Maiden and Spell
Maiden & Spell is a one-on-one magical girl aerial projectile battler, featuring a colorful cast of ladies fighting with fantastic spells.
Battling with magic is simple! Fire your spells, hit your opponent, and don’t get hit yourself! Each maiden is color-coded and has a set of abilities unique to them, activated at a press of a button. There aren’t any complicated combos or intricate inputs or grabs or melee attacks or block buttons! Just a 3-pixels-wide hitbox, a lot of shiny bullets, and your own dodging skills.
You can fight against a friend in Versus Mode, or test your skill against a series of opponents and bullet hell boss attacks in Story Mode.
An abyss on the edge of the map, said to be the most dangerous dungeon in the world… The Great Circle. A group of young adventurers travel down into its depths in search of a powerful treasure.
Awaiting them are cute monsters, nonsensical architecture, and an ancient city once known as The Kingdom of Stars….
- A unique versus game with a whimsical fantasy aesthetic
- 8 cute maidens to play as, each with their own magical attacks, abilities, and playstyles
- Versus Mode, where you can play 1 v 1 matches against your friends
- Story Mode, fight against a series of opponents mixed in with 70+ challenging attack patterns to defeat
- Extra unlockables and optional challenges that will truly test your skills
- A JRPG-battle-theme inspired soundtrack by composer Steel_plus
- Online battling with lobbies and rollback
Game Discussion
Steam User 22
The only online game where ping doesnt matter because your opponent is better than you anyway
Steam User 15
its worth it for the cute freckle girls
edit: after an extra nine hours i can confirm its very gay and still worth it for the cute freckle girls
Steam User 7
A bullet hell fighting game is an interesting enough concept to stand out on its own, and Maiden and Spell is pretty fun by any measure. The only caveat is that the story mode, while fun, is fairly short at 2-3 hours. Multiplayer is the main draw, though there is plenty of replayability solo if you like challenging yourself on higher difficulties.
(I was going to end this review with "(character) is best girl btw". But I couldn't decide who's best girl. They're all best girl.)
Steam User 8
Purchased thanks to Rabbit & Steel being such a fantastic 10/10 experience
Luckily Maiden & Spell is also a fantastic game!
Thanks mino_dev, you rock!
Steam User 9
As a rabid Touhou and fighting game fanatic, all I gotta say is this game ♥♥♥♥♥! HARD!!!
Steam User 6
Super fun.
I like that characters are unique and have gameplans the player can execute, it is not just fill the screen with ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
It is a fighting game whhere everything is reactable, but the mental stack is overloaded tremendously.
Much recommended.
Steam User 4
Probably the best version of a PvP Shmup I've ever tried or seen. Not only is dodging and knowing your opponent's moves important but knowing your own moves is its own handful of learning and mid-match concentration at the same time. Focus too much on one or the other and you'll get hit and fail to hit your opponent. Really intense and a lot more balanced and well thought out than I thought.
You'd really think in a game like this you can just spray unfair patterns willy-nilly and get hits so the entire match is just trading blows but whenever somebody gets hit, it feels like somebody was outsmarted and outskilled rather than something random and unfair happening. Part of this is thanks to the fact that all attacks are designed in such a way that even if they come out suddenly, if you know how to space yourself against the opponent nothing can really trap you completely. For example, all characters have an arrow on them to that points towards the opponent which shows where their aim is. What makes it fair is that this arrows is automatic and slowly moves towards the opponent. You can easily outpace this arrow without relying on weaving precariously in between bullet patterns to not get hit. Attacks that are summoned directly on top of you gives you a ton of leeway to not get hit even if you're moving at ridiculous speeds, and attacks that WILL just get you killed suddenly if you sit in the wrong spot are easy to see coming because you become acutely aware of the fact that these attacks usually come directly out of the opponent's body at specific ranges. This is the kind of bullet hell that features very fast moving projectiles prominently but they're JUST slow enough that with ordinary reflexes you can reactively weave through swarms of them if you're spaced far enough from the opponent. Last but not least, you don't feel ping in the slightest. Playing against an opponent with 200 ms ping doesn't feel weird at all.
The game DOES have singleplayer though I feel it's not really the highlight of the game, it's enough content for the price even if there wasn't PvP. You basically play as the same characters as in multiplayer fighting against the same characters you can pick, though you have to unlock more to play the others. The difference is that the bots are really stupid so they rely on long super attack patterns on their last lives to make it more exciting, mimicking how bosses would behave in an actual Shmup. There's also some other minor SP content that will keep you playing for a while if you're into side challenges.