This Way Madness Lies [Let's Play] - 02 - Pandas

2 days ago

One magical girl transforms into a Panda this time. You get to play as magical girl panda!!! It's even more hilarious than it sounds!!!

This Way Madness Lies is a mix of Magical Girls storytelling tropes with Shakespearean plays and unique (almost cringy) humor. This game follows Imogen and her friends from the girl club who perform stage plays at their academy, and have the ability to go to other worlds using their magical girl powers and world-connecting portals. These worlds they go to, are often recreations of Shakespeare's plays.

The RPG system is reminiscent of multiple SNES-era games, visually it's closer to Shining Force, but the turn-based battles are similar to the developer's previous game: Cosmic Star Heroine. In this game, however, he party levels up at once instead of each characters having their own levels.

My favorite aspect of the game is the "Translation" feature. Some characters are speaking in the Shakespearean era of English which the game marks as "Olde."

When a character is speaking in this Olde English, you can press a button to get a modern translation of what they're saying. The translation is ALWAYS hilarious. It's close enough in meaning to not be completely useless, but it destroys the nuance!