WitchSpring3 [Re:Fine] - Review — Analog Stick Gaming

Spells and Spelling.

WitchSpring3 [Re:Fine] - The Story of Eirudy, is as charming as it looks. Originally developed by KiwiWalks as a mobile release, it’s now found its way to the Nintendo Switch, a console that feels just too perfect for it, despite the massive price gap in what is known as “The Switch Tax”. While ININ Games and STUDIOARTDINK had a part in bringing this engaging adventure to Nintendo’s handheld platform, the translation of its script doesn’t quite cut it, feeling as if whoever was in charge of converting the story to English ended up just using Google Translate and calling it a day. While it doesn’t flat-out ruin the journey, it’s a sore spot that unfortunately rears its ugly head every few minutes.

Following the story of Eirudy, the titular Witch, or rather, a Deity, this young girl lives a secluded life in the Misty Forest, raised largely alone by her grandmother who lives in the neighboring forest. Eirudy has a small but spacious home filled with numerous dolls both big and small, all hoping for that one day that their young master would summon enough life force out of a crystal for their chance to come to life and join her on some sort of adventure. Now, the dolls themselves don’t really have these dreams or a will of their own, but you’ll do just that. One such doll that joins Eirudy on her quest is one of her own making, Failur, who is by all accounts a charming as hell companion, and almost worth getting the special edition plush for. Once we are initially introduced to young Eirudy, it’s here where her life is about to get far more interesting as she encounters a human, a young boy named Adrian, who is in dire need of her help.

WitchSpring3 [Re:Fine] is a gorgeous isometric JRPG where its turn-based battles take place directly on the field as you enter the immediate proximity of your foe indicated by a combat ring around them. There isn't really any flashy transition shift to an open battlefield, or anything typical of the genre, but just you, as Eirudy, swinging your sword, summoning your dolls, and performing a bit of magic. You’ll occasionally have some assistance by your side, but more often than it is just you and your dolls, with many of them allowing you to ride atop them or have them take part in actual combat alongside you. You'll tour throughout a forest, a desert, a mountain range, and more as you attempt to aid Adrian, or as she calls him, Adri, in his effort to save his mother, and deal with the threat of Witches being hunted by a man obsessed with ending their lives, a man in which Adri calls father.

There is a soft-spoken and charming adventure here to not just its pacing, but its performances as well. While the voice acting is only available in Japanese or Korean, there is a tone given to Eirudy and her fellow cast that is remarkably calm and matches the look and feel of the game perfectly. However; some of that is undone by the lack of polish when it comes to the dialogue used to convey its story and the constant spelling and grammar mistakes that infect nearly every few sentences. While some words like “Performance” and “Failure” may drop the “E” at the end due to some lore reasons, at least that is what I am assuming due to their frequency, there are constant other issues with noticeable keystroke errors that place the button next to a letter obviously intended. such as “reallt” instead of “really” or the village of “Ziv” being misspelled a total of three times as “Zic”. The translation also takes what could be a well-written story, and so much of the dialogue feels adapted by someone who didn’t know how to form powerful sentences or dialogue, making almost all characters sound like children instead of grown adults. It’s a shame, especially since the story itself can often be quite moving and is good, it’s just not written well enough for what it is trying to convey.

A lot of the gameplay has you moving from location to location gathering materials to aid in crafting, as well as earning days of training to get better in certain fields such as magic and attack power, defense, and learning new recipes and items. While there is an annoyance of repeated item prompts every time you pick up something, the crafting itself is easy to grasp, quick to perform, even if knowing how to procure certain items is a bit of mystery sometimes. The training, which is a bonus to essentially leveling up, grants you five days of training, which has you running laps around your house, punching a stuffed rabbit or doing pushups in your home. You can select five options out of ten during each of these efforts, each boosting certain stats in the process. The training montage that follows is extremely fun and can be sped up, making it seem even crazier as Eirudy is blitzing through pushups or running around her room at a breakneck pace.

During a few moments in the story, you'll need to have time pass to push the plot forward, such as needing to wait ten days for Adri to return to your house in the Misty Forest, requiring you to level up enough for more training to have those days pass. However; there are times where people are waiting for you, via time-sensitive matters, yet you can use multiple weeks of training and arrive as if they were just waiting hours. It’s inconsistent. That said, it's easy enough to grind and level up, as battles will gain you stone energy which can be used to level up your dolls, making their abilities and effectiveness in combat far greater, not to mention earning the required amount of energy to even bring them to life in the first place. In fact, leveling up the first doll, which heals between turns, went from healing me for about 100 to over 3,200 with not much effort, making me damn near invincible during the more trivial encounters as I would keep looking to increase my overall HP. Your stone will need a boost of its own to even summon the bigger dolls, and you'll easily perform the needed steps to do this, as most objectives are pretty easy to follow and complete, and one of them is even tied to the main story.

Combat itself is well enough without much really standing out as being a huge draw to this game. You’ll have magic and melee abilities, as well as boosting your melee attacks with magic as well. This is on top of buffs and various perks that your dolls grant you and a few that will join in combat as well, even if they don’t really seem to turn the tide of most encounters. In fact, I leveled up Eirudy pretty easily, and quickly, making me vastly stronger than any encounter I found, apart from maybe the 2nd or 3rd last battle of the main campaign. Often, waves of guards would be unleashed on me only to destroy them in maybe one or two hits. Your selections in combat are this: You have a Swordsmanship attack that when leveled up, can swing multiple times, with each consecutive hit using up HP. Then you have a Magical Swordsmanship attack where you can flavor your blade, such as causing a blue magical glow on your weapon for extra magic damage, or a green one for zapping health on each swing. As you level up Eirudy through training, you’ll earn more attacks as you progress.

There is also a Magic Circle system where you combine different items in order to customize certain magical spells. However; as interesting as this system sounds on paper, I honestly never used it apart from a few early battles. Using my Magic Swordsmanship attack, the starting one, honestly, it flew me through 99% of my battles, as it hits multiple enemies for insanely high damage, especially when I sacrifice a tiny bit of health to hit for five, six, or seven times, having my Little Emilia Doll heal me back up to full after every attack. This combo is so powerful that nothing else even came close to outputting as much damage. However; to explain the magic circle system further, you start with a Main Magic Circle and more as you craft them, such as a 4-pillar Ice Prison attack. Then you slot in a Supportive skill such as a Normal Focus MC where it will reduce the Mana cost of using it. Again, it’s a neat way to customize your spells, but they rarely do any decent damage unless you invest heavily into magic, which I went quite the opposite, investing far more into my overall strength, HP, and defense. Yes, I would invest into magic here and there, but maybe every 2 or 3 training sessions.

Most battles would go like this; I would approach any enemy that was going to put up even the slightest bit of challenge and summon Birdrock, a stone golem that buffs my defense by 30%, then engage in battle. I would summon Emilia, and then select Magic Blade, and swing for as many hits as I could with my multiplier. My next turn, if I even needed it, I would summon Musclee, another of my combat dolls, and bring him into battle. You can summon three during battles, and honestly, I don’t know how to un-summon them as while Vahnter was talked up in the story as being all-powerful, bringing him into my fights was painful as he would only do 1 or 2 HP hits, so I often benched him. This overall method worked 99% of the time until I found some sort of world boss laying about and would get slammed until I leveled up more and returned the favor. This method allowed me to steamroll through battles, with no campaign fight really proving to be difficult in any way, hell, the final battle, was over in maybe 5 turns, with not even coming close to defeat. There is a lot of interesting ideas here for combat, but balancing is just not one that seemed to be implemented here.

WitchSpring3 is damn gorgeous for what it is. There is a simplicity here that is soft and calm, with fun chibi-style characters that are ridiculously charming. Even the dolls themselves are full of character, especially Failur, who is just damn impressive as a character for doing nothing more than simply sitting on Eirudy’s head, falling into her cauldron whenever she would craft or soaking up her magic, an effort that pays off in a moment that will stick with me for a long time. There is a dollhouse sort of appeal here in some of the locations, almost as if we are looking into a diorama of sorts. The colors are also soft, with nothing really clashing or standing out, making the visuals just exude the same tone of its performances. I will say; however, that playing portable, that font is just too damn small, making me almost having to squint to read anything. It’s not as bad as the recent release in Dreamscaper, but it’s damn close. Lastly, the gorgeous character artwork here is damn near breathtaking and honestly, I took a screenshot of everything, as it’s some of the best anime art I’ve seen in a game to date, blending into the tone and feel of this game perfectly.

Now, I mentioned this at the start of the review, but the Switch Tax for this game is pretty out there. While much of the visuals have been reworked or simply remade, as well as a load of other art assets and full voice work in Japanese and Korean languages, the charge-up from $5.49CAD on mobile to $49.99CAD is pretty damn high. Now, the game is roughly around 15-20 or so hours long with taking part in some post-game stuff as I hit around 13 hours just on the main campaign alone, so there is some value here on a time versus money angle. There is also a secondary path to take in the game that has some events play out differently, so there is some replay here as well, but had this been half the price, then that huge price gap wouldn’t sting that much. While WitchSpring3 [Re:Fine] is still a solid recommendation from me, I do have to add the caveat that I suggest waiting for a sale to warrant that pretty substantial price gap from the mobile version.

I have to also mention that playing the previous games in the series isn’t exactly necessary for most of the story, but the last chapter alone feels like something that was set up in previous games, as a few characters from the first two games do make an appearance, out of nowhere, with little to nothing to make new players aware of who they are, or that of a third character that is mentioned by name and is apparently a very important character to the series, yet is only ever mentioned here at this moment. Up until then, I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything important, and while I still understand what happened, and who eventually was who, it’s a character-blindside that could have been better handled for newcomers, especially since the first two games are not on the platform.

While there are some design lows of noticing the game’s mobile origin’s creeping in, none of that really seemed to diminish what a charming and enjoyable game this turned out to be. While it took an hour or two to get its hooks into me, its wonderful characters, simple story, and calm atmosphere really came through in the end. Eirudy’s blissful naivety is addictive as she questions everything and yet accepts so much with little to no information but still chooses to believe in the good of people, and that of Adri. I half expected WitchSpring3 [Re:Fine] to be yet another visual novel with bland and uninspiring combat or characters, yet everything here, apart from its sometimes far too simple and grammatically incorrect dialogue, was often perfect and was a breath of fresh air in its tone and warmth. In fact, it’s made me want to play the other games in the series on my phone, a platform I rarely enjoy playing games on, and that says a lot.

Developer - KiwiWalks, Ikina Games. Publisher - ININ Games, STUDIOARTDINK. Released - August 13th, 2021. Available On - Nintendo Switch. Rated - (E 10+) Fantasy Violence, Language, Mild Suggestive Scenes. Platform Reviewed - Nintendo Switch, Docked and Portable. Review Access - A review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.