YMMV / The Mageseeker

• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Despite being built up as a huge badass by other works, particularly Legends of Runeterra, Lord Eldred goes down as a Cutscene Boss who gets executed by Sylas with almost no effort. Granted, the same stage as this has multiple other boss fights who count as a Best Boss Ever.
  • Despite his horrific crimes and the length he's stayed alive, Dr. Hesbeth proves to be an extremely satisfying example of a Cutscene Boss when he breaks down begging Sylas to spare him and gets met with the chains.
  • The final boss of the "Whispers In The Woods" side quests isn't a Cutscene Boss, but one would expect more from Nocturne, the demon of nightmares, than a reskinned Morgana boss fight with no upgrades.
• Awesome Art: The game's pixel graphics are gorgeous to look at, with great portraits, gorgeous backgrounds and some genuinely astonishing cinematography and scale, alongside it flowing beautifully during boss fights and cutscenes. Suffice it to say, Digital Sun did not skimp on amazing visuals for the game.
• Awesome Music: Thought Arcane had a mindblowing soundtrack? Well...it does. But feast your ears anyway on The Mageseeker's theme, "Lightbringer"^note Which is in fact a rearranged version of an already-awesome Pentakill song, another epic addition to LoL's musical repetoire.
• Best Boss Ever: The bosses have received particular acclaim from both reviewers and fans, and it's easy to see why.
  • Morgana's fight is the first time you truly fight a champion, and what a fight it is; she uses every attack at her disposal in the game without cooldowns and shows what she can really do, laying out Tormented Shadow by the dozens across the arena, launching Dark Binding across multiple directions, using Black Shield to ensure you can't sap magic from her, and using Soul Shackles at will. From a gameplay perspective, it's a tough-but-fair battle that requires the player to have their best reflexes as it descends into Bullet Hell.
  • Garen is a Duel Boss with the Might of Demacia himself. His attacks hit hard but are telegraphed quite a bit, allowing Sylas to dart around the arena and evade his strikes. As the fight goes on, Garen starts unleashing more and more power; he begins to summon swords from the sky. Where it really gets unhinged is at the end of his first phase, where he unleashes Demacian Justice to split the arena in two, both tightening the space of the fight and making him much harder to dodge alongside letting Sylas use his Power Copying ability on Demacian Justice, the result being two combatants that can summon the massive blade from the sky.
  • Jarvan IV initially seems to be a Breather Boss after the aforementioned Garen, but it quickly changes pace when Shyvana shows up to rescue Jarvan at the last moment, turning it into a Dual Boss. Just when the player thinks that's done, Shyvana transforms into a dragon, forcing the player to fight off the draconic Shyvana who is receiving assists from Jarvan and putting the player to the test with huge scale.
  • The second fight with Wisteria is good, but the third fight with her, as the Final Boss of the game, is the one that really takes the cake for amazing boss battles. The scale of her power is heightened greatly by her channeling the powers of Kayle and the boss is a fast, frenetic display of action with a ton of emotion as Sylas goes through their shared past and realizes how deeply she's his Evil Counterpart and expresses sadness that his old friend is Beyond Redemption, before defeating her in the most epic and thematic way possible— using his Power Copying ability to sap the power of the Winged Sisters from her and using it for himself to channel Morgana's abilities, causing a gorgeously-animated clash between two equally-powered beings channeling Morgana and Kayle and tying up the Rule of Symbolism of the game.
• Best Level Ever: The attack on Demacia's capital is easily one of the most pulse-pounding and awesome levels in the game. From a gameplay perspective, it's one of the longest levels yet never gets tired, allowing Sylas to be an utter One-Man Army and carve a swathe through Demacian soldiers and mageseekers on his way to personally break down the doors in a chaotic, final assault. It also has two major boss fights, each of which is multiple phases and has huge evolutions between each phase. From a story perspective, it's the Wham Episode of the plot; Sylas kills Eldred, clashes with Garen, Jarvan and Shyvana and wins, and Leilani makes a Heroic Sacrifice that finally forces Sylas to start becoming a better person.
• Catharsis Factor: Ever since the introduction of the Mageseeker plotline, fans have been waiting for the opportunity to teach the Mageseekers a lesson. The game is all about exactly that, and thusly has plenty of examples.
  • Combat in general— using the chains Sylas was chained up with and his Power Copying to pay the Mageseekers what they did to him right back, sometimes literally thanks to said copying abilities, is a fantastic feeling.
  • Sylas, and indirectly the player, finally getting the opportunity to outright kill Eldred, who's perpetrated the Mageseekers' crimes and oppressed everyone from common mages to his own niece Lux, is nothing short of satisfying. Though, the result it leads to isn't very good at all.
  • Getting to beat the hell out of Jarvan IV is extremely gratifying after all the things he's done to the mages. Similarly, watching Shyvana leave him and Jarvan finally have a Heel Realization is extremely satisfying after the lengthy Arc Fatigue of the plotline.
  • Sylas finally hunting down and ruthlessly executing Dr. Hesbeth after the horrific crimes he's committed against mages and the fact he forced Sylas to kill his own mentor Killan by turning Killan into a monster. The thing making it the sweetest is the way Hesbeth begs for his life, switching allegiances on the spot only to realize Sylas isn't a Take Over the World kind of guy.
• Complete Monster: Dr. Hesbeth is the head scientist of the Mageseekers, and the most evil of their number. Experimenting on countless mages and forcibly turning them into mage-beast hybrids to supply foot soldiers and suit his sick fascination, Hesbeth draws no lines against experimenting on the eternally kindly yordles or children, having helped shape Wisteria into the vicious, mage-hating monster that she is in the present through his manipulation and experiments as well as experimenting on Wisteria's young protege Rayn. When confronted by Sylas, Hesbeth deliberately turns Sylas' mentor Killain into a monster via Painful Transformation both to spite the rebel and make his escape, and his claims of loyalty to Demacia are ultimately undercut when he claims he loves mages and begs to join the rebellion when Sylas finally corners him.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • Lord Eldred has awesome chambers, a stylish outfit and Cool Mask, and plays the organ in his spare time. It feels like he's deliberately checking off every box on the "fantasy villain" list as he goes about his genocide of mages, and he's all the more awesome for it.
  • Wisteria initially seems to just be a particularly zealous Mageseeker, but the moment she breaks out one of Kayle's wings is the moment the player will realize just what they're dealing with— a full-blown Evil Counterpart to Sylas who represents all the fury a Knight Templar can conjure. For a new character, she utterly earns her position as the Final Boss.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Sylas is still a dick like usual, but he's significantly more heroic thanks to his expanded motives and more elaborate story, and it's hard not to feel for him when it becomes clear that he's genuinely deeply conflicted about what he wants, and it's especially difficult not to feel bad for him when his actions result in Leilani's death, which he clearly deeply regrets.
  • Wisteria, fitting for Sylas' Evil Counterpart, is another child who just wanted to control her magic. Unfortunately, she bought into the Mageseeker cause far too much and ends up Beyond Redemption thanks to Eldred and Hesbeth's machinations. Even Sylas has nothing but pity for her by the end, believing her to be a victim like himself.
• Love to Hate:
  • Lord Eldred is a despicable monster who is entirely willing to oppress, persecute and murder mages but he's also entertaining to watch, particularly since he comes off as a very classical villain; it takes a real villain to not only plan a genocide, but play the organ during it.
  • Dr. Hesbeth is easily the most awful and horrific of the Mageseekers the player meets, being a Mad Scientist who's been doing genuinely awful things in his pursuit of science, but that's exactly what makes him a great villain; after watching what he does, the player will be right there with Sylas in wanting him dead and it's extremely satisfying to see him beg for his life and try to side with Sylas, only for Sylas to put him down like a dog.
• Salvaged Story: Just as Ruined King and Ruination are to the Ruination plotline, the game takes a lot of time to amend the complaints fans have about the Demacia plotline.
  • Many people complained about the main lore trying to shoehorn Gray-and-Grey Morality where it didn't belong with Sylas, noting that making him a selfish hypocrite trying to bring down Demacia in as bloody a way as he can get for his own revenge was more or less an excuse to make the character whose goal is to stop an ongoing genocide into a villain. The Mageseeker takes this to heart and amends things to show that Sylas is really more of an Anti-Hero whose selfishness is a Fatal Flaw that he works to overcome, keeping him flawed but making it sharply clear that Sylas isn't the villain for trying to save his people.
  • The game recontextualizes Sylas' later conflict with Demacia to more successfully keep it gray; Sylas lightens on his views somewhat, but still feels that he needs to overthrow Demacia lest the mages' suffering happen again, leaving it a conflict where both sides actually are well-intentioned and justifying Sylas being the antagonist, while still keeping him reasonable.
  • The way Demacia is written in this game avoids the Too Bleak, Stopped Caring issue fans had with it. Not only is it shown that the Mageseekers gaining power is fairly recent and the true status quo is mages and non-mages living in harmony, the Mageseekers end up suffering a straightforward defeat by game's end and end up being abolished by Jarvan IV.
  • The game doesn't attempt any sort of Gray-and-Grey Morality between the Mageseekers and the rebellion and instead paints the rebellion as overall good and the Mageseekers as evil, which fixes many issues with the plot's attempt to make the issue seem more morally ambiguous than it was. While the rebellion has some selfishly-motivated members like Sylas, it's much more fleshed out than in previous stories and shown to be heroic, while the Mageseekers get their crimes on much better display to emphasize that they, straightforwardly, are the villains who need to be stopped. It also doesn't demonize Demacia, showing that the majority of common people actually support the mages' cause. The game also ends with a new status-quo that sets up a much better Gray-and-Grey Morality situation. While the Mageseekers are gone (abolished by Jarvan IV no less) Sylas will not stop fighting againt them, believing that the government itself must be destroyed, or something like the Mageseekers will happen again. The result is a conflict where both sides become much more sympathetic.
  • Jarvan IV's character is vastly improved by the simple fact that he has a Heel Realization about how vengeance has blinded him, makes a Heel–Face Turn by game's end, abolishing the Mageseekers and even personally taking to the field to try and save the mages in Lux's camp..
• Special Effects Failure: All the characters translate well from their 3D versions to the 2D sprite graphics...except Garen. Whose armor makes his head look disproportionately tiny, his arms appear oddly stubby and his running animation just looking flat out goofy.
• That One Boss: While most bosses in the game are challenging, Morgana is both this and a Best Boss Ever. Her attacks are wide-spanning and she starts really just throwing them out over the course of the battle, leading to a fight that plays more like Bullet Hell than anything else, in addition to them being less telegraphed than many other bosses, a use of Soul Shackles that can stun the player and open them to huge damage if they don't use the chains to immediately book it away from her, and to top it all off, trying to drain her magic causes her to unleash Black Shield and give herself shielding. This is also during the early game when the player won't have many upgrades or spells to work with, which can lead to a player stumbling on her fight very frequently.
• Unexpected Character:
  • While she's been alluded to and they have a thematic connection, few people expected Morgana to play a major role in a game about Sylas because she's typically not even used in the Demacian plotline.
  • Pretty much nobody expected Nocturne to be the final boss of a line of side quests, since the character is generally not featured in plots and has no prior connection to Sylas.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: While most appreciate the fact that Sylas was toned down from his previous Anti-Villain status, some people feel like he went too far in the opposite direction, to the point that he feels too nice. For a guy that was labeled by the developers as an Anti-Hero, he never does anything bad to anyone that didn't actually deserve it. The game also seems to ignore any of the innocent victims of his early attacks, to the point that not even Lux calls him out on harming innocents. Furthermore, his shift of priorities from revenge to rescue of imprisoned mages happens so early in the game that it barely feels like his actions has changed that much, even if his mindset has.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: While the narrative tried its best to salvage Jarvan IV as a flawed man buckling under the weight of his personal vengeance and The Chains of Commanding, some felt that he still fell short of sympathetic due to the severity of the actions he endorsed (mage genocide) and due to his Heel Realization only coming due to Shyvana leaving him after trying to reason with him many times to no avail. Some found him being immediately remorseful only after the aforementioned event and when his childhood friend Lux was threatened to be indicators that Jarvan is Secretly Selfish and only cares about the mages when his actions inconvenience his small privileged circle rather than for any moral reasons. This group found Jarvan's abolishing of the anti-mage laws to be too little, too late, and wishes Jarvan would step down as king or dismantle the monarchy altogether.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Rayn is often mistaken for a young boy with long hair. That her name is very similar to Kayn, a male Champion in League of Legends, doesn't help.