“Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble.”
-William Shakespeare, Macbeth
I have been an avid fan of RPGs and JRPGs for most of my gaming life. Something about fantasy worlds where swords and magic collide against colossal evils has always appealed to me. While I have had incredibly immersive adventures, nothing has given me the feelings of power (and inadequacy!) as RuinsMagus: Complete, a VR magic-based game for the PSVR2. Developed by CharacterBank, Inc., RuinsMagus offers an exciting 8+ hour VR game that can be played in both short bursts and long sessions. More importantly, however, it is the most complete JRPG VR experience available.
My Day In an Anime
From the first donning of the PSVR2 headset in RuinsMagus, players are immersed in a gorgeously anime-stylized fantasy world brimming with charming characters. After a quick orientation to basic controls and spellcasting, players arrive in the central hub town of Grand Amnis. The town initially starts with only a few sights worth seeing but eventually expands to include a fun cast of side characters and activities. While the scale of the town is significantly smaller than a standard RPG, I found the narrowed scope to be appealing. Any larger and it might have felt overwhelming in VR.
Within the town, the player will find all the usual stock of a modern RPG, from a mission board to collect quests to an item shop to restock on potions. Various characters loiter about, ready to spill local gossip about whatever is currently happening. The charming dialogue (now fully voiced in English for the Complete edition) and hilarious animations go a long way in making an impression on the player. All set to appropriately quaint and adventurous background music, the world of RuinsMagus: Complete felt like some of my favorite animes come to life. None of this may sound particularly groundbreaking, but experiencing it in first-person VR makes it an immersive delight.
Now You’re Playing with Power
While Grand Amnis is a peaceful home base for the player to catch their breath, the meat of the gameplay is found in the quests from the mission board. Quests take place in separate dungeons (or ruins) where the story’s central mystery unfolds. The stone ruins are necessarily simple and easy to navigate, echoing a similar style to the Portal games from years ago.
Within the ruins, the player will engage in battles. This is where the game fully won me over. While a lot of VR experiences are akin to walking simulators where players marvel at an immersive world, RuinsMagus breaks up the walk in a fantasy anime by offering a fast and active combat system that made me feel powerful at times — and incompetent at others!
Players are armed with a magic-casting right-arm gauntlet and a defensive left-arm shield. The player’s right hand can cast a variety of upgradable and unlockable spells, from projectiles to area-of-effect attacks, by expending 8 reloadable canisters. These attacks each feel like you’re actually conjuring magic, with pulsing vibrations in the right controller that match the fireball swelling in your palm. Seeing new spells form in my hand and then unleashing them in a flurry of fury on my foes never got old.
On the other hand (literally), the left-armed shield is used to parry and reflect incoming attacks through a quick raising of one’s left arm and a flick of a trigger (the back side of the shield also smartly serves as the player’s HUD for health points and stats). I regularly felt the panic of hiding behind my shield to parry and then countering with a well-timed fireball, especially in the frenetic and brilliantly addictive boss battles. It took some coordination and practice, but once I mastered the gameplay, I rivaled the power of Gandalf himself. Or at least Vivi from Final Fantasy IX.
Magic, Gathering My Friends
As is often my strategy with VR games to avoid motion sickness, I took turns playing missions in RuinsMagus: Complete with others, watching the person in the headset’s gameplay on screen while they explored the virtual world. To the game’s credit, we all enjoyed watching gameplay as much as we enjoyed playing. It became a fun communal event, which is a win for any VR game in my opinion.
RuinsMagus: Complete does not reinvent the JRPG genre, nor does it make any great strides in narrative innovation. But it didn’t need to. All it needed to do was bring a standard JRPG world, with all its lovable cliches and tropes, into an approachable, fully immersive virtual reality experience. And it did– with a beautiful art style, lovable characters, an engaging plot, and terrific gameplay. Put simply, RuinsMagus: Complete is a one-of-a-kind experience and a must-buy for any JRPG-loving PSVR2 owner.
Special thanks to CharacterBank, Inc. for supplying us with a copy of RuinsMagus: Complete for this review.
PIXEL PERFECT
Recommended
Editor-in-Chief of The Pixels, Wade (aka ProfNoctis) teaches and plays video games at the University of Alabama. His dissertation combined Judeo-Christian kingship and Final Fantasy XV. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, TikTok, and Twitch.
