Magical Tree (MSX)

The great thing about writing about obscure stuff is that sometimes, you find something great, and can then go on to show it off to everyone, so they can enjoy it, too. This is one of those times. Magical Tree is an MSX platform game about climbing a tree. I first tried it out, because I saw the boxart, and thought it might be a clone of Noboranka, the arcade shooting game about climbing a tree. I was wrong, but luckily, it turned out to be better than that anyway.

I'm sure I've mentioned before the concept of "pure" game design. Don't confuse purity with quality, it's just a stylistic assessment. What I mean by it is a concept that was more common in the eighties and early nineties than it is now: videogames in which each element, be it an enemy, an item, a part of the stage ,or something else, serves a specific in-game purpose and is easily identifiable from the other elements around it. Obviously, this kind of thing is much easier to do in simple, old-fashioned, arcade-style games like this one, but it's something you can also see in Minecraft, which is probably one of the most complex videogames of all time. I'm bringing it up here, because Magical Tree is a game that has this purity, and it does it well.

It is a very simple game: you go up the tree, avoiding enemies and collecting points items. At certain score thresholds, you get extra lives, so there's an incentive for playing for score, if that's not enough of a motivating factor for on its own. But like I describe above, you can easily learn how each enemy type acts, how certain objects interact with certain stage elements, and so on, to figure out every way possible of maximising your score, and of surviving to climb a little higher up the tree. Luckily, along with all of that, it is actually fun to play the game and do all this stuff.

One little stylistic thing that I think adds a lot to the game, and how addictive it is, is the constant on-screen tracker of how far up the tree you currently are. It's a constant reminder of your progress, and an easily-remembered benchmark to compare against earlier runs. It's probably copied from the "how high can you get?" screens, but they only appeared between stages, in twenty-five metre increments, while this counter is constant, and counts every metre you climb. It's just satisfying, you know?

Obviously, I recommend that you play Magical Tree. It's fun and cute and addictive. It seems that I keep finding more and more MSX games to love as time goes on, and while other Japanese microcomputers might have excellent graphics or music, it's the MSX's games that keep me coming back most often.