Gothic wa Mahou Otome

 

Microtransactions, archetypal anime girls and an overload of monetary systems are enough alarm signs that the game should be nothing more than a product to shamelessly steal the money from the average otaku. Though since a game is not what it seems to be, but rather what it actually happens to be, a small peek at the mobile game "Gothic Wa Mahou Otome" immediately reveals its quality as an action game, where the tactile control in combination with shooting game mechanics gives birth to one of the greatest exemplars of the aesthetic capability of movement in the genre.

The key of its success is in the scoring system. To obtain points, naturally a player has to hit the enemies in a stage. However, numerous variables are added that let the player increase their score. Firstly, the avatar is surrounded by a visible ring for the player, which extends its radius if they keep shooting down enemies. If the target is within this circle, the power of the shot is increased, and with that the score of the player. Additionally, if the player keeps hitting enemies continuously to enemies without getting hit themself, the score multiplier will increase. Thus, the player is met with an apparently contradictory objective: To keep themself near the objective that it wishes to attack, and to avoid crashing onto them or their bullets. In this way, the player is unavoidably subject to decide constantly in the best course of action to increase their score.

It is through this that the mechanics of the game acquire higher relevance. The higher the ranking that the player gets at the end of each level, which relies on the score, chaining of hits or amount of taken hits, the higher is the amount of resources such as money to buy temporal upgrades, and through this the player has an incentive to improve their performance to continue with the game in the most difficult stages. Furthermore, the higher difficulties, which hand out the best resources, consist of an immediate response from the enemies, with bullets of them in retaliation that are directed towards the position of the avatar to force them to distance themself from their target.

All of these elements in conjunction conform a frenzy where the player is encouraged to master the system to continue and take decisions in seconds, in order to fully take the attention of the player to their surroundings. To enhance the action through chaining mechanics had already been explored by director Tsuneki Ikeda in his previous titles, particularly his 2002 masterpiece "DoDonPachi DaiOuJou". Even though this title doesn't have the trance that comes from a complete and continuous adventure that arises in a traditional arcade game, where defeat used to imply to restart the playthrough from scratch, Ikeda manages to construct a different one through deepening the scoring system and the tactile controls, which brings with itself a cathartic sense of examining and scratching the screen to look for an opening. It is a feeling that isn't common even among other mobile shooting games, such as the ports of Ikeda's games in touch devices, or free-to-play shooting games like "Azur Lane" and "World Witches: United Front", which is representative of the director's control over action games and his evolution as a developer.

As a cherry on top, the game happens to be an inexhaustible source of experimentation, given that the shooting pattern of the avatar changes with each character, and which ones the player has to their disposition is random. One can have a short-distance pattern, another one is long distance, yet weak, another one targets behind, or to the sides, other ones have unorthodox patterns, and naturally, this affects how the player approaches enemies to obtain better scores. Thus, the player can experiment with different stages, which are not just the main campaign, which provides more than one hundred of challenges, but also with different additional scenarios that are updated every once in a while, surpassing thus even the overwhelming feeling of possibilities in Junichi Kashiwagi's "Dariusburst Chronicle Saviours".

"Gothic wa Mahou Otome" is currently only available in Japan, and it is to expect that after its unavoidable finale, it will be available for international audiences as a paid game, in the same way as its peer, Nanoha Hata's masterful "Arkanoid vs. Space Invaders", because just like that game in its original state as another free-to-play experience, was able to demonstrate the vitality and inheritance of the arcade action in our current times.