Review by: Cole Jones

As a Halloween-themed RPG that draws just as much inspiration from the Brothers Grimm as Tim Burton, A Witch’s Tale is a unique -- if slightly confused -- adventure. Yet even though it might scream "kid’s game," its puzzles and impressively powerful bosses might catch seasoned players off guard. This game won't appeal to everyone, but if you're the kind of person who appreciates a unique setting and aesthetic, you just might be able to look past a few annoyances and enjoy the fanciful tale underneath.

It's hard to believe that over a thousand years have passed since the Great Witch Alice sealed away the evil Eld Witch and ushered in an era of peace. But once again, a witch is fighting to bring harmony back to six distraught kingdoms. You play the young witch Liddell as she sets off to discover the definition of humility and save the world from the evil witch she accidentally brought back from the abyss.

While other DS RPGs do a good job of adding a bit of touch screen to the mix, A Witch’s Tale is played entirely with the stylus. Wielding it as your "magic wand," Liddell easily follows your touch anywhere onscreen, and interacts with everything via a nudge or a tap. While that's nothing new, the battle system is both fresh and straightforward: just drag and drop your spells, attack commands, and items onto their designated targets. Although I would have appreciated an “automate” option (or at least to be to able button mash when I'm feeling extra lazy), the touchscreen controls performed admirably well -- even when crudely tracing a mega-powerful ancient rune.

Unfortunately, the game just doesn't know how difficult it really wants to be. Even though each area follows the same general pattern of "collect the three ingredients necessary to get a boss key", tracking down every NPC or treasure chest in the right order can be a major headache. Since the game's map system doesn't give you any hints towards undiscovered nooks and crannies, you'll spend a lot of time trying to find the missing piece of the progression. Even worse, many of the clues can be exceedingly vague or downright misleading -- a real shame considering the quality of the translation overall.

All this inevitable backtracking wouldn't be so bad if the random battles didn't take quite so long. For no particular reason, every object has a relatively high level of HP. Thankfully that includes Lidell and her doll teammates (so the battles are never really difficult), but you'll have to exploit elemental weaknesses and powerful spells if you want to finish quickly.

The boss battles, however, are another matter entirely. Packing upwards of ten times the HP found in your average baddie, most bosses feel out of place in the otherwise middling world. Thankfully you have a lot of MP to expend on ancient magic that's exponentially more powerful when these bosses show up, but it feels like the game could have used a little more balancing on a whole.

Even though A Witch's Tale isn't quite as easy as NIS might have expected (and grows a bit thin after the first few areas), it's still a game with an unmatched aesthetic. However, it's not likely to be everyone's cup of tea, and diehard RPG fanatics will see through its cutesy exterior and focus their attention on its most glaring problems while younger gamers will enjoy everything up until they get smacked by the unforgiving boss battles. In the end it’s hard to fully recommend the game to either group.