A heated battle.

Even with the control issues aside, LOSTMAGIC is not an easy game. There’s little room for error in most of the battles, so you’ll find yourself needing to replay all of the battles several times before you hit the right combination of luck and strategy to lead you to victory. Making the losses more frustrating is the game’s insistence on making you replay all of the conversation preceding the battle without the option to skip it and move straight to the fight.

LOSTMAGIC comes with support for Nintendo’s Wi-Fi connection, so you can go online and battle other players. There are two battle modes, the first of which will provide players with evenly matched characters and the other in which you use your character from the single player game. The advantage of this latter mode is that the experience that you gain in battling other players will apply to your character when you return to the single-player campaign. This is a way to level-up outside the game and make the campaign a bit easier when you return. The downside to this is that the online play can be pretty laggy at times which can be frustrating to say the least.

LOSTMAGIC has its share of frustrations, but there’s enough strategy, variety, and fun to the gameplay to make it recommendable to players who enjoy real-time battles and don’t really care for all of the additional trappings that usually come with RPG games. If the developers can iron out the game’s issues in LOSTMAGIC 2, then they’ll have one of the best strategy games available for the DS.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 71%.  LOSTMAGIC’s unique real-time battle system is weighed down by some frustrating issues, but it is an interesting game nonetheless.

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