I eased my way back into reality this past week by playing an absolutely wonderful RPG game, The Witch and The Warrior. It was a rude awakening leaving my beach and heading back to work and hauling my kids to their summer activities, so this bit of non-reality was quite welcome. Since I had thoroughly enjoyed my first foray into this game genre while playing Eridani's Ella's Hope, I was very excited to discover that The Witch and The Warrior had been released.
I have got to say that I enjoyed The Witch and The Warrior even more than her first game Ella's Hope, which I thought was phenomenal. While the graphics in this type of game are a bit "retro," the storyline is captivating and humorous and the gameplay is challenging without being too difficult. If you did not heed my suggestion to give this RPG genre a try with Ella's Hope, then you really need to do so this time around. (I'll break you down eventually!) It's a wonderful change from my usual Time Management games and it's frankly a relief to give my mouse hand a break.
The Witch is a charming young witch named Ember who sneaks away from home to go to Marnethia College Town to go to the Witching College. Along the way, she joins company with The Warrior, a purple-haired warrior student named Anda. They join together with a few other young students to essentially save their world from evil while traveling to different lands, encountering different enemies, and all the way honing their fighting and magic skills. Frankly I am amazed that the developer can actually make me care about these little characters. I'm usually the one who plays through a game and doesn't care that much about the storyline, but this is a game that is so well written that I actually spent the time to read the dialogue.
The Witch and the Warrior offers players several choices of difficulty. I must be getting better at the fighting because I found it a lot easier this time around. I played first in Easy Mode and then again in Normal mode. I highly recommend choosing Easy if you are at all new with this type of game or want to play more quickly. However, be warned that easy is still a bit challenging. It's a great way to get used to this type of game. Be forewarned that if you choose Normal mode, your game will not be auto-saved. I came into quite a rude awakening after playing Easy mode with auto-save and then forgot to save before having a pretty big battle. The good thing is that when you do die, you can just reload a saved game.
I cannot recommend this game highly enough and I've written a guide that includes screenshots and maps of everything with instructions on how to complete all of the sidequests. The developer wrote a strategy guide but did not include information on how to complete all of the optional quests, but you've got that here. So what are you waiting for? Come and join me, Ember, and Anda. It'll be fun!
