Continuing my hotly anticipated column covering everything PvP, we’ve gathered together again here in Fight or Kite to discuss dancing and school work.
You read that right. Harry Potter: Magic Awakened took the one ballroom dancing scene from the Goblet of Fire film and centered a whole game mode around it. Less surprising than that, though, are the gamified classes: Most games in the Wizarding World tend to find a way to turn the classes at Hogwarts into some sort of challenge or game.
Although we aren’t going to have as much face-to-face spell-slinging PvP in today’s game modes, there is a little bit of that too, so sit back and relax and try to enjoy the casual friendly nature of these activities because once you get into the higher-end tiers, the challenges get intense.
Take my waist in the Dance Club
I’d rank the Dance Club in Magic Awakened as one of the top five or so pillars of the game. It isn’t the most important feature, and there will be a lot of days when you don’t even engage in any dancing, but you aren’t going to completely ignore it either.
The primary reason for that is because of the daily system. As I mentioned in an earlier column, running through your dailies is going to be one of the main ways for freemium players (including me) to keep up with the Joneses. You’ll earn gold, gems, and various keys, which are all necessary to leveling up. Participation in a few dances tends to show up in the dailies frequently too.
Now, how the dancing minigame works is basically a quick-time event. A ring will appear somewhere on your screen, and you want to precisely time your click on it. Depending on how well you tapped, you’ll get a miss, good, excellent, or perfect score for the tap. Chaining your taps, of course, earns you the most points while a miss will wreck your score. At the end of the dance, the scores of you and your dance partner are added up, and the total score determines your overall performance. Scores rank from a failure up to SSS. Each song has five tiers that can be unlocked as you score well on the lower tiers.
As with most activities in Magic Awakened, you could run these with an NPC. In fact, if you play the game with NPCs often enough, you’ll level up your friendship with them and can even earn additional outfits for them to dance in. The NPCs will never get top scores, though. If you want those, you need to dance with another player. It’s easy to click on your friends list and invite someone to dance with you, but even if you don’t, there are other players walking around the dance club whom you can invite easily. However, unlike in my own boyhood, the other students tend to accept my offer to dance.
With dancing, tiers one through three are no problem. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be acing tier three with no issue. But for tiers four and five, hold on tight because it gets crazy. With tier four songs, you’ll often have a bunch of simultaneous taps required – that is, both a left hand and right hand or two super dexterous fingers will be needed. It’s a challenge to be sure. I think I’ve gotten S ranked on maybe half the songs. However, the tier five songs… those are to be feared. You’ll not only be tapping like mad – simultaneous taps and extremely quick – but the songs will also add in some slides. You can see these in the images above as the blue rings with arrows. So, one finger is tapping while the other is sliding, and it’s a mess. I think a B rank is my best there.
While there isn’t a huge selection of songs and they are mostly waltzes and tangos, Magic Awakened did add a funk song with the last seasonal update, so that was cool. I hope that it’s a sign the studio will continue to add news songs.
Learn the difference between monkshood and wolfsbane by attending class
Classes are another pillar of the game’s activities. There are seasonal challenges and dailies as well. Any one of the classes themselves isn’t particularly remarkable, but the whole of them makes for a fully featured game mode. They are basically minigames, but each one offers something different.
As with many schools, not every class is available everyday. There’s a schedule with three or four different classes each and then everything available on the weekend – which wouldn’t be so much fun if it were real school. We currently have eight different classes to play in ranging from battling monsters to trivia.
- Charms – a class where you must fight a troll in the bathroom. This is another call back to a scene from the movies. The first time you take the class, the game even gives you a little flashback like story to remind you. You’re given a unique class skill, the levitation charm, to interrupt the trolls. It’s fairly simple and straightforward.
- History of Magic – a trivia game about the Wizarding World. It’s set up as a multiple- choice Who Wants to Be a Millionaire style of game. The contest is two teams of three completing to answer 10 questions the fastest. It’s not completely clear to me whether you’re competing against real people or not as the other team always uses generic player names. The questions are all specifics from the books/films, so I tend to struggle with this one.
- Muggle Studies – another trivia game that’s set up exactly like the History of Magic. The only difference is these tend to be easy real-world questions like, “What is a box that muggles use to keep their food cold and fresh?” The main challenge is in answering quickly as you get 25 points down to 10 points for answering slowly.
- Quidditch – This is a new class added with the most recent seasonal update. It’s real strange and nothing like the other classes. To play, you switch to first-person perspective and ride on rails with three different lanes to choose from. It plays just like those old handheld Tiger electronic car games where you tap left and right to switch lanes and avoid running into other cars. There’s a little bit of nuance to it, but it doesn’t seem like a whole hell of a lot. The main goal is to dodge the other players in your lane at the very last second. The closer you were to hitting them without doing so earns you more points. I think. As with the trivia, I’m not sure whether it’s a competition against real people or not.
- Defense Against the Dark Arts – This is more akin to the Charms class, but you need to defeat a bogart or capture gremlins (both moments from the movies).
- Divination – a hidden draw and guessing game. It’s akin to Pictionary: You and two other students draw and then guess each others’ pictures. You’re given an image to draw in about 20 seconds. Then your drawing is passed to the right and you’re given four multiple choice answers to guess what the other player drew.
- Study of Ancient Runes – a simple memory game where you flip rune cards and try to find matching pairs. We’ve all played this when we were children.
- Care of Magical Creatures – The last class is another PvE combat scenario where you and two others must defeat the griffon in a short time limit.
With that I think we’ve rounded up these two game modes. The majority of your time in Magic Awakened will almost certainly involve these two modes and the dueling and dungeoning we discussed before. However, we aren’t done yet, so next time we’ll discuss everything else there is to do – and even the dreaded gacha.
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Every other week, Massively OP’s Sam Kash delivers Fight or Kite, our trip through the state of PvP across the MMORPG industry. Whether he’s sitting in a queue or rolling with the zerg, Sam’s all about the adrenaline rush of a good battle. Because when you boil it down, the whole reason we PvP (other than to pwn noobs) is to have fun fighting a new and unpredictable enemy!
