Maiden and Spell
Maiden & Spell is a magical girl battle game, set in a cutesy fantasy world. Select from one of eight young ladies to battle 1 on 1 with a friend, or fight your way through a series of bosses and learn the secrets of The Kingdom of Stars.
Maiden and Spell is a indie, action and bullet hell game
developed by mino_dev
and published by mino_dev and Maple Whispering Limited.
Released on February 24th 2020 is available only on Windows
in 5 languages: English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean and Portuguese - Brazil.
It has received 773 reviews of which 751 were positive and 22 were negative resulting in an impressive rating of 9.1 out of 10. 😍
The game is currently priced at 2.69€ on Steam and has a 75% discount.
The Steam community has classified Maiden and Spell into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows 7 and above
- Processor: 1.2 ghz
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: 512 mb video memory
- DirectX: Version 10
- Storage: 400 MB available space
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Yeah, this rules. I like it way better than Rabbit & Steel honestly. Rabbit & Steel is attempting to be a new kind of thing. This is simply perfecting the shmup. The patterns are intuitive, the music is lovely, the art and writing are charming, and the normal difficulty is calibrated perfectly to me---a being who does not understand that I should not be selecting normal on shmups. It's very forgiving. And there's also plenty of room to scale things up if, unlike me, you are actually good at the genre. In terms of content, there's again a bit more here than in Rabbit. You have multiple characters to play through, each with a different story, and there's a fair bit of text here compared to Rabbit's more minimalist approach. A full run will take you about twenty minutes, so if you're looking for a giant singleplayer campaign this is the wrong place. But if you want to git gud you can spend plenty of time doing that. Also, this developer makes really rad stuff. I hope more people pick this up and support them. Edit: Got a perfect (on normal) on my second playthrough. There isn't a ton of story variation between the first and second characters, but wow do they play different. Green girl is sustained pressure and a few defensive tools, black is pure burst aggression with pressure tools and a chargeable trap. You end up in a completely different rhythm. 2nd Edit: Red is... interesting. Sniper playstyle in a shmup feels weird, but her ability to force lockdowns and use delayed pellet spam is brain-bending to try and counter. Lowkey this might be a great fighting game if you're into those and don't mind when they take on unconventional forms. 3rd Edit: The game does a good job of presenting the characters to you in order of ease of use. Peach feels atrociously difficult. You can absolutely bullseye someone with your charged attacks if you time and position them exactly right, but the skill ceiling for this is wildly high and they're borderline useless if you can't. Similarly she has no tools to keep people from getting in, and charging her attacks slows her and lets them do exactly that. She has the best defensive panic button in the game, but I'm not sure it actually lets her out of pressure. 4th Edit: Could not for the life of me figure out what the game wanted me to do for the final phase of the final boss. Every other phase, 10/10, great fight. The literal last thing you have to do is so badly explained as to wreck the rest of it. "Get to her" apparently translates as "go to the black orb in the middle of the stage and press V." Not, y'know, actually getting to her. Or attacking. Or doing anything with the bomb hovering overhead. Or outlasting your status effects. Or anything else the game has taught or is currently communicating. Took twelve hits during this phase specifically as I tried to go to the center of the pattern and got kicked back fifteen minutes to the beginning of the fight. I ain't doing all of that twice, so I'm gonna skip whatever else is in the game. It's still worth picking up, just understand that whenever the game says 'her' it really means 'that unlabeled black circle that looks like it might be an enemy attack and has otherwise been completely irrelevant to the fight.'
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Maiden & Spell is a bullet hell fighting game by solo developer mino_dev, released in 2020. It’s a novel concept with a clean and impressive visual design to complement its original gameplay and clever writing. Maiden & Spell re-envisions a classic Dungeons & Dragons adventuring party, and the monsters they encounter, as magical girls. The adventurers are on a journey to the bottom of the dungeon for a treasure, and the monsters are protecting it and the two groups fight it out in flashy bullet hell battles. There are very few bullet hell fighting games out there (the Acceleration of SUGURI games are the only others that I know of) and Maiden & Spell does the gameplay well with extremely readable projectiles and hitboxes. There are eight characters total - a fighter, wizard, healer, and thief, and on the monster side there is a lich, basilisk, dragon, and some kind of water cat thing? I’m sure they said what she was at one point but I forgot. In a match, two of the magical girls square off in a bounded arena and can move in all directions while firing a variety of different attacks. Generally, they have a basic attack, a wide attack, an offensive special, and a defensive special. These abilities vary dramatically from character to character, so the different characters can play quite differently from each other. The controls are very smooth, and in addition to the different attacks characters can focus which slows them down allowing you to micro their movement through the projectiles with more precision. The art style is extremely cute and cartoony, and very colorful. Each character has a unique design and color palette, and the backgrounds to the arenas are rendered as 3D animated environments though they never distract from the battles themselves. The writing for the game has a very distinctive voice which is clever and humorous and sometimes moving. This isn’t a perfect comparison, but tonally I would compare it to the animated series Adventure Time. The story mode has you play 6 different storylines, each revealing more about the characters, their relationships, and the treasure at the bottom of the dungeon. Each character has a different personality and motivations, and if I had one complaint it’s that I wanted more story, more time with the characters, and to learn more about them and the setting. Maiden & Spell is 12.99 USD at full price, and playing through all the single player stories took me about 3 hours, but the game doesn’t end there. There are 4 difficulty levels, and the online multiplayer. As a fighting game, the competitive multiplayer aspect is truly where the meat of the game is and extends its life considerably. I was blown away with how much I enjoyed this game. The look of the game is very simplified, but this is to the advantage of the gameplay as it makes the projectiles unmistakable during a match - something that’s critical to a good bullet hell, and even though the story mode was very short the writing was very enjoyable. I also want to touch on the game’s multiplayer community. The player base is rather small, with fights being organized over the developer’s Discord community, but every time I checked there was a handful of dedicated players duking it out in a lobby. The game is four years old so you can expect to battle some very serious players, but I found them friendly and welcoming, and very generous with pointers and advice to a newcomer. There is also an active tournament scene, with tournaments taking place twice a month. When I first looked at the Steam store page for this, I never would have guessed that I’d have a new game in my rotation of favorites, but it has sucked me in. If you have any love in your heart for bullet hell games, or if you like the cute aesthetic, I recommend checking it out. If you do pick it up, maybe I’ll see you in the lobby. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the game, and if you’re interested please follow my Steam Curator page [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/45265204/]Hidden Gem Highlights for reviews of lesser known titles like this of all genres.
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While it is a fantastic game for both bullet hell experts and newcomers like me, the saves aren't synced between PCs, which removes seamless switching to Steam Deck. This is my only issue so far, and only really matters in story mode, not PvP.
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Maiden and spell is a directly touhou inspired shmup or bullet hell game and i think would serve as a great introduction to them for anyone not super into the genre. The gameplay can be split into many parts, ill talk main story first, the game is 2 phases, swordplay where you and another character battle to hit one another using various attacks at your disposal, they're nice breaks from the main chunks of the game: magnuses, they're an attack which you have to endure while shooting the boss to end that particular attack, they start simple and progressively get harder as the game goes on, the patterns themselves are fine tuned for each difficulty and character and they work super super well for what they are, the main story is awesome, then we have the extra bosses, there's 2 of them and the first one is pretty good, they turn up the difficulty a notch so expect a spike here, but the second one suffers from the games inherent flaws, the first one is that the difficulty balancing is a lil weird at times, the hardest 2 attacks of this fight are the last and 3rd to last meaning its backloaded and you have to clear 10+ minutes of each magnus to get back to them. The true magnuses are 1 magnus that's intended to be super hard to clear, they're extras but required for completion and imo they're the best part, they're creative attacks, and push your peak shmup skill to the brim while still being very fair, i can safely say these are awesome and creative, even if they are slightly imbalanced. Another flaw the game shows is in its attack and movement system, some are simply hold and you're attacking this should be standard for all attacks, having to constantly mash a button to fire a rally of shots gets tiring real quick and there's no real merit to having it in the game, just let it be autofire. The other flaw is that when shooting you're slower, this is standard for shmups and i've no qualm with it, but when you stop firing, you don't instantly get set to normal speed, there's a small delay and it feels clunky at times, it needed to be a bit snappier. The graphics and music ill lump into one section, they're all very functional and touhou esque, the story is cute and nothing extreme although i felt it didn't really tell a story but sort of just nodded to one, still fine nonetheless, the character designs are clean, and took an artstyle which was simple and functional, and the music is fit for each fight and environment/stage you're currently in. Overall maiden & spell is a shmup built with clear intention and good creativity, the design is a little shaky at times, but none of its flaws are enough to hamper the experience and i think this is a very clean and enjoyable experience for anyone who either wants to work their way into shmups or as a veteran, see what it has to offer, and given that it goes on sale often, give it a go!
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 23 November 2024 06:01 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 19 December 2024 04:48 |
| Steam price | 23 December 2024 20:28 |
| Steam reviews | 22 December 2024 03:58 |
Online players
15
Developer
mino_dev
Publisher
mino_dev,
Maple Whispering Limited
Release
24 Feb 2020
Platforms
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