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For my first project I chose a game that is relatively short and simple. A Witch’s Tale. A Nintendo DS game created by NIS that experienced a lot of turbulence and hype during its creation. It was supposed to be an action/RPG title although during the last phases of production it was changed into a pure RPG format. As a result the game play experience was extremely hindered by an obviously rushed and repetitive battle system that featured random battles instead of monsters you could run around and avoid. This change was obviously made after the maps were created as the maps are quite large and stretched out – which makes it annoying having to walk across the map. That said, right from the start the game draws you in with atmosphere. The wonderful story, art and soundtrack absolutely make this game an awesome experience if you can ignore the tedious battle system. 

It’s another one of those twisted Alice in Wonderland sort of games with a feel similar to Nightmare Before Christmas. Although the Alice references stop at names and sometimes personalities only. The story itself completely deviates from Carol’s classic work. It’s about a world where the Witches of the underworld – lead by the Eld Witch attempted to take over the surface world due to their jealously. Using their rune magic that laid waste to the world only to be stopped by the mystical Queen Alice whom used their own rune magic against them and sealed them away for good. Now, 1000 years have passed and rune magic is considered forbidden and has been all but forgotten by the general population. All except for a young, ambitious witch named Liddell who wants to become the next best witch – quicker than she can learn in school. So she sets off to find the forbidden magic – however in doing so she accidently released the Eld Witch upon the world again. Now Liddell must work to save the world she doomed by releasing rune magic on the surface world again.

It’s a charming story filled to the brim with great characters – although there are certain places where the plot feels thin. I’m going to seek to fix that problem by extrapolating on the plot already within the game. The game doesn’t really devel deep enough into the pasts of its characters either – why I find said. This game had a lot of potential to be absolutely amazing. I hope to give it that second chance.

My progress will be slow until I finish going through the first and second playthroughs of the game. Since there is not a game script out there I am making one myself to use as reference when creating the script. It’s a looooong process and I’m already 6000+ words into it. Although when the scripts are completed and ready for the voices I figure I can  make this into a 10 episode radioplay. With maybe some added bonuses like an episode focusing on the Great War that occurred 1000 years ago and such. We’ll see. I’d say I’m about 30% done the original scripting process and hope to be at least 70% complete by this weekend. 

Cheers,

Caitlyn Glass ♫