There’s a game that it is easy to compare Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom to – Ico. That’s not to say it’s as good as Team Ico’s classic, but it tries to emulate everything that Ico did right, then goes too far and emulates everything that Ico did wrong as well.



Darkness is swallowing the world, and as Tepeu the player must stop it. Tepeu isn’t strong enough alone, however, and so enlists the help of a guardian. This huge golem-like creature, Teotl, follows Tepeu everywhere he goes, falling down and generally being a nuisance, but also carrying out whatever orders Tepeu decides to issue him. These can be as simple as “wait” or “follow”, and as elaborate as telling Teotl to wait by a boulder and push it onto a group of pursuing enemies at the right moment. Issuing these commands takes some getting used to – the controls are so complex that the game has to display the available commands on screen for their entire duration. They are picked up eventually and Teotl, although frustratingly stupid, is easy to manipulate once you’ve got the hang of it.

Teotl’s biggest use is in combat, as that’s where Tepeu is at his most pathetic. Teotl attacks automatically, and Tepeu has one attack of his own, mapped to one button. That’s the entire combat experience in Majin, and it’s an abject failure. Game Republic wanted the player to work with and rely on Teotl in battle, and to ensure that this happens the player is underpowered to the point of uselessness. If Tepeu fights an enemy when Teotl isn’t nearby, he can only knock them out. Their soul remains with their body and the enemy will eventually recover unless Teotl comes close to absorb the soul. Saying that, attempting to fight without Teotl nearby is not fun and is never recommended. Even when levelled up, Tepeu is so weak that attempting to knock out an enemy with him alone can require sixty or seventy strikes with his weapon. This is not an exaggeration.

This weakness means that even fighting alongside Teotl feels mostly pointless. The player’s attacks do so little damage that most of the time is spent just standing and waiting, doing absolutely nothing until Teotl has knocked an enemy down and a combination attack becomes available to finish the enemy. This requires one press of a different button to before.



There are a few bosses in the game where the combat works better, involving scripted events that can play to what little strengths the system has. These are so rare, though, that they can’t even begin to make up for how annoying the rest of the combat in the game is. Never is it more annoying than at one location late on in what is one of the clearest examples of terrible game design ever seen: a number of enemies stand in a giant pool of “darkness” and touching this makes Tepeu unable to act; all he can do is slowly walk though it and try to escape. Move a few inches away from the enemies within, though, and they use an attack to pull you back in. It is literally impossible to escape and all you can do is just stand and watch your health drain away. It’s all too easy to fall victim to this, and it’s frustrating moments like this that take so heavily away from the game.

All of this is a shame because, were not for the combat, Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom would be an incredible game.

It’s all about the world. Primarily because it’s just utterly gorgeous. The colours are bright and vibrant, everything is designed with beauty in mind, and it’s all set to orchestral music that creates an incredible atmosphere.

Beyond just the visuals, though, the world is the game. In a way, it can be thought of as a giant dungeon from something like a modern Zelda game. There are forty or so interlinked areas, and in each one there are a number of puzzles to be solved in order to unlock doors, obtain chests, or to find a way to allow passage for the lumbering Teotl. These puzzles aren’t as difficult as Zelda and there aren’t many points that will require you to stop and think for more than a few seconds, but yet obtaining all of the chests in an area is still an incredibly satisfying experience. Even if the puzzles aren’t hard, there’s still a great sense of accomplishment.

Unlike Zelda, though, these areas are all self-contained. There’s only one occasion in the entire game where a puzzle is (sort of) spread across two of these areas. On one hand, this dulls the sense of grandeur of the world slightly, but on the other it makes everything more focussed. If you’re struggling to find the way to a chest in a room, you know that the solution is nearby and you haven't missed an obscure switch on the other side of the world, or anything like that. This contributes to the game’s ease, undoubtedly, but in a good way. With so much stress in the combat, the relaxing feel of the exploration side of Majin is a much-needed change of pace – the only pace the game needed.



And we return to Ico. A game that created an incredible, persistent world full of puzzles, threw the player into it with an escort mission, and then filled it with a poor form of combat - needlessly. When Majin works, it's in the same places where Ico worked. When it doesn't work, Ico never worked either.

So that’s the experience of Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom. A beautifully constructed world which would be a total joy to get lost in, were it not for videogaming’s insistence on shoehorning combat into every game to offer a “challenge”. The challenge should have been in finding a way through the world, and if the developers had been brave enough to commit to this then they’d have created an absolute classic. As it is, the combat taints the experience to such a degree that the game is a disappointment – a missed opportunity.

Pros:
- A really lovely world
- Solving a puzzle is as satisfying as it ever was

Cons:
- Poor, poor combat
- Could have been so much more

Score: 6/10