Wii Virtual Console Review: Magician Lord

Developer: ADK (Alpha Denshi)
Publisher: SNK
Console: Neo-Geo
Release Date: April 1990

The evil Gul-Agieze wants to rule the world by awakening the terrible God of Destruction using the 8 Books of Mystical Power. It is up to Elta, the last Magician Lord, to find the 8 tomes and seal away the evil god, forever.

The Neo-Geo controller had four buttons but ADK thought gamers willing to buy this game were mentally-challenged and couldn’t handle so many, so only two are usable. Elta can jump and shoot two slow and microscopic waves of magic at a time. That’s it. You can shoot upwards, while ducking, and downwards if you’re jumping. The enemies move in such bizarre patterns that it doesn’t matter if you can shoot in many directions, you’ll get killed constantly anyway. You just can’t hit everything that’s coming at you and you die after only two hits. After you get hit once you blink for half a nanosecond before you can be hit again, so you basically die every two seconds.



Along the way you’ll find little treasure chests that have crap inside like food that doesn’t replenish your health and jewelry you can’t wear, but they also have one of two magic orbs. Oh boy! One of the orbs can upgrade your wimpy magic shots up to three times, making it less wimpy. The other orb is what makes Elta the raddest Magician Lord ever. It gives him the power to turn into six different forms: a ninja, a fire-breathing man-dragon, some sort of knight, a samurai, a blue watery man, and a brown electric dude. The characters you change into seem to be random and their special skills are not that great. Even worst, you lose the upgrade if you get hit, and you are CONSTANTLY getting hit! It’s fucking pointless. No wonder the Magician Lords are extinct.



All of the eight stages consist of a maze with lots of doors. You have to find the correct door that will lead you to a mini-boss, then you face the stage boss and move on. There are all sort of monsters flying around shooting at you, popping up from the ground or simply materializing where ever you’re standing for an instant death. Even if there were absolutely no enemies it would still take an eternity to finish each level because Elta moves slower than Stephen Hawking without his wheelchair.



Your character’s sprite is big and detailed, but doesn’t animate that well. Backgrounds look pretty good, but the castle wall texture gets old fast. Enemies look like shit, but that’s what they should look like. All the flying flaming skulls, zombies, catwomen, wraiths, and other creatures look pretty good, and the bosses are big and detailed.



Although the graphics is Magician Lord’s highest achievement, the same cannot be said about the sound. The music is forgettable and mostly annoying, and the sound effects are just average. Between boss fight, the evil Gul-Agieze says completely absurd things, and you get to actually hear him speak. The speech quality is not bad, but the broken English is. After all, this is the same development studio that brought us the god-awful Blue’s Journey.

Magician Lord may not be the worst game ever made, but it definitely doesn’t try too hard to be the best. Here’s something to think about: the first Ninja Gaiden was released a year earlier on an inferior console, and that game is so much better in every department. Shame on you, ADK.

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