Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom

Photo by Dan Siney

MAJIN AND THE FORSAKEN KINGDOM

Platform: Xbox 360

Publisher: Namco Bandai Games

In

Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom

, you play a nameless hero out to recruit the Majin, a legendary giant who once saved the local kingdom from a dark age, because that dark age has come again. You find him in a dungeon, but he’s been robbed of most of his powers. Once you break him out you have to set out to find big magic-bauble things to get him his powers back.

So it’s a giant-monster pet game. Except then the Majin opens his mouth and I want to stop playing, because he speaks in terrible, aggravating broken English—basically normal grammar, except with all instances of “I” or “I am” replaced with “Me.” Expect to hear things like “Me hungry!” and “Me feel sad!” The Majin isn’t actually dumb, just simple-minded, and the speech impediment is the writers overselling it.

The gameplay is… God, it’s forgettable. There’s a very rudimentary combat system where you have an attack button and basically want to run up to enemies and hit them, except they can only be finished off by combination attacks performed by your adventurer dude and the Majin. The combat exists to spice up the puzzle elements, which are usually like “Go here and use whatever power you just unlocked for the Majin to solve the ‘puzzle.’” I’ve seen this style of game play described as “Modern Simple.” You don’t need to put much thought into playing, so the play experience is running around performing obvious solutions to puzzles and powering through repetitive, difficult-to-lose fights.

There are people who want this sort of game, and they’re welcome to it. The graphics are pretty in that way all games for the current console generation are always pretty, the scenery is nice and passes by quickly, and it’s easy to get a sense of progress because you won’t get stuck very often. I am terribly, terribly jaded; I play spectacle brawlers like

Bayonetta

and

Devil May Cry

on the higher difficulties, and I play obscure Japanese tactics games and get the in-jokes. I am not the audience for this. But I can’t call it bad—it’s an adequate Modern Simple adventure title, and also remarkably kid-friendly, albeit the sort of kid-friendly that doesn’t particularly respect kids’ intelligence.

If you’re reading this you can probably skip it yourself, but if you know a six-year-old and you want to get him a game and you

don’t

want to get him anything violent, you could do worse.