I’m sure everyone’s seen magic tricks before from the magician pulling coins behind your ears when you were a child, the popular rabbit in a hat trick and the later shows where they manage to saw people in half or make them disappear. Then you’ve got the card tricks where your friend manages to pick out the card you selected even though you didn’t show it to him and because of that, you spend time trying to figure out how he done it. Even though there’s a whole selection of magic books out there, Nintendo has come up with their own magic tricks but not in the form of a book – it’s software for the DS.

Included in the Magic Taizen (“Magic Compendium”) box that’s about the size of two DS game boxes put together, there’s a pack of normal looking trump cards. This is what you’ll be using to perform some of the tricks available on this magic based title.


Magic Taizen comes with Nintendo branded cards.
There are basically three modes to Magic Taizen –Magic Alone, Magic Attraction and Mystery Training. “Mystery Training” offer you a few mini games to play through while the first two modes is where the magic really begins. Not all magic tricks are available to you at first. What happens is the game is every time you perform or play through any of the magic tricks, you’ll earn yourself ten points and each day, there’s a limit to the number of points you can obtain. Thus, you have Barbara from Daigassou Band Brothers telling you to check the time is set properly. She’s also the one that gives out the tutorials when you first start the game.


Not all tricks are available at first.
You have to earn points daily.
For the first mode “Magic Alone”, you’re basically given a number of tricks you to take part in as the audience. Some require you to use the playing cards provided and some you don’t. The tricks aren’t exactly as impressive as say watching someone disappear from a box but they’re good enough to make you wonder what the trick is.

For one trick, each month of the calendar is written on twelve pieces of paper and the DS asks you to think of one them then keep it in your mind. After that, it asks you to blow into the mic several times and each time some months are removed. During this process, it’s supposed to be able to tell whether the month you chose has been blown away or not and during the first try, it really did manage to tell which month I was thinking of! Pretty interesting.