Disney’s Twisted Wonderland has been traveling in Japan for two years. Yesterday the gacha Mobile Anime Academy game was finally released in English. The best way I can describe it is, “What if Disney Japan gave their intellectual property to the creator of the manga?” Black Butler and asked them to make an anime Hogwarts game?” The result is a delicious gothic visual novel card battler for weebs who wish Halloween was 365 days a year.
If you’ve ever played a Mobile Academy game such as Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery, the structure is very similar here. The game takes place at Night Raven College, a magic school where you, as a new student, attend classes, make friends, have heated rivalries with members of other houses, and occasionally have magical duels that play out as turn-based card games (in which your classmates participate , and not your character). Although only mages are normally accepted into the all-boys school, you play as a non-magic prefect who accidentally got into the academy. The headmaster eventually accepts you in hopes that you can prevent the magically gifted students from accidentally burning down the house. There are main story chapters that make up most of the narrative content, but you’ll spend most of your time studying classes and extracurricular mini-games.
But let’s face it: the character art and looks are a bigger draw than the gameplay itself. Luckily, the character designs are great. Instead of building existing Disney villains directly into the game Kingdom Hearts, the designer used them as visual inspiration to create themed homes like Savanaclaw (based on the insidious Scar of The Lion King) and octavinelle (e.g The little mermaidfrom Ursula). The students from Hades’ dorm have fiery blue hair and the Queen of Hearts’ apprentices wear outfits inspired by poker card suits. At least half the cast of this all-boys school wear light eyeshadow. None of them would look out of place in an Asian boy band.
I chose Diasomnia (Maleficent) because these grumpy teenagers seemed to be the most consistent. However, your choice doesn’t really affect the availability of the characters. It appears to be purely aesthetic, and they all play through the same main storyline. Just like Hogwarts, each house is meant to exemplify certain characteristics – in this case, those of its figurehead. For example, Scar is viewed as a stubborn king who loves equality, and Ursula as a benevolent wish-granter.
As I progressed through the story chapters, I began preparing myself for my chosen Diasomnia students to prove just as troublesome as the rest of the cast. Just like the villains their homes are based on, these are kids chaotic. The main artist and author of the game, Black Butler Creator Yana Toboso is known for designing wacky, frequently misbehaving characters, and her influence is clearly seen in the Disney Villain Theme Rules these houses adhere to. For example, the Queen of Hearts requires that white roses be painted red. If you’ve ever looked at a man and thought “I can fix him” then this is the gacha game for you.
The gacha itself focuses mostly on outfit variant draws (like the sports uniform) rather than characters. Personally, I feel no compulsion to participate in gacha other than spending the free currency I get just for playing. Frequent gacha players will also be pleased to know that the game has a built-in reroll system. This means you can repeat the starter gacha as many times as you like and pick the one role you liked the most. In other gacha games, most hardcore players do this manually by deleting and downloading the game again or creating a new account, which also means playing the tutorial again. If that sounds like a big hassle, it is. During TW As I’m not the first to implement a reroll system, I was glad that I could more easily control who I started with.
Combat is a relatively straightforward card battle in which you select cards of a type that is advantageous over your opponent’s. If you have ever played lawyer gacha Tears of Themis, the turn-based battles are the same here. Since there aren’t any major stat modifiers other than the inherent benefits of matching certain students, I don’t anticipate that TW Development of a complex combat meta. TW also has a rhythm game component where you advance the storyline by completing “Twistunes”. The rhythm game aspect is more varied than the combat, but it’s still nothing revolutionary. You can also take classes, but there’s no real gameplay component. You’re mostly watching little character animations and listening to a few lines about learning. You spend energy to generate a random number of stars, which can be redeemed for EXP items, which in turn can be used to increase the combat abilities of your cards (which are outfit variants for the students).
You won’t find a community that does a lot of theorizing around combat, but that’s not the main appeal of Twisted Wonderland. Though the game resembles a Hogwarts spin-off, there’s plenty of original worldbuilding to enjoy, and new main story content and events are released frequently. The first chapter features the characters from Heartslabyul, a dorm based on the Queen of Hearts Alice in Wonderland. Future chapters will all feature a different villain’s dorm. So if you want to hit your boys early, don’t make my mistake and pick the very last villain.
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