12 year old me would have devoured this game, but current me can only appreciate it. A follow-up to the RTS JRPG Nintendo DS game Lost Magic, Takt of Magic is one of those rare Wii projects that embraced the potential of the Wii Remote; in this case, to draw runes for casting magic spells. I love a game that thinks of a unique gameplay mechanic, then develops the entirety of its being in service to that mechanic. In that sense, Tact of Magic pushes the idea of "draw runes to cast spells with motion controls" as well can be imagined, and shows the strengths and practical limitations of the concept.

There’s a real barrier to motion-based types of play, namely, that humans are not used to drawing specific gestures with their whole arm. In any game, it's frustrating to have a simple concept in mind and struggle to execute it as gameplay. Relying on Wii-era handwriting recognition technology makes that feeling worse. Even if Wii Remotes were perfect motion trackers, (which they are not), there is an input learning curve present separate from merely learning a new game's mechanics and eccentricities.

For Takt of Magic, that input learning curve is the entire appeal of this game. Do you draw simple C or Ʌ sigil, because they are easy to execute? Or do you try for @ or M runes that are more powerful, but more time consuming to write and prone to error? What order you chain runes together dictates what spells you cast, and how accurately you trace their form dictates their potency. Memorizing these 70+ spells, their uses, and being able to quickly, successfully call upon them in battle really did give me moments where I felt like a wizard in a kind of role playing that selecting button prompts from menus just can't replicate.

And the spell variety is great! You have "basic" spells like blowing gusts of wind and throwing fireballs, but the game surprised me with the care that had gone into the rest of its physics. Earth spells could conjure walls for corralling enemies and blocking environmental traps, with advanced versions capable of raising sections of the level’s floor geometry. I loved that spells had utility for controlling space as much as they did for directly dealing damage, or that water spells could heal or affect terrain depending on how you combined them with the other elements.

It's a damn shame the game, moment to moment, isn’t that fun to play, even as I understand the decisions that lead to these results. Time doesn’t stop while you’re trying to cast spells, so simple interactions can go south quickly due to mis-inputs by the player or the controller. I found this frustrating at first, after being accustomed to time-stopping radial menus from the PS2 era forward. I eventually realized if time did stop, you’d become aware of the fact that this action could be a button press on a radial menu, which would defeat the entire purpose of this game’s appeal. So spell casting has to happen in real time to maintain the disbelief.

With real time casting a necessity for maintaining the fantasy, the game becomes balanced around this motion-based input method, which means all character speeds are set to mosey. Successful runes take precious seconds to draw, and that’s assuming you didn’t mess up a couple times first, need a moment or two to recenter the cursor, accidentally cast something else, or plain forget which combination of ϟ and C you were trying for in the first place. Even if you are good at art, fencing, and video games, you will struggle to be a good wizard in this game. So to account for some of this, everything happens at a speed slow enough for you to react. Which never feels slow enough when you're overwhelmed in battle, but feels like an eternity when waiting for your characters to shamble across the map.

Slow character movements introduce a second problem and solution - why not just spam the easiest spells to draw, since attempting to learn the complicated runes and combinations is so prone to error? The developer’s answer was to include a time limit on every stage, which is the cheapest kind of difficulty adjustment that I absolutely hate. Weak, easy to draw spells are spammable, but under a time limit, it becomes more enticing to try the stronger, harder to cast spells, where one success could possibly make up for a failure. On one hand, I appreciate that the developers didn’t constrain player choice by making enemies only susceptible to specific spells. On the other, it is agonizing to repeat a 12 minute stage when you were steps away from victory.

In my rating system, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game. Takt of Magic has moments of fun, but those are punctuations between feelings of frustration and tedium. I feel confident giving it a C+ rating at 2.5 stars by how complete a package the game is as a product. There’s a full JRPG trope of a story campaign with two drastically different endings, multiple epilogues for side characters, and dozens of unlockable standalone missions. Though long since dead, the game even featured a full online mode that allowed for both vs. and co-op missions, a rarity for the Wii system.

I played this game via fan translation, thanks to the wonderful efforts of prolific translator Brand Newman. There were multiple times I could feel the English script scraping against the hard character limit to which fan translations are bound, but I had no difficulty finishing both endings. (And let me tell you, there are ZERO online English resources for this game, and only one Japanese let’s play of the game I could find on YouTube.) I feel bad this game flopped so hard - maybe if Nintendo Directs had become a concept two years sooner, this game would have had a chance. The 12 year old within me still adores it, and I wish I still had 12 year old me’s patience for this game’s flaws to truly love it.