Black Magic [Windows / 1997] (ブラックマジック) [English partial TL]

Habanero · February 4, 2020

Black Magic is a Wiz 1997 Windows 95 PC game that is loosely based on the OVA of the same name (which is an adaptation of Shirow Masamune's manga) that came out 10 years later for some reason. It's a real-time squad tactics game where you control a small team from pic related. There are 20 weapons or so to choose from, and there's a basic leveling system where your units get stronger, typical stuff. Some levels are in power suits, others are on foot. I've been playing through it, so I went ahead and modified the relevant files so that the UI stuff is in English. I'll upload that here in a bit when I finished typesetting these last two menus.

https://archive.org/details/BlackMagicShirow

Unfortunately the game seems to have suffered from a low budget, so it didn't turn out that great. The gameplay is slow and janky, the enemy AI is retarded, the missions are all the exact same boring search and destroy 10 or so guys, and there's not much reason to do anything but form a small blob of overwhelming firepower and kill everything in front of you. I'm on mission 4 and don't think I'll continue (12 missions total). It could do with a good remake or fan mod. Everything is controlled with the mouse -- right click is how you'll get through the equipment menus. There are three "movement" options, but I don't know if they actually make any difference despite being labeled as such (Normal, High speed, Defensive). You can get away with just using Normal movement. Also, when a level starts, I recommend right clicking and turning off "Messages", because these are annoying little popup dialogue that every single friendly and enemy unit in the game makes when they attack. So unless you want your game interrupted by a dialog box every 5 seconds, turn it off.

I didn't touch the script because it'd be a Google TL'd mess, but they're all in SCR text files that you can just edit to whatever if you feel like it. Just extract the ISO and then drag and drop the files when I upload them.