Fortuna Magus is a JRPG set in a world where people may randomly gain magic powers and have a chance of going absolutely berserk. For this reason, they have deemed it necessary to execute anyone found to possess magic. We play as a kid named Amane whose father decides to abandon him and his two adopted sisters one day, leaving them to practically raise themselves. Some years later when they are now teenagers the older sister decides to go looking for him and leave the two younger siblings as well. One fateful day the sister Tia is attacked by bandits and while Amane steps in to try to fight back they are ultimately saved by a white-haired stranger.
This broody stranger calls himself Rett and is invited to a meal out of gratitude of saving the siblings. Things quickly turn sour as soldiers break into the house, accusing Rett of being a mage. Amane tries to stop the soldiers only to end up making himself and his sister fugitives for assisting a mage. Forced to leave his peaceful life our adventure begins as we flee through a forest. It won’t take long before we encounter a random battle from moving around and Amane & his sister Tia are forced to fight for their lives.
Fighting takes place on a horizontal plane with the enemies to the left and the heroes to the right in a turn-based battle. Both sides have two lanes, the ones closest to the middle are melee and the ones further back are ranged. You can attack a ranged character with a melee attack but the damage you inflict will be greatly reduced and vice versa. Characters can either attack, guard, use their skills/items or cast magic if they are a mage. If they cause or take enough damage they will eventually fill up their TP bar which allows them to unleash special attacks as well as allow a combination of two characters’ attack if their bar is also filled.
It is a simple system that works well though it is nothing special. We start off with only the two sibling characters but will soon enough have a party of 5 unique characters. All of them are very cliché with none having a unique bone in their body. Their interactions are generic as well though they are by no means terrible. One of the major issues to the story and character development is that they feel far too rushed, things move along at a blink of an eye giving no time to flesh anything out. That may be due to the short length of the game which lasted me a bit over 4 hours, however there are different endings to see, adding some replay value.
Our journey will have us traveling all over the over-world map and into various dangerous locations like volcanoes and mines. All of these areas are very small allowing you to conquer an area in the span of a short coffee break, really helping this be one of those games that you want to load up when you have a bit of time. At the end of each area is a boss fight and before them, there is always a blue orb that completely restores all of your party’s health/mana. One can save at any time too so this is not a terribly difficult game as you may imagine. This title does have in-app purchases but they are competently optional and do not in any way hinder your ability to progress.
We can either move around using the onscreen touch icons or by touching the exact spot where we want to go on the screen. It is very awkward to use the icons since it is not analog movement meaning that characters are either completely still or moving at full speed making it difficult to stand in a precise position. Speaking of, the menu interface is simply abysmal and were definitely made with controllers in mind which makes it all the more bizarre that there is no controller support. It does not control well due to the tiny size of everything and made me avoid going into menus whenever possible.
Fortuna Magus’s music is not all that great, to put it bluntly and the sprites for the characters are either a lover it or hate it affair. The game does start off rather bland but gets progressively better the more you play. It will never blow your mind or break free from being cliché but it is still a fun time waster and does not outstay its welcome. If anything it would have benefited it to be lengthier considering it is 8 dollars. In any regard, while generic and over before you know it, Fortuna Magus is far from terrible.
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