TGS 2005: Feel the Magic 2 Hands-On

During a visit to Sega's sizable Tokyo Game Show booth today, we were able to get our hands on a demo version of the upcoming sequel to Feel the Magic. We weren't able to discern what was going on story-wise in the two Japanese levels that we played, but it looked to be some kind of bizarre courting ritual involving chicken legs, pizzas, cakes, love hearts, and lots and lots of rope. Confused? Wait until you hear what the gameplay involved.

The demo started with a brief intro sequence in which two male and female black silhouetted figures (much like those in the current iPod advertisements) appeared to be having a lover's tiff. The guy somehow ended up being tied up with a large amount of rope and sat at one end of a long table. And then the girl sat on the table, while looking down on him, and shouted something in Japanese. We were hoping that we might be able to take an educated guess as to what she was shouting once we got to see what the subsequent gameplay sequence entailed. We were wrong.

The first of the two levels we played saw us assuming the role of the aforementioned male character on the touch screen, who was still at one end of a long table bound in rope. His female acquaintance stood on the top screen while hurling food items down the table toward him. Our mission, using the stylus, was to move our guy from left to right so he could catch the numerous chicken legs and pizzas in his mouth. A couple of nasty-looking items--surrounded by a green mist--were sent down for us to avoid at one point, but otherwise the menu was to our liking, and swallowing the cake that marked the end of the level seemed to please the girl who threw it at us immensely.

The second of the two levels was even more unusual, because we had to hold the Nintendo DS at 90 degrees (or, since the DS was fixed to a demonstration pod, cock our head at an uncomfortable angle) to play it. Whether the touch screen was on the left or the right was determined by our telling the game if we were left- or right-handed (we stared blankly at the Japanese text and guessed wrong on this occasion). Our hero once again found himself bound in rope, but instead of being sat at a table, he was hanging from a second rope. Over on the other screen, his nemesis (or girlfriend, perhaps) was hurling love hearts at him that he clearly had no interest in. Our mission, then, was to grab his foot with our stylus and kick the incoming hearts away before they got too close. It was every bit as simplistic as it sounds, but since it'll undoubtedly be one minigame among many in the finished game, that's certainly not a criticism.

We look forward to bringing you more information on the sequel to Feel the Magic as soon as we get our hands on a more complete (and hopefully localized) version of the game.