You know, I'm a pretty big fan of Atlus role-playing games. Disgaea and the rest of the Nippon Ichi titles were great, all of the Shin Megami titles are top notch, and in general Atlus has a good track record when it comes to RPGs. So when I was handed Magna Carta: Tears of Blood to review, I was fairly pleased with the assignment. However, after playing through the game, I've changed my mind.

The concept of Magna Carta is a solid one. The combat system takes a page from Shadow Hearts and adds a few unique features, the graphics are top notch for the PlayStation 2, and the story, while very slow to start, becomes quite intriguing once you're about 10 hours into the game. But everything else that could go wrong, does go wrong.

My personal preference when I play Japanese RPGs is to change the audio to Japanese with English subtitles. It's not that I have a problem listening to the English language track, but in many cases the English voice over is just not very good. Magna Carta is a perfect example of this as the English vocals are just horrid. Since there's no Japanese track (or in this case Korean), I was stuck with the horrible audio throughout the entire game.

Magna Carta also moves along at a snail's pace, and I'm not just referring to the story line. Loading times were fairly lengthy and occurred regularly as you moved from sub-area to sub-area. In fact, even saving your game took over 20 seconds. As if that wasn't bad enough, moving around areas is slow and tedious as well.

There are two different movement options: detect mode and dash mode. Dash mode is your standard running pace that just about everyone uses to move from area to area in an RPG. However, if you're in dash mode you can be surprise attacked by an enemy, which makes battles more difficult and longer than they need to be. So you'll need to spend most of your time in detect mode, where the main character pulls out his sword and walks slowly through the area. You'll avoid getting surprise attacked and you'll even be able to unleash some surprise attacks of your own, but the pace is revoltingly slow.

In addition to the two movement methods, you can go into rest mode. Here you're entire party will slowly heal. Now, I can understand the concept behind this, the developers wanted players to ensure there were no enemies around before resting. That's all fine and dandy, but once I've confirmed there are no enemies around why do I still have to sit and wait for my party to heal? We aren't talking a few seconds here, sometimes the healing process took nearly a minute. In some cases it's necessary to do this after every battle, so added to the detect mode, it becomes extremely tedious to work your way through areas.