Incantation

The Good
Graphics are pretty lush and almost reminiscent of a Capcom platformer. There's plenty of opportunities to collect items, upgrade your magic powers and fight your way through the levels. The HUD is conveniently placed at the top so you won't have to worry about anything obscuring the game sprites. And the camera pans across the level correctly so you don't run into that many accidents. That's pretty much all I can tell you from the bright side.

The Bad
You've got great graphics and playable stages of course, but what have you got to go with them? Every essential you'd expect to find in a game is non-existent. No configurations (other than Mono or Stereo), no way to save and continue where you left off and no cutscenes to tell a story. And the music is just up-n-down beat and plain boring.

Gameplay has its own flaws. For one there's indication of when you pause, but thankfully you can, compensating for lack of save progress. If you thought enemies were easy to beat, you'll snore when you see how ridiculously unchallenging the bosses are. And speaking of bosses, why does the final one have the health bar and the others don't? Are the other bosses all sub-bosses? Even being an easy game, you don't have many abilities. Or so you would think, unless you read the instruction booklet. Ah! There's your storyline and hints. Too bad they didn't put this content right inside the game.

The Bottom Line
Titus has a horrible habit of assuring quality to its games on SNES, but failing to do so. They tried to go to Capcom's level of game making, but didn't quite make the cut, not even close. Why even bother simplifying a SNES game to the bare minimum? Tiger Handheld are already good at this. Even so, terrific graphics, don't always equate to a brilliant game, especially if you spend more time in the art department than the programming one. This game certainly got pretty overlooked, no surprise seeing as it came in the late part of the SNES catalog lifespan. So if you haven't heard of this one or got it in your collection, it's okay, you didn't miss anything truly.