The stars of the games, the Doodles, are smooth, bulbous, and cel-shaded, sporting a scraggly crayon border. thing.! Graphically, Magic Pengel is an odd yet pleasing mix. As a result, one mistake early on can spiral into a series of forced incorrect choices, sure to be frustrating to those accustomed to more forgiving and more strategically oriented monster battle games. The dynamic is so strong, however, that there's little room for error - if you choose incorrectly" your enemy will not only get to attack first, but you will not be able to attack that turn at all. Each type of ability can be used once before it has to recharge for a turn requiring you to select your moves carefully. Every monster has attack, magic and narrier abilities, and this interplay is the focus of the battle. Equal parts strategy and luck, Magic Pengel revolves around a simplistic rock-paper-scissors model. Magic Pengel's battle system clearly received less attention than the monster creation software. And no, you're not cool and/or clever for thinking of that. There are tons of different ways to combine parts and allocate ink, giving players a huge number of options in monster creation. Add a "hard" piece to the end of his arm, such as a claw, will grant him a stronger "Scratch" attack and more defense. How these pieces are drawn and assembled determine your Doodle's stats - spend a lot of ink on your Doodle's arms, and he'll have a high-attack power and a standard punch attack. As you battle other Doodlers and gain experience, you'll gradually increase the amount of ink you can spend on a single Doodle, learn to draw new parts and gain different colors of ink - as you go through the game, your first blob will eventually get bigger, gain arms and legs and other features. Doodles don't gain experience points, instead increasing the amount of ink they can be created from. Your first Doodle will be little more than a blob, a hopping mass of ink limited to tackling attacks and the like. From this technology has come a surprisingly robust and easy-to-used monster creation package. Meet MalTiVo, the evil god of television. Ask any developer and they'll tell you that it's hard enough for a person to do the first part, and writing code to do it reliably is even harder. Seeing the intuitive nature of Tokyo University's technology, Taito's Studio Garakuta created the most advanced application of the technology to date - not only does Magic Pengel transform your 2D scribbles into 3D models, it goes through the arduous task of rigging them with a "skeleton" and then animates them on the fly. A number of products, mostly PC-based art tools, licensed Tokyo University's research, but none are quite as technically ambitious as Magic Pengel. Children are familiar with doodling, so why not build it on that? And thus the first sketch-based 3D modeler was born - by "inflating" the shapes drawn, 2D drawings could be easily turned into globular 3D objects. Tokyo University, one of the most prestigious universities in Japan, had a mission - design a 3D design interface that anyone, even a child, could use. Magic Pengel began as a technology research program. Players assume the role of an anonymous Doodler, blessed with a mystical spirit called a "Pengel." With this "Pen Angel" and an army of squiggly Doodle allies, the player will confront the evil empire with the help of two kids, Zoe and Taro, and a mysterious stranger. Furious, the King of Men set his vast empire against the new Doodlers in an attempt to once again control the power of creation. The Spirit of Creation agreed, and since then only the pure of heart could create Doodles. Jealous of the Doodle's power, the human king began using Doodles for evil, so the Doodle King plead with the Spirit of Creation to limit those humans who could create Doodles. People were given the power to create Doodles, and Doodles created color with which to draw more Doodles. With the world created, he set about filling it with two kinds of life - people and Doodles. Long ago, the Spirit of Creation created four colors, and with them drew the world. While the story here won't win any Oscars, largely due to the overuse of the word "Doodle," it provides a compelling fairy tale mythos on which to build the game. Magic Pengel takes place in a magical world created by none other than Studio Ghibli, the anime studio that created the Oscar-winning Spirited Away. While Magic Pengel may not be as good of a game as many of those others, this feature alone warrants a look. While some let you customize monsters, and some others let you crossbreed them, never before have you been able to create your own monster from scratch - until now. Thanks to Nintendo and the success of Pokmon, just about every company has its own monster-training RPG series now.
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