ま～する -序章-

"ま～する -序章-" is a poorly made Japanese "edutainment" mobile app with lightweight RPG elements designed for Japanese schoolkids to play on their mobile phones and learn some arithmetic at the same time. Gameplay consists of resolving lite-RPG battles by solving maths problems. The technical implementation is incredibly weak, and it's both comical and mildly insulting that the Japanese mobile developers behind this tried charging Steam gamers real money for a free mobile app. What do you do in the game? Maths problems, but in Japanese. This lack of an English translation for the game doesn't really matter. The language of shovelware games is universal. This is clearly a mobile app... it makes no difference if this hit PC before the app stores, or if it never even launched on a phone. This was made by mobile app "developers", and intended for the lowest common denominator in gaming, and it must be judged accordingly... there's no contemporary, modern PC gaming experience in mobile apps. That alone is enough to disqualify this from any recommendation. Nobody spends thousands on a high-end PC to pretend it's an iPhone and use their rig to play mobile apps and phone games. The game features really lacklustre 2D visuals (does the developer not know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid-1990s?). Gamers don't spend thousands of dollars on gaming rigs and the latest 3D graphics cards to play 2D games. Even mobile phones and game consoles can do 3D graphics now. There's no excuse. On the important matter of pricing and value for gamers, there's a lot going on here with monetisation, so this really shouldn't be considered a truly free product because of that. There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $1 USD for this. Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows us the all-time peak of ONLY ONE player. That's right, just one. When I launched this, I personally equalled the highest peak player count, just by myself. How bad is that?? SteamDB shows people loading it up just to see how bad it is then deleting it maybe once or twice a month and that's it. Given the vast number of gamess on Steam (over 140,000 games!), it's understandable gamers ignored this... but this is an embarrassing failure in terms of public reception. This "free" game won't count toward your game collection count on your profile. With that in mind, is it something you should still download? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. There's no financial cost up-front, but you'd still be spending your time and a little hard drive space on a product that's far from the best. There's thousands of better alternatives on Steam. Remember what I often say... if you don't agree with what I've said about this game, by all means add it to your library and play it. My review is just here to inform your decision, and if you think I was wrong and you downloaded the game, then I've done what I really wanted to do... inform your decision.