Format: 360
Release: Out now
Publisher: Atari/Bandai Namco
Developer: Softmax

Don’t be fooled by Magna Carta II’s Korean heritage. While artist Hyung-Tae Kim’s character designs, with shrunken heads set atop long, tapering necks and torsos, are idiosyncratic and fresh, this is a Japanese RPG to the bone. To anyone with even the smallest experience of the JRPG form, it’s a clutch of over-familiar tropes fronted by another: Juto, the pubescent, amnesiac lead whose quest to avenge a friend’s death literalises the journey of a young men into adulthood through an endless stream of XP and incremental stat upgrades.

There have been more irritating JRPG protagonists, but the weightlessness of Juto’s character and experience will make both he and his journey difficult to relate to for all but the troubled youngster. His cause is not helped by a vanilla script and some school play production theatrics, full of pregnant pauses that fail to birth interest, something still characteristic of mid-budget JRPG releases. The story’s few twists are so predictable as to rob them of all impact and the archetypes that join Juto’s expectedly ragtag band of companions do little to add pace or spice the narrative, even as the plot beneath lumbers.

It’s no use looking to sidequests for appeal, as these lack the imagination to engage on any level beyond merely chasing after XP and loot. Short fetch quests and dull bounties for ordinary monsters fail to inspire in the way, say, Lost Odyssey’s extra-curricular missions did, their presence seemingly intended to bulk out the game’s length rather than to add depth or interest to its world and inhabitants.

The game’s adherence to tradition carries through to the battle system in the sense that this is the one area of the game where developer Softmax allows itself some freedom to invent. As with so many JRPGs of recent times, while the rusty old game framework may remain resolute, the game’s designers have clearly taken time to create and refine the combat system and, while the results here are unlikely to cause a revolution, they do sparkle when set against the game’s more general mediocrity.

As with Final Fantasy XII, battles are real-time, eliminating both the need for a transition from explorative to combative play and random battles. Initiation is as straightforward as unsheathing your sword and attacking. With every attack a tiredness gauge fills a little, automatically depleting if you take a moment to pause between swings. However, during the heat of a combo it's entirely likely that the gauge will fill completely, at which point your character stalls for a few seconds, unable to act.

To balance the risk with some reward, it’s possible to execute an Overdrive attack while in this wearied state, then switching to one of the other two members of your team to release another. Successfully chaining Overdrive attacks restores your team’s stamina in an instant allowing combat to continue to flow unhindered. But mistime the inputs and your entire team will be temporarily incapacitated, ensuring that every battle ebbs and flows with just enough peril to maintain interest. However, while new skills and summons unlock, the strategy fails to blossom meaningfully over the course of the game, and the rhythm becomes not only repetitive but also dull long before its conclusion.

Sparsely scattered save points, un-skippable animations and cutscenes, and repeated locations and boss fights are anachronisms that will frustrate and alienate all but the most ardent traditionalist. For genre newcomers Magna Carta II’s few charms will be too nested in an awkward, difficult-to-learn idiom to be worth the effort while, for everyone else, Magna Carta’s uninspiring familiarity will breed little more than fresh contempt. [4]