One-on-one spell duels
Maiden & Spell is a magical girl battle game where two players fly through the air and trade spells. There are no combos, grabs, melee attacks or block buttons to learn. You fire your spells, try to hit your opponent, and dodge the bullets coming back at you. Each maiden is color-coded and has her own set of abilities, activated with a single button press. Your hitbox is only three pixels wide, so survival comes down to reading patterns and moving cleanly through dense fields of shiny bullets.
Playing together
Versus Mode puts you in a straight 1 v 1 match against a friend. Pick from the eight maidens and settle it over a series of rounds. Online battling is available with lobbies and rollback, and Remote Play Together lets someone join in from a distance. When nobody is around to duel, Story Mode sends you through a run of opponents mixed with more than 70 attack patterns, including bullet hell boss fights.
Before you start
The game leans on bullet hell and shoot 'em up difficulty, so expect to lose while learning each maiden's kit and each boss's patterns. It is a short game, and extra unlockables and optional challenges sit behind solid play. The setting is the Great Circle, an abyss on the edge of the map called the most dangerous dungeon in the world, where a group of young adventurers descends in search of a powerful treasure and finds cute monsters, nonsensical architecture and the ancient city once known as The Kingdom of Stars. A JRPG-battle-theme inspired soundtrack by Steel_plus plays over the fights.