series of events which can give you various bonuses/penalties.

The other thing that demands your attention is the faction screen. Occasionally you can contact local factions to improve relations or ask them for favors (at the cost of said reputation). Sometimes these are related to quests, but usually there's just bonuses for having a faction have high reputation, like more mana gain or getting to skip events.

There are events that happen occasionally that demand your attention, such as a local faction wanting something from you. They usually require a choice, and you can have more options if you have certain rooms or resources available. Most events you can't pause though, and purposely trying to have some things available is sometimes impossible if you just can't draw the card from the deck. This can be frustrating for events tied to quests, like location-specific factions.

In the end though, eventually your students will graduate, and be given a career. The career they are given can give you wildly different bonuses, affecting school prestige (which affects how many students show up each semester), to giving you free cards, money/mana, or the like. This can also be tied to one of your quests for the map as stated above, meaning graduation can be frustrating if students keep not qualifying for the jobs you need them to. When the game ends, all students are immediately graduated with their current stats for whatever career they qualify for.

The Good

Art The game is adorable. The art style is solid and cartoony enough that it is seriously enjoyable to watch all the students run around, jousting each other on unicorn back, running away from fires, practicing various magic schools and the like.

Game Flow Per region, the game flows pretty well. Start up, draw some cards, get your quest, aim to complete those goals, deal with events, talk to factions, get near the end where cards are more expensive and try to get those last few points for quests, then see your summary and pick bonuses/penalties for the next map.

The Bad

PC Resources Good god this game is a memory hog. It isn't graphically pretty enough to need this much, and even starting a new map takes ages. It might be my ancient PC, but I run other more graphically heavy/resource intensive games much better.

Repetition By the end of the first campaign, you are probably starting to feel a little bit of same-yness in the game, let alone the two playthroughs required for completion or more. A lot of the quests are the same, you get the same events quite often, draw the same cards from decks. You would not notice at all if the game didn't make you start new universities every hour or so of game play.

The Meh

Does it even matter? An iffy one, but at some point in my first playthrough, I started to wonder if a lot of what I was doing even mattered. I stopped caring about which house I put students in, traits they got, and a lot of the more nuanced game play functions. It didn't even seem to affect me that much, so I'm not sure how much effect things had, since a lot of traits are just 'learns a skill faster'.

No need for repeat game play When you finish the first story campaign you do, you have basically seen all the game has to offer. If you beat it on hard mode, you likely have every achievement in the game as well. There are optional challenges that add more cards to the decks, but that's of dubious value and well...you've already seen everything the game offers. Why bother?

The Completion

Most of the 100% completion milestones for this game you pick up in a single playthrough of the game. Hell, if you played it on hard (which the achievement is super-vague on, but is just a higher difficulty, none of the challenges), you might get them all. None of them were particularly out of their way, a few you'd have to purposely do (like every single dragon at the same time in your school), but nothing too bad.


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in reply to @rine's post:

Oh feel free to steal it, I stole it from the linked post for a solid intro, and I loved how the tabs help to keep things from requiring a massive 'read more'. Still ironing out the kinks though, but I'm not a CSS guru, I just copy and adjust.