Magician's Quest: Mysterious Times is an immersive Animal Crossing-meets-Harry Potter alternate reality for the DS.
This game immediately sprang to my attention when I spotted a cartoon unicorn on the cover, and I knew I ought to track it once I saw the title and description on my monitor: "NEW LIFE SIMULATION FOR THE DS - IF HARRY POTTER AND ANIMAL CROSSING HAD A BABY, THIS WOULD BE IT."
I thought, 'great! I like babies!' and then I thought about it some more and decided that I, like the rest of the human population, also really happened to like Animal Crossing and Harry Potter. I wrote the game down under my "MUST BUY" list. I waited in anticipation. I raced out to HMV and bought it the day it came out. I played it. And I fell instantly, irreversibly in love.
To put it bluntly, this game basically does everything Animal Crossing doesn't. You can cast spells. You can do quests. You can play music. You can can date your villagers. You can chill at an island. You can move into a treehouse. You can have at least a million different cutscenes where your villagers confront and ask you about who you like, who you hate, what you want to be when you're older, and whether you're practicing black magic. The choices are limitless.
As the title suggests, there is a rather large quantity of quests in this game, which generally come once a month after Mystery Time. Mystery Time is when the graphics and scenery become eerie, the music changes to the Nutcracker, you can go to a special class with the neighbourhood skeleton and learn something semi-interesting, and the bugs and fish that you can catch mutate into more expensive items. The opening title is also pretty spiffy, but I digress. The quests aren't very difficult (especially if you've got a handy walkthrough, which you do, as there are at least 1000 of them hanging around on the internet) and they include characters such as Santa Claus, Death, some fairy, some goat hippie, a Yeti, a Pumpkin Face Man, a dragon, a phoenix, and the aforementioned unicorn I saw on the cover. They are fun, they are cute, and they are great.
What is kind of awkward is how I seem to have missed the main point, which is that you go to school, attend classes, and socialize. In fact, you basically only go to the school to socialize, unless you're one of those keeners with perfect attendance. Your classmates can pass you notes (you don't even have to be good friends with them) and they corner you after class a lot of the time to ask you if you like another villager (this usually happens if they see the two of you hanging out together, and if this villager also happens to be in the class at the time).
It is slightly more difficult orienteering oneself, because this game is wholly underrated and under-appreciated and there aren't many fan sites out there with cheats and guides. In fact, I only know of one, although it really does have virtually everything on the subject. There are certain glitches in the game which should be noted - for instance, if you walk in an area with three or more other people, your game will lag a bit. Not enough to annoy you and keep you from playing it ever again, but it does happen extremely often and you should come prepared for it. Also, these villagers move extremely fast. Like unnaturally fast. They will be sitting on a bench doing nothing with their lives, you go into a store, you come out three seconds later, and they are gone. When you find them again, some four minutes later, they are on the other side of town, fishing by the bridge. I don't mean to sound picky, but this actually really bothers me because it can be next to impossible to find someone. While you're checking their houses, they could be going to class, or running around in the caves, or drinking tea upstairs in the dorms. Some of them will even go into the stores and look for furniture, and because I avoid the shops like the plague, I rarely ever find anyone I'm looking for.
All in all, this game is an 8.5/10 - highly addictive, highly immersive, and highly enjoyable. Only things I would change for future instalments in the series (if they choose to have any) would be to fix those glitches, have the villagers walk slower, make the shops and classes more interesting, make it easier to get rid of the people you hate, and find a more efficient way to sell your fish and insects. That is all.