An okay RPG geered towards a younger audience.
A vibrantly coloured, vivid and living landscape pervades Magical Starsign. The character design, while anime-ish, is perhaps a tad off the beaten track. The dual screens are used throughout the game, though not always in the most useful sort of way. It is cool that some bosses and spells are so big they take up both screens, but a lot of the time you are just seeing the sky or a map on the other screen. It works for what it is, though.
As you might guess, magic is very important in this game. Actually, it has been made so important that your characters physical attacks are almost useless, other than to kill the rare enemy that is totally resistant to magic but quite weak to physical damage. The visuals for the magic are quite nice, but the selection of spells in combat is quite paltry at only 5 spells per character plus an extra bonus spell from a small set that can be assigned to any of your characters. Although each spell has a couple animations, depending on whether the character is in the front or back row, this still doesn't lift the total and utter boredom of running through the same spammy motions in combat that players may develop towards endgame.
The music in this game is not bad at all. It does a fairly good job at setting the mood, and it matches the visual environmental design very well. Some of the tunes are a little short, though and end up looping too quickly and can become boring if not grating. Don't expect epic symphonic orchestrations here; they wouldn't fit into this game environment anyway. The sound effects range from amusingly effective to lackluster.
Battle mechanics amount to the typical old-school styled menu-option selecting. It's turn-based, with speed stats determining the combat order. Nothing too exciting there. On a side note, healing in this game kind of sucks because the characters who can heal (only one, really, since the other one depends on your choice of element for the main character) lose a huge chunk of MP any time you need them to heal. Thankfully, healing items are pretty easy to find, although not always as effective as a whole-party spell... The touch-screen elements are incorporated into battle in terms of selecting things from the menus, targeting, and performing 'spell strikes' and defensive shielding.
The game's story is original in its surface ideas, but totally derivative when you look deeper. Characterization is well done, and each of your characters along with many of the NPCs end up with distinct personas. Don't expect any startling or ground-breaking development, though. Things are pretty flat and set in stone. There are also no totally unexpected twists in the plot. It's pretty darned straightforward.
Overall, this game is not bad. It tries hard to be a lot of things but never quite succeeds in completely engaging the gamer beyond the surface. It is clearly targeted at a younger audience, or at the very least, someone seeking out something lighthearted and straightforward. I wouldn't recommend paying full price, but it's good enough to get a rental or be purchased used.