Life of a Wizard

I liked the sense of humor, but this is far too short and the plot consequently moved too rapidly.

The longest path I found proceeds like this:

Wants to become a wizard – Takes a test – Passes and becomes qualified to become wizard – Becomes Bandit instead – Attacks and kills Headmaster – Plunders and kills everyone and establishes a new school.

This is accomplished in 10 pages. Here’s the shortest path I found:

Wants to become a wizard – Become bandit instead – Attacks and kills Headmaster – Plunders and kills everyone and establishes a new school.

This is accomplished in 6 pages. There is little build-up and little detail on how these events happened. Not to mention that the direction changes on a whim. You are supposed to be taught how to be a wizard, but then the choice of being a bandit shows up and you can act upon it without any build-up or reason for the protagonist to act upon those wishes. Why does the protagonist consider being a bandit? Why does he become a bandit (depending on the player’s choice)? There was nothing to indicate that their goals or aspirations could be achieved by banditry (One way this can be solved: they want riches above all else and aren’t afraid to do dirty work in order to obtain it, this can be achieved by banditry, so the choice to become a bandit makes sense) or that their personality would influence such behavior (One way this could be solved: make the main character not care about the welfare of anybody but himself). If there’s no indicator or reason of why the protagonist is striving to do something, then it makes that striving to do something pointless. Also, these are the only paths I found without resulting in me dead, making it incredibly linear as well. I don’t understand why you couldn’t add a conclusion for the wizard path and instead force people to go down the bandit path in order to get a prologue. This also would’ve made the test with the wizard not pointless. This also would’ve removed that annoying loop-back link.

There is little back story and no motivations for the main character. I know that they went to the wizard school because they are a wizard, but why did they leave their previous home in order to learn at the school? What does being a wizard mean to them? Why did they see it as more of an aspiration compared to other careers? Asking questions about characters motivations and answering them via either interactions between characters (such as the Headmaster. An example: “Obviously you are good enough to be a wizard, so much in fact that you get to skip enrollment and all that other stuff and get right to the test! But first, I’m curious, why are you a wizard?”) or by the narrator explaining (You, an aspiring wizard, have left your home to learn more about wizardry because of your hometown’s constant barbarian attacks. You hope that you will learn offensive spells in order to protect yourself and the town. Well, that, and because you have massive debt from the tavern, and you hope that the tavern and it’s owner will be destroyed and killed by another attack while you’re absent. Good thing this academy doesn’t have a tuition fee, or you’d be in massive student debt too!) or by any other methods out there.

The main character has very little personality. I realize that the story is in second-person and you want people to put themselves in the boots of the protagonist, but the protagonist has to still have a worth-while personality. Think of it this way, you cannot think up and present all the different ways a character can go about a situation in a setting you produce. One way to cherry-pick the choices you present is to think of what the character that you have built up a personality would choose. You cannot do that with someone who does not have a personality at all.

I assume the Headmaster is speaking to us directly, so he should have quotation marks around his dialogue. Aside from that, technical missteps are few but present.

Details were few and far and each page was pretty barren. Ask these questions: What does the protagonist look like? What does the Headmaster look like? What does the school look/smell/feel/hear like? What does Fantalia look/smell/feel/hear like? Always think of the five senses when describing anything in your story.

Never put an end game link on the first page.

I would give this a 2/8, since some effort was put in and I like the humor, but the first-page end game link, the extreme linearity and, to a lesser extent, the loop-back link all bumped it down to a 1/8.

I thought that the fighting aspect was the best part.

Fun game

This was... Weird. Not quite sure how I managed to kill the zombies with healing magic, but I'll roll with it. The main problem with this game is that I have no idea what you were trying to achieve. I don't really get the impression that you're actually a fan of the Magic Student genre, but it didn't seem like you were making fun of it either. What was your motivation for making this game?

I'm not sure if you were going for random humour, but if you were, there's just two little problems... It wasn't random, and it wasn't funny.

The saddest part is that I think Bannerlord put more effort into his review than you put into the whole game :p

I had a few problems with this story.
1. This was too short.
2. The maturity level was a little to low.
3. Why is this called Life of a Wizard, if you can be a bandit?

It looks like there are a lot of options, but as far as I can tell they all either end in death or the same non-death ending. While there is a bit of humor involved, it isn't enough to make up for the lack of story or choices.

watta...make it longer

amazing

good

I suggest a rename. Life of a Wizard is an already pretty well known CYOA on Choice of Games. Not that it matters that much, but I just consider it nice to make titles as unique as possible (easier to search for on google,ect).

Also recommend removing the end story link on the first page.

Game is pretty short. I love me some wizard sims and think you could do better on this if you gave it more time.

GL