Marvelously Novel
Magical Pollution is spreading across the realms, corrupting all it touches. Join Mary, the fabled Little Red Riding Hood, as she searches for her grandmother and purifies the Polluted in Madtale: Idle RPG from developer Archosaur. With its dark take on classic storybook lore, lively voice acting, gorgeous character designs and solid RPG gameplay, Madtale begs to be explored.
Not Your Mother’s Tales
Our story begins with Mary asleep at home. She dreams of the last time she saw her grandmother—during a great battle with the Witches. Grandma, also known as the Speaker, instructed Mary to return home, guard The Book and wait for her return. With the Speaker’s absence looming large, Mary ponders her fate. Suddenly, Gray, Mary’s massive dire wolf companion, startles her from her slumber with a loud roar.
Calling out for her grandmother, Mary rushes outside to find Laura, her half-human, half-wolf friend, approaching. She explains that the Speaker provided a distraction for her escape after they were cornered during the battle. Unfortunately, Laura led some of the Polluted directly to Mary, and with your help, the two must dispatch several waves of enemies.
True to its name, Madtale: Idle RPG employs fairly standard genre mechanics. Players must assemble a team of characters and send them into autobattles against opposing teams. Like most idle RPGs, Madtale manages to ratchet up the difficultly by incorporating six main character classes called Camps. As players unlock new characters via the game’s gacha system, increasingly complex team combinations become available. For the first few story chapters, players can expect fairly straightforward progression, with very little need to experiment with diverse teams. However, around the third chapter, typing advantages begin to play a much larger role.
With Laura now part of your team, you’ll set off to purify the Polluted inhabitants and locate the Speaker. Along the way, you’ll encounter recognizable princesses tied to the Speaker and soon discover that these fairytale dames are more than meets the eye.
A Multitude of Modes
For an idle game, I was rarely at a loss for things to do. In addition to Madtale’s main story mode, Adventure, players can explore a variety of gameplay in the Wilderness. Wilderness acts as the game’s catch-all and incorporates eight different modes. These modes are only available once certain story and account level requirements have been met.
One of the earliest unlockable modes features a tower of winding paths called the Giant’s Garden. Players can explore branching paths that feature choices between various battles, character buffs, temporary team additions and shops. As you advance, you’ll fill a progression bar, and at the end, square off against the Giant himself. Similarly, the Polluted Prison allows players to go on a quest throughout various rooms, take on a series of foes and earn valuable rewards. Similarly, Otherworldly Rift features a series of battles but requires clearing Adventure Level 24-6 and high-level characters to participate.
The Underground Ruins act as the game’s tower, where players fight an individual wave of enemies on each floor. The Palace of Abysm and Memorial Palace act as pure resource-generation modes. The Palace of Abysm asks players to vote on their favorite top-ranking players by bestowing likes in exchange for resources, while Memorial Palace allows players to farm resources through two rounds of battles.
For the more PVP-oriented players, Thorn Arena and Exploration Guild hold the bulk of your interactive matches. After joining a guild, players can access the Exploration Guild mode, which acts as the hub for all of your guild activities, including farming resources, guild battles and monster battles. Thorn Arena functions as the game’s PVP arena and gives four free battles per day. Players who wish to continue their brawls can either purchase or unlock extra tickets during their playthroughs.
Grimm Approved
All too often, I find myself put off by how cluttered mobile RPG games can appear. Not so with Madtale: Idle RPG. By condensing its miscellaneous modes into a generalized area (the Wilderness) and simplifying its screen, Madtale stands out from its competition. Clearly, tons of creativity and thought went into not only the UI and UX design but also the game’s characters.
Madtale enchants with its dark, twisted take on fairytales, which feels fitting for a game centered around magical corruption. The game often evoked early Kingdom Hearts titles with its use of easily recognizable characters in unfamiliar and slightly macabre situations. Thanks to the game’s edgy, illustrative designs, I was always excited to see which character would pop up next. This aspect also lent more excitement to gacha pulls than I’d ever felt with other idle RPG games. Even more heartening is the game’s free-to-play accessibility. Players need not spend money on resources or pulls, thanks to a very generous rewards system. You’ll probably reach a natural impasse towards the end of each story chapter as battles become tougher. However, after a day’s time, you’ll be back in fighting shape with the wealth of resources you’ll harvest from your daily activities.
Verdict
I only have two qualms with Madtale: a game-freezing bug and frequent grammatical errors. On more than one occasion, when trying to return to the Main City (the main screen), the game suddenly froze. Luckily, restarting the app each time resolved the issue, but I could see this bug becoming a hassle for players. Additionally, while Madtale’s overarching narrative reads solidly, its dialogue often seems clunky due to weird phrases and word choices. Honestly, I enjoyed the overarching story and gameplay enough that I overlooked these occurrences that might just be localization issues. Even with these minor inconveniences, Madtale: Idle RPG still manages to weave a tale worthy of the Brothers Grimm’s approval.
