Tag Archives: Magical Fury

Angel Project

anime, projects, ,

The other day I finally finished Persona 5 (play time: 99 hours 38 minutes), and since I was still jonesing for some JRPG nonsense I decided to play through Galaxy Fraulein Yuna 3 for the first time in years. That in turn inspired me to start seriously working on Angel Project, the Yuna-inspired RPG I’ve been wanting to do, while some other projects are waiting on other people.

Galaxy-Fraulein-Yuna-Manual-Front
I can’t even tell you just how 90s anime the contents of this CD-ROM are.

Galaxy Fraulein Yuna is a franchise that spans three games and two OAV series, running from about 1992 to 1998. Designer Mika Akitaka did a series of “MS Girls” illustrations, making cute girl versions of different Gundam robots, and Red Company and Hudson asked him to create a game for the then fairly PC-Engine Super CD-ROM^2. (NEC branded the PC-Engine as the Turbografx-16 in the US.) Akitaka’s concepts evolved into a visual novel with a series of simple one-on-one battles scattered throughout. In the story, Yuna Kagurazaka wins a beauty contest, and then finds out that she is now the Savior of Light, tasked with protecting the galaxy. Over the course of the two PC-Engine games, two OVA series, and the final Saturn/PS1 game,[1] she fights a bunch of enemies who are mostly cute girls, and winds up befriending the majority of them. The English-speakers who know the franchise mainly know it through the anime, and unfortunately the five anime episodes only represent parts three and four out of a five-part story. It has its own distinct aesthetic and sensibility, but it’s a lot like a sillier version of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha or Symphogear, blending epic battles with lessons in friendship.

hibiki
Punching in the name of friendship!

I came up with the idea for Angel Project when I was considering doing some alternate settings for Magical Burst (the other two being a Persona-ish thing called “Zero Hour” and a thing with teenagers with special powers in the vein of A Certain Scientific Railgun called “Helix Academy”). Later I ended up designing and publishing Magical Fury (which has been surprisingly popular), and a reworking of the Magical Fury rules felt like the right way to realize Angel Project. Although it has a lot of sci-fi trappings, Galaxy Fraulein Yuna is essentially a magical girl story (Yuna even has a mascot/mentor that grants her powers and advises her, but it’s a little robot thing named Elner), and although Magical Fury is a darker take on it, it’s very much a magical girl RPG. There are a lot of things I’m reworking for Angel Project, a lot of things that need to strike a different tone, but there weren’t too many rules that I had to entirely cut out. The single biggest change was that I replaced Magic/Trauma/Hope with Friendship/Silly/Despair, which should do a lot to change the overall feel and flow.

One kind of unusual and oddly fun thing in the Yuna games is that you travel to various implausibly themed planets, like the Wind Planet and the Beach Planet, so Angel Project has both rules for traveling places and a setting section that outlines places like the Machine Planet, the Fancy Planet, and the Fandom Planet. It also has more clearly defined enemies, in the form of Dark Angels, robots, Shadows (kinda like the Noise from Symphogear), Machine Generals, and so on. It’s generally going to be a bit more fleshed out than Magical Fury, and I’m enjoying doing more with that framework.

While I’m not opposed to doing darker stuff in RPGs, I definitely feel there’s a greater need for more uplifting, positive games. I want Angel Project to be a game that celebrates friendship and redemption, a game where befriending foes is not only a possible outcome, but a common one.

[1]There are a few other Yuna titles, but they’re various remakes, ports, and retellings of the stories of those five entries in the franchise.

Magical Fury and Magical Burst

musings,

Magical-Fury-CoverOn Sunday I launched Magical Fury as a PDF product on DriveThruRPG (also, an updated version of Entanglements as a Pay What You Want product). As I mentioned earlier, it’s a much simpler dark magical girl RPG, which uses a very simple AW engine variant (inspired by The Sundered Land). It’s the product of a particular circumstance and emotions, but on the whole I like it a lot. It has a distinct simplicity and plays with lightning speed even for a rules-light game. The final product wound up being 35 pages, though nearly half of that is a set of 17 d66 tables covering character creation and other aspects of gameplay.

I based it on the Star Princess Astraia story that I really need to get around to writing some day (which gave me an excuse to get art of her done for the cover). It thus has some elements that stem directly from things I’m planning for that, notably the reincarnation aspect and the “change the world” move (inspired by a part where Astraia decides to patrol the streets and winds up in the middle of a confrontation with a police officer).

Magical Burst

One of my goals with Magical Fury was to break through things that were blocking me with Magical Burst. I’ve been working on Magical Burst long enough that it’s accrued a lot of inertia, and coming at a similar concept from a different direction let me come up with some new approaches to handling things. They’re still two different games (and will continue to be so), but quite a few of the things I did with Magical Fury point to simpler, more elegant ways to approach some of the things Magical Burst is meant to do. There’s a lot I like about the Fallout system in Magical Burst, but in play it’s clunky and produces too many instances of Fallout that become hard to work into play. The Shift rules in Magical Fury accomplish a very similar goal in a much simpler way, and provide a clear blueprint for how I’m going to approach revising them.

One really important thing is that Magical Fury wound up being a proof of concept for a system that “summarizes” battles, reducing something that is quite involved in most games down to a few die rolls to find out how things go. As with Slime Story, I want Magical Burst to have both quick battles and more involved ones, though even for the more involved ones I want to avoid the hour-long combats of Magical Burst 4th Draft.

Making the moment of awakening as a magical girl a core, default part of gameplay was also a really effective aspect of Magical Fury in play, and helped bring to life the strangeness of it all. It’s definitely something I want to do with Magical Burst, and I’m leaning towards generally having the game set up to ramp character complexity gradually over time, another concept I’ve been wanting to play with in RPGs in general.

I also wanted to mention a newer magical girl series I saw recently, Yuki Yuna wa Yusha de Aru. If I had to rank them I would put Madoka Magica above it, but it’s nonetheless and enjoyable series with its own sensibilities and themes. It’s difficult to properly explain without spoilers, but sacrifice is a major theme, and the details of what the magical girls (“heroes”) are and how they work are interesting. One fan went as far as to write up Magical Burst rules for the blooming/mankai element from Yuki Yuna.

Although Magical Burst stemmed directly from the inspiration that I got from watching Madoka Magica, it’s never been as much of a Madoka Magica RPG as people seem to think it is. Even so, watching other magical girl anime has definitely been a good thing, and helped the game be that much more its own thing rather than a slavish imitator. While watching more of Sailor Moon, Precure, Lyrical Nanoha, etc. has had its benefits, Yuki Yuna feels more like a Magical Burst game than basically any other series besides Madoka Magica itself.

About Magical Fury

projects,

Back in October I participated in a “tradgames jam,” and over the course of a few days wrote a first draft of a game called “Magical Fury.” The idea was to write a short and simple dark magical girl name, to play around with some of the ideas I’d been developing for my “Star Princess Astraia” story and hopefully shake out some cobwebs on Magical Burst. Magical Fury is kind of its own animal, but also kind of a Magical Burst Lite, with some similar things handled in a much simpler and smoother way. It’s hard not to draw comparisons between the two games, but then Magical Fury pretty much exists because of my dissatisfaction with Magical Burst.

Compared to my attempt at a Magical Burst novel (Magical Girl Radiant Yuna), Star Princess Astraia is a bit more brutal, and more focused on conflicts between magical girls. In that respect it hews a bit closer to Madoka Magica, as well as Lyrical Nanoha. It has reincarnation of magical girls (a darker take on what happens in Sailor Moon) as a major conceit, and thus magical girls have a (potentially risky) ability to look back to past lives. (Thus the story’s inciting incident is when a magical girl shows up at the protagonist’s work, threatening to start killing people unless the reincarnation of Star Princess Astraia reveals herself.)

It’s kind of a Powered by the Apocalypse game, in the same sense as The Sundered Land, and generally a very light, story-oriented game. The dice mechanics pretty much some straight from Sundered Land, and are a lot like if you took the basic AW rules and assumed that everyone has a +1 in all stats. It doesn’t use anything like HP or Harm though. Moves give outcomes and sometimes call for magical girls to take points of Magic or Trauma, which in turn can make them have problems (kind of like fallout in Magical Burst, but much simpler). After writing moves that say things like, “When you have a moment of true desperation…” or “When you try to do something that affects the real world…” I feel like I’m definitely using the framework much better than I did in Magical Burst.

One of the major things I like about it is that it has the part about girls becoming magical girls hard-coded into the default way to start playing the game. It’s a really important moment in virtually every magical girl story, and I think the lack of such is a big weakness of Magical Burst.

It also reduces combat down to a handful of rolls. While the tactical combat system I put together for Magical Burst is fun in its own right, it’s also time-consuming enough to dominate each game session. While I don’t dislike tactical combat–I enjoyed playing D&D4e regularly for years–there are times when it isn’t what I want, and when protracted battles just get annoying. Cutting it down to a few rolls and evaluating the outcome is a really refreshing alternative. I wouldn’t want to go that route in every game, but it seems to work pretty well for this one.

The new revision I’m working on adds an element of turn-taking scene framing inspired by Shinobigami. Shinobigami is a Japanese RPG (with an English release from Kotodama Heavy Industries planned) about modern-day anime-style ninjas. It’s a bit more mechanistic than what I have in mind for Magical Fury, but the basic gameplay puts PCs in competition and has them take turns setting up scenes trying to accomplish various goals. They thus ferret out secrets, form bonds, and have the occasional skirmish as well. Magical Fury’s take on it will be a bit looser, with the option to start a scene and see where it goes, and with the GM taking turns that they use to complicate the PCs’ lives and have threats creep closer.

Overall, Magical Fury is much more a “story game,” much more a set of tools to provoke you into telling an improvised story together. At this point I really don’t know where I’ll go with it, but it’s one of the projects I’m the most excited about just now. At the very least it’s going to be a massive influence on whatever Magical Burst turns into next, but I kind of want to bring Magical Fury to fruition on its own. A thin, simple book that won’t be table-torture for whoever I get to do layout.