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Maiden & Spell Review

by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Maiden & Spell
• Developer: mino_dev
• Publisher: mino_dev, Maple Whisper
• PC

Take the elaborate bullet patterns of modern STGs, give them to adorable fantasy monster girls, then combine them into a fighting game and you get Maiden & Spell. A niche within a niche, Maiden & Spell is part of a line of surprisingly varied shooter-fighting game hybrids, following in the mold set by G-Rev’s Senko no Ronde. As you might expect from a combination of such obsessive niches, Senko no Ronde was a maximalist game, one with highly detailed mechanics and obtuse nuances that required serious effort before you could begin to understand what you were playing. 

Compared to its contemporaries, Maiden & Spell is stripped down, focused on immediate communication. It turns an intimidating genre into an inviting one, one you can show to your friends and immediately have them understand. 

Maiden & Spell’s colorful designs brings to mind Akihiko Yoshida’s work on the Final Fantasy series, and the bold lines and contrasting colors make clear where threat and safety lie. Each character is assigned a specific color, and their hitboxes are on display to make sure there’s never confusion to where you can take damage.

Likewise it tosses away the flashy and elaborate HUD of its inspirations and uses familiar RPG-style skill icons, complete with cooldowns. It’s much faster to parse than the different intersecting circles and layers of meters that have become the genre standard. Health bars are even tossed out, instead using a system of hearts and cards, signalling how many hits you can take before you lose a life and the round resets. Each hit is accompanied by dramatic text declaring HIT and BREAK, making it clear what happened. 

If fighters like Senko are all out brawls, where success is measured in cumulative blows leading to the KO, then Maiden & Spell is fencing, focused on stepping around your opponent and forcing them into a corner for that single lethal hit. Fighters can get chaotic, and sometimes you’ll find yourself knocked down before you understand what exactly hit you. Maiden & Spell retains the chaos that makes them so fun, but presents it so that its clear how exactly every hit happened. 

To that effect, Maiden & Spell gives you plenty of ways to drive your opponent into a corner. There are four characters, each providing their own unique moveset and strategy. Each face button responds to a skill, with another button used to slow down for precise movements and focus your attacks. Skills are broadly categorized into direct attacks, wide attacks, and offensive and defensive skills, though those categories aren’t necessarily exclusive. 

Direct attacks force opponents to move, while wide attacks generally only work against moving opponents, so combining the two is key to putting your opponent in a bad situation. Once there, offensive skills can be used to secure the point and create an inescapable situation–unless they can neutralize it with their defensive skills. The interplay of these moves gives clear utility to each of them, creating an RPG-esque rotation you use while focusing on attempting to position yourself outside your opponent’s traps. 

Exactly how those skills play off each other changes wildly between characters. The Hero of Frost gets in fast, with a powerful dodge roll that gives her enough invincibility frames to get out of most situations. Meanwhile the Lich of Flowers gets more dangerous as the round goes on, with flowers that create hazards across the entire screen, butterflies that act as turrets, and a charge spell that covers the screen in a giant rose. 

Other characters occupy the space in between, with different setups and game plans, and even unique movement options. There’s plenty to play around with and the way that the dynamics work off each other creates a lot of variety in the situations you can set up, or be forced to deal with. 

All the depth in the world doesn’t mean much if you can’t get a game, and on that front Maiden & Spell also happily delivers. M&S uses a lobby system not unlike the ones used by Arc System Works, with various rooms you can walk into to battle with others, and rollback netcode that minimizes stuttering and the effects of lag. I played with a friend from the UK, and despite being all the way in Chicago I only experienced two half second interruptions in over an hour of play, neither which was long enough to cause problems. The rest of the time the experience felt as if we were playing in the same room, with little to no noticeable input lag. I’d had problems with connections in other games with the same friend before, so the implementation of online play here is truly impressive. 

Maiden & Spell does a lot to invite you in, and more to keep you around. Bullet hell and fighting games are two genres with huge intimidation factors, but Maiden & Spell winning combination of colorful fantasy art and adorable characters makes it feel approachable in ways that other entries in the genre don’t. Fighters sometimes feel like they require a lecture before you can understand what you’re looking at, but M&S draws you in and uses familiar visual language to immediately explain itself. 

Maybe this is a strange way to describe a fighter, but Maiden & Spell is a game that radiates warmth. It’s charming, adorable, and every new character and stage is an opportunity to spend more time in its fantastic little world. I loved it since the first played its demo and its final form is just as easy to love.