A Witch's Tale Review

Sorry, A Witch's Tale, you get no headline.

A Witch’s Tale is one if the most highly anticip... hold on, that’s not right...
A Witch’s Tale is the hottest DS relea... nope, that’s still not right...
A Witch’s Tale is pretty oka... close, but still not quite there...
A Witch’s Tale is a game… there, that’ll do…

So.... A Witch’s Tale is a game that came out a while ago for the DS and nobody really seemed to care. It’s brought to us by NIS America, makers of such hits as the Disgaea series but don’t let that fool you. One big hit doesn’t automatically mean that NIS’s every endeavor will be a smashing success (after all, nobody ever asks you for Herman Melville’s other books).

In A Witch’s Tail (just roll with it), you play as Lidell, an obnoxious little tart that dresses like a French whore and talks like an actual witch if an actual witch sounded like a soccer mom trying way too hard to sound like an actual witch and whose only knowledge of witches came by way of Tim Burton.

Shortly after deciding she’s going to be the BSET WTICH EVAR, she (and by she, I mean you) sets out on this arrogant little quest and is joined by a vampire (as if there isn’t enough of that crap going around) named Loue who follows you around as a bat doing little more than pointing out the obvious. “Chests usually have useful items in them,” he says during the 60+ minute intro tutorial. No kidding, Loue. And here I thought they were just for decoration.

When you finally think you’ve gained control of Billy Ray Cyrus' most recent parenting failure, you’re then introduced to nearly every fairytale persona from here to the chocolate mountain. Most of the idiots you run into, however, are caricatures from the works of Lewis Carroll that are so embarrassingly imitated I’m sure the Carroll estate would rather field questions regarding his suspected pedophilia than talk about A Which’s Tale.

So A Twitch’s Wail is, at its heart, an RPG so it’s necessary I address the combat. In a word: boring. In two words: very boring. It’s not unlike the combat from Earthbound, but far more tedious and unstimulating. You make commands like attack or cast a spell or whatever and then the enemy shakes a little, repeat.

The touchscreeen is used for movement in the field and for issuing commands in battle, and to its credit, Fitch’s Bale does this pretty well. There isn’t much right with this game, but in this regard, A Mitch’s Tail is surprisingly good.

I honestly can’t think of any kind of gamer that would genuinely enjoy this underwhelmingly over-the-top tribute to everything you’d see if Hot Topic made a video game. Bottom line: Avoid this. This game is so insignificant I actually had a hard time bad-mouthing it because I kept ignoring it to death.