Maliki: Poison Of The Past

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Once I saw the trailer to Maliki: Poison of the Past, I knew I had to give it a chance as the cool looking anime-like vibe pulled me in (the characters are clearly based on the late, great Akira Toriyama’s style), as well it’s unique turn-based RPG battles that keeps things fun and interesting.

via YouTube

Based on a French manga series (which explains the anime look), the plot places you into the life of a young lady named Sand. She’s just minding her business when all of a sudden her town is attacked by monster plants, and just when it looks like she’s about to die, time stops and a portal appears that takes her to the future. Sadly this future turns out to be very bleak and bad thanks to a giant plant monster named Poison that’s nearly taken over the world as it’s been altering space and time to its whim.

Just when all seems lost, Sand runs into Maliki and her friends who are fighting to save the world from Poison, and it’s up to you to lend your aid to save the world and time itself. Fortunately Maliki has a safe place in the Domaine, which exists outside space and time that’s also home to the Thousand-Root Tree that protects the Domaine from Poison and any other monsters.

Anytime you’re in the Domaine, you’re able to plant and harvest items, cook meals, and improve your equipment as you’ll need to do all of these to take down the plant monsters and restore the timeline. The real fun comes in the form of the turn-based battle system that has a few added twists, which is being able to trade turns and positions with the enemies you’re fighting, that shows up on a positioning gauge on screen that reminds me of the one from the Grandia game series.

Once you’ve swapped actions and positions with your enemies on the gauge, you’re able to create chrono points that allow you to use temporal actions to do neat things in battle, such as speeding up your movements to circle around your foes and create huge advantages such as combo attacks, rewind time to try a different strategy and more.

It takes some time to get used to and will seem overwhelming at first for sure, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be taking down Poison’s forces in no time. As I mentioned earlier about the game’s anime-like looks, the graphics and artwork here are pretty catchy, as you can clearly tell they’re going for the Akira Toriyama look and feel, as the characters feel like they’re ripped out of some of his classic works such as Doctor Slump.

The music and sounds are great and fit the situations nicely. If there is a gripe to be had, it’s that the game lacks any kind of voice acting outside of gasps and grunts. This isn’t a big deal as I get they’re trying to pull off the “old school” RPG bit, but it would’ve been nice to have had some voices sprinkled in here and there.

Fans of turn-based RPGs will want to check out Maliki: Poison Of The Past as it has all of the right things going for it. Cool, anime-like graphics and artwork, a catchy soundtrack and even catchier turn-based combat with neat temporal tricks to keep you planted in your seat and playing for hours on end.