Video Game Review - WitchSpring3 Re:Fine - The Story of Eirudy

Rob reviews WitchSpring3 Re:Fine - The Story of Eirudy on Nintendo Switch...

WitchSpring3 Re:Fine - The Story of Eirudy is a charming RPG that's been brought to the Nintendo Switch by STUDIOARTDINK and ININ Games. Originally launched as a mobile title WitchSpring3 tells the story of Eirudy - a marionette Witch who lives alone in a secluded forest. It's a charming tale that full of content with a rich, fully realised standalone story. 

As the title suggests the story follows the Marionette Witch Eirudy. Eirudy lives a somewhat secluded life with only her aging relative and a selection of marionette puppets for company. During a quest to find enough life-essence to rectify a failure within her latest creation, Eirudy stumbles across a human who's not only not afraid of her, but is seeking a fabled 'Stone of Life' in order to save his dying mother. 

The overall story is quite interesting. The world is full of interesting characters that each have their own motivations that play out during the games story. There's an underlying tension between the humans of this world and the witches, and as such most of the human population look at Eirudy with a sense of fear - even though Eirudy isn't a bad person. 

The gameplay of WitchSpring3 Re:Fine - The Story of Eirudy is fairly simple. You control Eirudy by moving the analogue sticks and combat is performed via a turn-based system. Throughout the journey you'll be guiding Eirudy through various dungeons as she gathers ingredients to craft more powerful spells, and harvesting life essence to increase the powers of her marionette puppets. 

These puppets play quite a large part of the story and essentially act as Eirudy's party members. Each puppet plays into the traditional RPG role such as DPS, Ranged, Support. While your only able to have three puppets active within a battle, they supplement Eirudy incredibly well. A couple of these can also be mantled by Eirudy which in turn allows you to traverse the games many environments at an increased pace. The puppets can also be upgrade via life essence that's harvested from defeated foes. 

The life essence that Eirudy gathers is stored within the Life Crystal. This upgradable source is used to breath life into the various puppets as well as upgrading them for combat. Considering that every enemies drops a certain amount of essence (with them respawning on a timer) it's incredibly easy to farm. To counteract this the game stagnates how my essence the life crystal can hold. Its a nice mechanic that does eventually see you become over powered, but keeps things controlled for the sake of the story. 

When it comes to combat this is played out in a turn-based system. Eirudy attacks via actions within a menu wheel. This actions on this wheel don't have any names so a lot of the time it boils down to memory, until you know what image does what. Anyway, in combat Eirudy is able to utalise her magic, dolls, and physical attacks. These are further enhanced as the game progresses via various training regimes. This training is again monitored by story progression, which in turn keeps everything to a manageable level. While in training you're able to select five "work outs" that Eirudy performed over the next five-days - don't worry these are sped up!

Upon completion these will upgrade Eirudy's stats such as; HP, MP, Attack, Defence, etc.

The visuals of WitchSpring3 Re:Fine - The Story of Eirudy are so-so. While they're not particularly groundbreaking, they're not terrible either. Everything has a soft colourful feel to it, and cut scenes play out with some gorgeous anime inspired drawings. Through playing the game, you're able to see its mobile gaming roots, but as the old saying goes "presentation isn't everything". 

While there's a lot to like about WitchSpring3 Re:Fine - The Story of Eirudy, the game does have its negatives. Often the controls can feel a little too twitchy. This on occasion will see you cycle through targets, or abilities at quite a pace. It happened that often I started to wonder if my Pro Controller was drifting. Also while the game has a journal that keeps track of the current objective, its not all that clear. A lot of the time you'll be wandering around trying to find out exactly where to go. 

In conclusion, WitchSpring3 Re:Fine - The Story of Eirudy is a great RPG. Its got a brilliant standalone story that doesn't require you to play any of the previous titles to understand. Eirudy is also a well designed and likeable character, as is the supporting cast. For RPG fans there's a lot of bang here for your buck, and with a 20+ hour completion time - there's a lot to do too! 

Rating 8.5/10

WitchSpring3 Re:Fine - The Story of Eirudy is available now and can be purchased via the Nintendo Switch eShop by clicking here.

A code was kindly provided for this review.

Rob Lake - For more comic book and video game chat why not follow Geek Culture Reviews on Twitter and Facebook @GeekCultureRev