I bought Magna Carta 2, like many others, solely on Hyung-tae Kim's art design.
The translation to 3D was pretty hit-or-miss, toning down most of the stylization of his artwork. His male leads are typically gender-neutral boys or even slightly feminine, while his women usually posses an hourglass figure with the thighs and ass exaggerated as much as the bust. Magna Carta 2 is no exception, but I was disappointed with the generic stylings in their translation to 3D - the original drawings are much more ornate and unique.
Most JRPG players like to focus on the story, but I honestly couldn't care less this time around. I've played a dozen other JRPG's that have tasked a young amnesiac boy with finding his true strength to save the world from an evil threat, and this game follows the same formula. Some of the twists and turns are telegraphed from the very beginning, turning what could have been a sophomoric story into something downright amateur. The voice acting was competent, though, save for Celestine's voice actor who is downright annoying.
Magna Carta 2 operates very much like a single-player MMO. It's all real-time hack and slash save for item and spell selection - this actually pauses the game and gives a few moments to survey the situation. The only unique mechanic that would separate this game from Dynasty Warriors is the heat gauge and cancel actions - this forces you to use all three active characters in your party rather than spamming one character's move the entire game. The friendly A.I. is subsequently left in the dust; once you master the heat gauge in the first few hours it's more like switching between fighting styles than different characters.
The only semblance of strategy, aside from a few choice boss battles, comes with upgrading weapons. Adding attribute modifiers in one of eighteen different spots per weapon is more vital than leveling up your character, since enemies level up with you throughout the game. Since weapons can be fitted with so many upgrades, there aren't many hard choices of how you will modify a character's attributes. If you want, every character can be fitted with a healthy dose of condition-nullifiers, HP, attack and defensive points with enough space left over to raise their agility enough to dodge every physical attack (save for a few special moves courtesy of the boss fights).
Of course, if you do want to put a little thought into it, you can give some choice perks to your healer partway through and completely break the game. That's not even to speak of the DLC weapons, which render the first disc a veritable point-and-click adventure.
The only challenge presented throughout the entire game was in the final dungeon, and even then only in the final boss battle. This was one of two times I died and faced a game over screen in my entire playthrough.
Hyung-tae Kim is probably the biggest selling point of this game, but again the character art was not done justice. The entire game looks like a 720p rendition of Final Fantasy XII, which would be nice if it didn't seem so slapped together. There's a healthy dose of texture and model pop-in. There isn't a wide variety of character animations, much less enemy models. Visually it's just a bland stand-in for the concept art - while this is common a game fall short of it's predevelopment sources, it's still disappointing here. The Unreal engine clearly wasn't picked for it's visual prowess, but for it's ease-of-use.
So, if you want a JRPG with thirty to forty hours of hack and slash that's centered around a single combo system and rudimentary stat-manipulation, Magna Carta 2 is probably what you've been looking for.
