Atlantis Academy

Focuses on doing many things rather than doing a few things well.

An interesting concept helps this one shine despite it falling into the same unfortunate formulaic design of most recent Choice of Games titles. The villain is obvious from the beginning, there are many mysteries that you can learn about and which all come together to support the path to one of the endings. Huge bonuses in its favor, in no particular order: 1. The importance of the Academy is not overstated. If you want your character to be all "I must get good grades!" you can be, but you can also take the approach of "Yeah I don't give a ♥♥♥♥ about grades, I only came here to improve my magic. I'm gonna go do <other thing> now and maybe I'll come back." This is refreshing - a lot of games set in a school setting can sometimes become myopic about the importance of the setting in contrast to the larger conflict of the plot. 2. There's a racist bully, after putting up with his crap a few times, you can just say "♥♥♥♥ this" and murder him. 3. There's a guy who kidnaps your pet dragon, when you rescue him you can end that bastard's life. Numbers 2 and 3 make me sound bloodthirsty but just think about all the games you've ever played where there's an antagonist but the goodie-two-…

The writing is good but it's hard to enjoy when things keep breaking immersion because they make no sense for the setting, which is sorely underutilized. It's an enormous waste of a good premise. [list] [*]You are given a dorm room... which just looks like an ordinary room with an underwater skin. Why ? It's underwater, you don't need to be limited to a room with only the floor for circulation, it could have been ANYTHING else. It could have taken any shape and be usable in all three dimensions. But no, it's just a regular dorm room with some seaweeds for decoration. Even though it used to be a building on land, there are absolutely no adaptations made now that it's underwater ? [*]You sleep in a bed and your dragon in a basket. UNDERWATER. Why ? How ??? [*]You have a desk. UNDERWATER. Apparently things on it don't just float away when you create currents by moving near it. [*]There's a library. How do you have a library underwater, you might ask ? Does it use some alternative writing supports that works underwater like stone tablets ? Does it use something original and creative like books with pages made from large creature scales ? Nope, it's the most boring solution instead : j…

I recommend it although with with a big flaw. The idea and world building and even character customization are nice and well worked upon. But damn either i made some weird choices and lost some content or the ending is so rushed it literally let my face with a ''what the f*** just happened?'' expression... why build the nice world and characters just to end it faster than a car waits for a red light? I'm confused.. so much potential..

Although some pages of this story were a little terse, for the most part I genuinely enjoyed how the story was unfolding. All the way up until the final chapter, which seemed horrendously rushed. The final showdown lacked detail, making it difficult to visualize. Key characters were killed off ignominiously in the span of one paragraph. And worst of all, the protagonist (me) played very little part in the confrontation, using basically none of the magic that the whole story revolved around teaching me. It was as if the author loved the story they were making at first, but then grew tired of writing it near the end, and wrote just enough to wrap it up and get it over with. After the positive experience I'd had with playing the "Undying Fortress", this one left me feeling tragically dissatisfied. Which is too bad, because it was really shaping up to be a good story.

I love 'Choice of' games, but this one felt all over the place in terms of story & options. You're given the one original aim, to then be thrown another, and then another, and before you know it, the storyline is convoluted and any choices you make either seem to not matter at all, or just lead to throw you into the next new throw away situation. I tried to focus on one area of power (as is typical in these type of games else you're spread too thin) just for half the skill checks to not even include that power, and then a key point (I wanna say 2/3 in) left me so deflated with the writing I've given up finishing it completely.