Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God

A curry world of magical girls.

About the Game
Genre: RPG

Mode: Single Player
Rating: T
Developer: Compile Heart, ZeroDiv
Publisher: Compile Heart (Japan); Aksys Games (North America)
Platform: PS Vita

Release Date: March 28, 2013 (Japan); December 10, 2013 (North America)

When I was playing Sorcery Saga, I was pleasantly surprised at how good the game was. Most of my previous dungeon-crawl fun came primarily from the Megami Tensei series. I’ve played only a few roguelikes before, but this inexperience wasn’t much of a factor when playing the game.

The game opens with Pupuru, the game’s protagonist, taking a test at  Magic Academy.

Already ahead of the curve for Magic College

A bunch of things happen and Pupuru ends up needing to venture into dungeons and collect ingredients to create a variety of curry dishes in order to salvage a failing family-run curry restaurant. The rival curry restaurant is run by the usual greedy business man archetype striving to expand. Although much of this seems rather clichéd, the delivery and the execution of the story is actually well-done. There’s plenty of self-parodies, exaggerated dialogue, and humor present throughout the campaign which kept me going.

The game does an excellent job of balancing story progression and the dungeons itself. The dungeons are extremely easy at the beginning, but they exponentially get harder. The latter dungeons require some form of prudent strategy. The gameplay is pretty straightforward: the player controls Pupuru’s movement via tiles in the dungeon and can utilize melee or ranged weapons to kill mob and achieve completion. A minion named Kuu accompanies Pupuru in these dungeons and is somewhat of a double-edged sword. Kuu can’t be controlled by the player and his HP deteriorates with every tile movement. Once he hits a certain threshold, he attracts mobs and makes life difficult. The player can raise Kuu’s hp by throwing random equips and etc items into his mouth.

The gameplay is not without flaws however. The most notable was the jarringly obvious FPS drop in the bigger dungeons. Many times I found myself annoyed. I was able to ignore it eventually, but mainly because of the nice aesthetics and quality on other aspects of the game.

The other problems I had were minor quality-of-life suggestions and purely preference-based. The save system felt inefficient. Some of the dungeons take a good amount of time and only temp save was available. I found the best way to circumvent this was simply to leave my Vita on sleep mode and pray that nothing happens.

The other problem was the fact that Pupuru and Kuu reset to level 1 at the start of every dungeon (however spells and equips carry over). I personally didn’t like this as it felt like the effort I put into completing the dungeon was no longer tangible and I had to be content with the unlocked costumes. Since the player reset to level 1 after every dungeon, equipment from previous runs become much more significant. The game keeps it fresh by limiting the player with minimal inventory space and that once the player dies all equipment is lost. These unforgiving aspects of the game proved to be challenging in a fun way as decisions became even more crucial.

This was one of the few Vita games I honestly enjoyed. Putting aside the minor problems and the FPS issue, the game succeeds at being challenging while keeping it simple. Its simplicity mixes well with its cast of characters and story that kept me laughing throughout the game.

What I liked

+ Curry

+ Fun gameplay

+ Easy-going and overall lighthearted pace of the story

+ Good character design

+ Decent amount of replay value

What I didn’t like

+ Random FPS lag

+ Save function/Temp save function

+ Can’t mute the title song

Overall Score: 9/10 May not be the most challenging game, but it is definitely an enjoyable one.