The Legend of Dark Witch (3DS)
If you take the run and gun platformer action of Mega Man, the upgrade system of Gradius, and the character design approach of Touhou, you’ll end up with the game The Legend of Dark Witch for 3DS. That’s some impressive DNA to be built on and a fairly unique combination of elements, but with every advantage it takes from its predecessors, Dark Witch seems to carry over some of the faults as well.
Set in a world where humans draw on powerful Syega crystals for the magic that makes up the basis of their society and technology, the god/dark witch Zizou Olympia notices that all the Syega in an unspecified country has been stolen, setting off to try and find answers on who is responsible. From here, the player is given a choice of six levels to tackle as they please, each one a run and gun platforming stage that culminates in a fight with a cute anime girl with unique magical powers. There is a loose justification for why Zizou is tracking down each girl, that being she suspects they might know something about Syega or who might have stole it, but it’s clear the designers just wanted to make the characters and levels they wanted to. Zizou and the boss do at least have chats before they battle, but you never really hear any helpful information about the plot if they do have it and the translation isn’t too good in places, most obvious in the case where one character’s name switches between Sola and Sora. In some ways, the reduced emphasis on plot and characters in favor of visual design ties into the Touhou comparison, where cute character design is often not backed up by the characters having a lot of substance, but having buff fire-breathing snowmen and flying armadillos as obstacles does make the game a bit more delightful.
The Legend of Dark Witch’s aesthetic may draw you in, but it’s the gameplay that it intends to hook you with. Most levels follow a fairly similar structure, starting first with an odd transitional zone where the background is sparse and enemies are drawn from the same basic pool. These areas are rarely ever challenging, but they are important though, primarily because it lets you start building up your meter before you get into the level proper. The Legend of Dark Witch is a run and gun platformer, but you start off every level slow and weak. Every enemy you shoot will give you some Tres power to fill up a bar, and depending how much energy is in that bar, you can install a certain type of upgrade. Zizou’s bar is consistent across levels, divided into segments for Speed, Wing, Line, Comet, and Power, and while there is a second character you can unlock, their bar also shares the emphasis on choosing whether or not mobility or strength is the more important focus for your upgrades. Most spots on this upgrade bar can be installed more than once, with the boost they provide greater and greater on each install and the player able to unlock the ability to install them even more if they find hidden Syega in the levels. Speed, despite being the most boring install, is quite essential, as you start off moving much too slow and boss battles will often ask you to be able to move around quickly to avoid damage. Wing is a unique upgrade that lets your slow your fall for more precise jumping, but it doesn’t feel quite as necessary as Speed and it is again a distraction from making your shots more effective. Line and Comet are Zizou’s two shot types, Line focusing on a single forward shot that can be upgraded to fire more shots in a fan-like spread and Comet launching a small projectile that can be upgrade to have more blasts shoot out and converge at a point. The secret character has a similar choice between two shot types, but both seem to start off with the favored, more effective shot and the other almost seems to be a punishment for sloppy installing. Comet isn’t bad, but Line is easier to use and benefits more from being powered up, and if you choose to switch between Comet or Line at any time, you lose all the power you’ve put into one and have to start from scratch with the other. During a boss fight this can be annoying if it happens by accident, especially with the secret character’s incredibly gimmicky second shot type. It’s just a matter of hoping you can switch back to the other shot before you are killed, because while dying does clear all your installs, it will leave your shot type on whatever it was last. Thankfully, most bosses can be handled with just a single speed upgrade and some smart movement in the worst case scenario.
Once you leave the transitional area that begins a level, you enter whatever location you’ve selected for real. Unique enemies, appropriate visual backdrops, and a movement gimmick is usually what you can expect during these portions, and while you’ll definitely want to keep killing baddies to install more in anticipation of the boss, the difficulty you selected is going to be affecting things heavily here. Normal mode certainly seems like the intended mode of play, even though it is quite challenging for something given the baseline difficulty name. On Normal mode, enemies do not drop health, meaning this portion of a level is all about carefully getting past obstacles and foes to ensure you have enough health to face the boss. You have multiple lives in each level and they are refreshed on entering a new stage, but lose them all and you have to replay it, meaning that you’ll want to come to the boss with a lot of power and health if you don’t want to go through it all again. However, Easy mode robs the game of almost all its challenge. Enemies drop health, bosses only take a few hits to kill even by a weak shot, and the level design really doesn’t put up a good fight without the threat of death and damage being so high. Most of your advancement in The Legend of Dark Witch is hopping around, shooting whatever enemy might be ahead in the hopes they don’t hit you first. While this portion of the game certainly pulls on the Mega Man style of play, its navigational gimmicks rarely put up much of a fight and the enemies are a bit too simple to require you to change up your tactics, meaning that you need that fear of failure to push it into something more interesting.
The bosses are definitely the main draw. Their fights are all about learning the small selection of moves they have and how to dodge them so you can stick around and deal enough damage to defeat them, but every boss has a shot type they’re weak to in order to make them easier. After defeating a boss, you get a special power you can use in other levels that draws on the same energy that your upgrade bar uses. Just shooting a boss will give you Tres power so you aren’t ever running on empty during the fight, but in the regular stage, there’s basically no reason to use these powers. Every enemy is easily dispatched with your basic shot or not worth the trouble taking care of with a special weapon, and draining your upgrade meter isn’t really worth it for these fairly situational skills. They can kill a boss quickly or cancel one of their attacks if used properly, but a lot of them are slow, move oddly, or are only good in close range, and boss enemies are some of the few foes who will even give you the chance to use them without jeopardizing your health. It’s better to think of them as a supplement, for the basic shooting and the balance of trying to keep your power-ups is thrilling without needing to integrate these special weapon types into the regular play.
A rather interesting addition is that, between levels, you can upgrade your character based on how much Tres power you’ve collected in the levels. Here you can upgrade how much Tres is collected from firing at an enemy, how much health or lives you have in a level, you can increase the baseline of power for your standard shots, and you can make your special abilities better, not that they will get to the point they overcome their general incompatibility with level design. There are even unlockables outside of the main game that can give you extra power to help make the more challenging difficulties a bit easier to handle, because The Legend of Dark Witch certainly puts up a fight. On Easy it’s a cakewalk, but every bit of damage comes with consequence on harder difficulties, and you will have to learn to anticipate what’s up ahead, the game even putting in booby traps that will hurt you if you just hope blindly firing ahead will keep you safe from incoming enemies. There is a block ability in the game, but it only activates if you press right or left at the moment you’re hit. Trying to block on purpose is a bit ridiculous as it means you’ll lose precious health if you don’t hit the small window to activate, and since a lot of dodging involves jumping or moving about, it’s too risky to try and activate on purpose and you’ll likely just get blocks by accident. Had blocking been a more conscious and easily executable action, the combat in general could have been a more advanced affair with more approaches than either dodging and shooting or using a boss’s weakness as fast as you can. These aren’t actually poor ways of structuring the boss battles, but if the blocking mechanic had been executed well, it might have opened up some opportunities instead of being an accidental relief when you activate it while just trying to dodge normally.
THE VERDICT: The main thing holding The Legend of Dark Witch back from greatness is a lack of refinement. It’s got the exciting run and gun action and challenging bosses of Mega Man but the level design is a bit too simple to explore your powers in. The Gradius-style upgrade bar gives a sense of progression in each level and asks the player to be thoughtful in their approach, but some of its upgrades are too important or almost traps. Thankfully the Touhou-like focus on cute girls with magical powers helps make the worlds more interesting, even if it doesn’t have the substance to make it a game greater than its gameplay. The Legend of Dark Witch is a basic blend of these inspirations that has yet to figure out how to truly integrate them to best complement each other, but there is still enough strength in the individual mechanics to ensure that, on anything but Easy, skill is rewarded and boss fights are excellent challenges of your ability management.
And so, I give The Legend of Dark Witch for 3DS…
A GOOD rating. It feels a bit like Inside System is feeling out what works in The Legend of Dark Witch. Managing precious Tres and health resources in a stage is an interesting addition to the run and gun gameplay, but that gameplay needs to be better explored to prove interesting on its own. It’s mostly a procession of enemies broken up by a few platforming oddities but nothing that effects navigation all that much. If your character’s base speed was already equivalent to what it is after one Speed power-up, the upgrade meter would already be much better, but at least it does not make you feel helpless if you have no Tres except, of course, when you accidentally install the secondary shot type.
The Legend of Dark Witch will often find a good rhythm before it suddenly stumbles on one of the faults in its combination of ideas. On the whole it makes for an enjoyable experience but one that fails to reach its potential. It’s a fun take on the Mega Man design ethos with enough different in its construction to avoid being a clone, building a solid base that hopefully the sequels improve upon.